This will be our last post for 2008.

This year has been an exciting and challenging year… we have achieved quite a number of business goals (including revamping this website) and our main aim is to continue to grow in the digital signage industry.

In order to grow, we believe that we need to connect more with our readers and therefore would like to hear your feedback. You have probably noticed that the bottom right hand corner we have added a feedback button. So if you have some spare time, we would love to hear your feedback about our site. We constantly want to improve all of our websites and will need your help in doing so.

Wishing everyone the best for 2009 and look forward to another exciting year. We have bigger plans for 2009 so come back, bookmark this page, or subscribe to our RSS feeds.

All the best,

The advertise me Team.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

Just before the Christmas period, Advertise Me and Visual Sounds successfully installed a digital signage solution at the Go Vita Narrellan store.

The main objectives for installing digital signage were to:

1. Replace the static lightbox which didn’t really serve its purpose

Go Vita Narellan Lightbox

2. Capture the attention of people passing by or sitting down

3. Promote healthy products

4. Promote Go Vita specials

5. Promote manufacturer products

Below are a couple of images of the installed solution:

Advertise Me: Digital Signage Solution for Go Vita Narellan

Here’s a video of the template that we developed to showcase the Go Vita products and services.

About Go Vita

Go Vita was established in the early eighties and brings together under one brand the unique talents and skills of the individual owners and their staff to ensure a personal approach with all customers. This combines with the strength of the group to provide networking and substantial buying power to offer better prices and more services to all customers. Go Vita has over 110 stores across Australia, making them easily accessible for most people.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Case Study

In this current day and age, quite a number of technologies are now using touch screens.  For example, gaming consoles such as the Nintendo DS, Mobile phones (iphone, blackberry storm, various PDA’s) are all using some form of touch screen technology to further increase the interaction between the user and the device.

Why interact with digital signage?

The main reason why businesses would want to interact with their customers through digital signage are:

• To provide targeted and specific information to the viewer e.g. Medical surveys whilst conducting eye sight tests.

• Traffic analytics – to understand how many people interact with the system. One system that I could think of is a Health Checking system. A weight scale connected to a digital signage system could potentially be setup to perform the following:

- The system will request for the persons age and then it will measure and display their weight

- Based on the information gathered, the system will then display the recommended weight and potential health related problems associated to the persons weight.

- Obviously at the same time, there will be an area for advertising and this space can be sold to businesses in the health industry.

• Any form of relationship requires a two way communication – to connect and build a strong relationship with your customers or clients you need to basically involve them in the decision making process. So if it’s to buy a new car, a digital signage signage solution at the car dealership should have the ability for the potential buyer to modify the colour or shape of the car as this can influence their purchasing decision.

So now the question is whether you should use touch screens in your current digital signage deployments. We cannot provide you with the answer to this question but what is important is to understand what the clients requirements are and then to assess whether a touch screen meets these requirements, but most importantly if you are planning to use touch screen technology in your digital signage solution, make sure you thoroughly look into the system usability i.e how can people interact with the system. Here are some examples from a youtube user that shows unusable touch screen systems – she refers to them as the “Usability Hall of Shame”:

For more Digital Signage videos visit the Digital Signage Portal.

My prediction is that touch screens will become part of the standard deployment for any future digital signage projects as we have seen touch screens mainly used for way finding, product catalogs, directories and gaming but is this all digital signage touch screens can be used for?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Blog Video

This is a gentle reminder that the digital signage case study competition will be ending soon (31st December 2008 @ 5pm) . I know most of you are currently on holidays but its never to late to enter the competition.

For full details of the competition click here.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Events, Digital Signage Case Study

Today, we came across an interesting digital signage powerpoint presentation from NEC titled “A digital signage solution for every business”.

The presentation contains quantifiable information and the aim of the case study was to analyse the effects of a retail signage system on sale figures in a medium sized supermarket. We were not surprised with the results as it showed that the supermarket with a DS had higher sales figures.

To view the complete presentation click the following link: http://www.nec.com.au/ramzy.pdf

Have you entered the digital signage case study competition?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Case Study, Featured Post

The Advertise Me team wishes all our readers, partners, and clients a Merry Christmas and a happy new year.

We look forward to posting up more blog entries in 2009 and don’t forget that our digital signage competition will end on the 31st of December 2008.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Back in June 2008, we posted a blog entry of the top 10 search terms people are using which are landing to our digital signage blog from search engines. We have noticed that things haven’t changed much, most people are landing to our website with the most popular search terms.

Below is the updated list:

1.  digital signage blog

2. digital

3. digital signage

4. signage blog

5. digital signage blogs

6. blog digital signage

7. cellular digital signage

8. how does digital signage work

9. signage

10. what is rs232

The most noticeable difference is that more people are actually searching for blogs relating to digital signage. The great thing about our site is that its generally on the first page of google for the search term digital signage blog.

Now this is also a great opportunity to start another poll and we want to ask our readers whether their business has a blog website.

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If you do have one feel free to share it with the online community by posting a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Polls, Digital Signage Techie

Just recently, I was involved in a discussion with a couple of friends about whether one of them should install network cabling throughout his new home.  We started brainstorming reasons why he should do it:

1. You’re able to connect to your Local Area Network with faster and more reliable speeds than wireless

2. It will be more secure than wireless

3. Cheaper to install the cabling before the walls go up

4. You’re able to use the network cabling to extend video and sound

Now, whilst we were talking about point 4, we ended up having a heated debate whether you degrade video quality when extending a DIGITAL video signal. One my friends raised a good question which was ”If you send 0 & 1′s down the ethernet cable, you would expect those 0 & 1′s to come out the other end. So why would you loose video quality if it’s digital?” – that was a really good question and I was quite reluctant to answer because I didn’t have an answer.

So for those techies out there, how would you have responded to this question?

Feel free to respond to this question by adding a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Techie

A video captured by a youtube user in Tenjin Station (Fukuoka – Japan) of a digital signage screen.

For more Digital Signage videos visit the Digital Signage Portal.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog Video, Featured Post

It has been almost over a year since we had the intention of buying the domain name http://www.advertiseme.tv and we finally got it.

If I recall correctly, sometime last year we started receving promotional material about the availability of the .tv domains, so we did a search for advertiseme.tv and the domain name was available. We decided that we should include an agenda item in the next team meeting so that we could discuss whether to buy this domain name or not and determine how we were going to use this domain name.

During the meeting we all decided that it would be beneficial for us to have this domain name so we decided to purchase it but within a week someone else ended up buying that domain name. We were quite dissapointed and somehow I had this subconscious feeling that the domain search records for domain names were being tracked – big brother was watching.

But this year luck was on our side, the domain name expired and without hesitation we ended up purchasing this domain.  We intend to use this domain name for our digital signage online TV channel and potentially use it for syndicating content. This basically means that we want to enhance our clients digital signage signs by having more content available e.g. news, trivia, music clips, sports, stocks, weather and anything that people might be interested in watching.

We will hopefully launch our online services in 2009… so watch this space.

If you’re a content provider and would like to add your content or services to our porfolio just send us an email to info@advertiseme.tv

Have you ever let your domain name expire and regretted it?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

Today, we are introducting Polls to our digital signage blog.

Our aim is to find out what our readers think of a particular issue or question and share this information with the online digital signage community.

So to start of our first poll, we thought we’d ask our readers which screen manufacturers do they use in their digital signage deployments.

Hope you can participate in this and future polls.

NOTE: If you select other, feel free to add a comment with the company name.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Polls

We all know who (Sir) Alan Sugar is, and the role he plays on The Apprentice, but did we know that he has a Digital Signage company?

The company is called Amscreen with Lee McQueen (winner of this year’s The Apprentice) as the development director. Amscreen plans to roll out 15-inch LCD screens (carrying ads and customer information) across pharmacies in Birmingham and Oxford, UK.

We believe digital signage has great potential to create additional revenue streams for a range of brands and retailers. Customers can now control their own media in real-time. This makes it the most easy-to-manage, cost-effective digital signage solution on the market, said Alan.

Information and quotes sourced from printweek.com.

I myself have not seen any of Alan Sugar’s The Apprentice series, so I’m curious to find out whether or not any part of this digital signage company was aired in any of the episodes.

Did Alan Sugar’s digital signage company get any airtime on The Apprentice?

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News, Featured Post

Have you ever walked into a shop and incidentally spotted an LCD or plasma screen hanging near the back corner of the shop and you’ve asked yourself whether that’s the best location for the screen?

I’ve experienced this too many times and I often wonder whether there was any time spent by the installer to strategically position the screens in the most effective locations.

Our thoughts: Retail businesses with shop fronts need to come to a realisation that if the initial intention of installing digital signage was to engage and drive more customers into the shop, then installing the screen inside the shop will not achieve this. Our recommendation would be to install screens at the front of the shop were people passing by can actually see the specials your business is running, then with engaging content drive them into the shop. When they enter the shop, increase the chances of the visitor buying your products by using large screens with product videos and information.

We have also seen businesses installing and positioning small screens at “hot spots” for manufacturers to showcase and advertise their products. What we mean by “hot spots” is locations where the most traffic would pass at any given time – generally this could be in an area where the special or on sale products are located or at the front of the product iles.

Just as an example, here’s a couple of pictures of an install we completed for a Newsagency based in Sydney. We had two screens located right in front of the entrance to catch the attention of people passing by in both directions. Then inside the store, we had a large LCD screen located right at the magazine stand – this was a “hot spot” because people tended to hang around to read the magazines and pickup the newspaper.

Sometimes, you may also need to think “outside the square” and find locations where you think you can target a specific audience, e.g toilets – you can target your audience by gender (male or female).

Our question: Have you seen any screens installed in any interesting locations/areas?

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

Today is the start to the digital signage case study competition. We and the digital signage community are excited to see what digital signage case studies businesses will be submitting.
So far we have already received positive feedback and we invite all digital signage businesses to participate and spice up the competition.

The competition will end on the 31st December 2008 so don’t wait till the very end and participate now. For the complete details of this competition, click here.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Events, Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

Sponsored by:

Christmas is just around the corner and Advertise Me has decided to give something back to the digital signage community by running a competition before the Christmas festive season (you can say it’s our Christmas present to the winning business).

The objective of this competition is to help businesses showcase their digital signage deployments through case studies. Having been in the business for several years now, we know and have come across many interesting and innovative digital signage solutions from several business around the world and we want to share these solutions with others – we also know that the online community is interested in this area as well.

The competition will commence from the 1st December 2008 9am EDST and will end on the 31st December 2008 5pm EDST so don’t miss out!

The winner of the competition will receive 2 months of FREE sponsorship and advertising on the digital signage blog.

What is the competition about?

We know that all over the world, digital signage deployments are being successfully completed on a daily basis. Many of these businesses that are involved in digital signage do not have the opportunity to showcase their digital signage solution as they may not have the avenue or the means to do so.

Our competition will help these businesses to showcase their digital signage deployments to the rest of the digital signage community.

Basically, this competition is about showcasing YOUR digital signage case study.

The competition is not limited by the size of your business or the size of your rollout. So no matter how big or small your digital signage solution is, all businesses will have the opportunity to enter.

How to enter the competition?

1. In order to enter the competition, you will need to register on the digital signage portal – www.digitalsignageportal.com. Existing digital signage portal members are encouraged to submit their case studies as well.
2. Once you have successfully registered on www.digitalsignageportal.com go to the digital signage portal forum and create a new thread in the forum category called “Digital Signage Case Study“. For example, the title of the thread can be ‘[Company Name]: Successfully installs digital signage at the ABC’.
3. Submit your case study – it can be a video link, a link to your company’s website, an attachment or the complete text.

If you want to view all the latest case studies click here.

That’s all you will have to do. If you need some help in submitting a case study please contact info@advertiseme.com.au

How will we judge the entries?

There will be a panel of judges and they will assess each case study based on:

*Innovation Provided (the overall creativeness of the digital signage solution)
*Uniqueness (how is the solution different to others)
*Customer Satisfaction (in what ways did the customer benefit from the solution)

advertise me will announce the winner on the 12th January 2009 5pm EDST on the digitalsignageblog.com. The FREE advertising and sponsorship will commence on the 19th January 2009 9am EDST.

What will the winner receive?

The winner of this competition will receive the following:

1. The winning case study will be listed at the top of the Digital Signage Case Study forum topic on the www.digitalsignageportal.com.
2. The case study will be featured on the Digital Signage blog (www.digitalsignageblog.com) and the Digital Signage Portal (www.digitalsignageportal.com).

3. 2 months FREE sponsorship and advertising – this is a 125 x 125 image located in sponsorship section and a 300×250 banner on the right hand column of the digitalsignageblog.com website.

For more information about our advertising options click here.

Terms and conditions

1. Each business can only submit a maximum of 3 case studies and Advertise Me will not accept duplicate entries. Duplicate entries from the same business will be removed.
2. In order to enter the competition you must submit the case study within the period mentioned above. Any late submissions will not be accepted.
3. You must ensure your business name is clearly stated within the case study.
4. The business must own the necessary rights to publish the case study, this includes both copyright and intellectual property rights.
5. By submitting a case study you give us permission to republish the case study on all websites owned by Advertise Me.

6. The winning business will need to supply the banner advertisement and must comply with the dimensions requested by Advertise Me

7. The terms and conditions may change so please revisit these terms and conditions on a regular basis.

Would you like to become a sponsor of this competition? If so, contact info@advertiseme.com.au.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Events, Digital Signage Blog News

We came across an article that we thought our readers would be interested in reading. The article is about a new LED Billboard in Times Square which is officially the largest LED screen in the world.  For those techies they would love to have worked on this project as it uses some very interesting and the latest technologies. Just even looking at the pictures you’ll be amazed to the amount of grunt and gear the system uses to drive content to the LED screen.

Have a read of the article from Gizmodo and you’ll be amazed as well.

Our Question:
What’s the worlds largest LCD screen?

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News, Featured Post

This year the Australian Idol show was quite different from the previous years. Some of the changes that were made in this show were:

1. No more Mark Holden – although the famous “touchdowns” was performed by the other judges

2. Additional performances by the bottom 3 contestants on the eviction night (Monday)

3. But the most significant change that we saw was the use of digital signage for communicating information to the viewers and internal staff. This was evident in the final show where 1 large screen and 4 other smaller screens were used in the tally room to display dynamic information. Also, if you were watching the final show, you probably noticed that at the Opera House, large screens were used to display the live performances and occasionally followed by the events sponsor ads.

I believe that it’s quite interesting to see broadcasting organisations using LCD screens to further increase advertising revenues whilst showing the performance on air.

Congratulations to the winner of this year’s Australian Idol (Wes) and good luck to all the other contestants.

Our question:
Have you seen any TV shows which embraces digital signage technologies?

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Several weeks ago I had relatives visiting from overseas, so being a host I decided to take them out sightseeing to the major “tourist” locations in Sydney. I must be honest with you, it’s been a while since I’ve done that so I was quite surprised to see a number of businesses using Digital Signage at the front of their stores in the main streets of Sydney. The majority of the stores were Mobile Phone companies such as Telstra and Optus (there was also a couple of banks as well).

Whilst walking around the Sydney Opera house, I was stopped by one of my relatives and he said “What is that?”. I turned around and I saw a large portrait plasma screen showing “What’s on” information and local advertisements. Here’s a couple of pictures of what we were looking at (click on the images to make them bigger):

“Ah!” I thought to myself, this is a great opportunity to talk about my business “Advertise Me“, so I started talking about digital signage (actually it was more like giving him a sales pitch). But before I could finish, he stopped me and he said, “No, that’s not what I meant. What’s that annoying text doing in the background”.

At that stage I didn’t really know what he was talking about, so I carefully looked at the screen again and I couldn’t believe that I didn’t notice it the first time. *Have a look at the images again and see if you can spot it* If you haven’t figured it out yet, click on these two images below:

He was basically referring to the burns on the plasma screen. Now, because I’ve seen this before on other plasma screens I started telling him how it could have potentially got there – the WHITE text was too bright and the text being displayed on the same area was too frequent.

This screen definitely needs to be “burnt” and replaced – no one likes looking at a screen with noticeable burns as it can distract the viewers from looking at the messages the business is trying to convey.

With the cost of LCD screens coming down, plasma screens are becoming obsolete, but if you’re still using plasma screens  you may want to our forum post called “Guidelines to prevent plasma burns” on the digital signage portal.

Our question:
Has your plasma screens ever experienced the burn in effect or have you ever seen any screens with noticable burns?

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

There are several ways to receive the latest digital signage portal forum posts and these are listed below:

1. Email Subscription – on the top left hand side column of the digital signage portal website there is a section called Forum Posts Subscription – all you have to do is enter your email address and hit the subscribe button. Once you have successfully subscribed, you will receive daily forum updates via email.

Enter your email address to receive daily forum updates:

Delivered by FeedBurner

2. RSS feed – at the bottom right hand corner of the forum you will notice the RSS button. The RSS feed you should subscribe to is: http://www.digitalsignageportal.com/component/option,com_fbfeed/f,1/func,rss/

   Just use your default RSS reader/viewer to receive the latest forum entries.

3. digitalsignageportal.blogspot.com – visit this website and you’ll be able to view the latest forum posts.

Our question:
What do you use RSS feeds for in your digital signage solutions?

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

One of our members on the digital signage portal submitted a very interesting and intriguing post about establishing a world wide network of small digital signage operators. My thought on this is how we go about approaching this and what standards, if any should all the operators follow.

Has anyone else thought about this approach or wanting to establish a digital signage network with other operators? If so, feel free to participate in the discussion forum.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Today is Jayden’s birthday (the son of one of our staff members) – he turned 1 so the Advertise Me team wanted to wish him a “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!”. Now, grow up quick so that you can be part of the advertise me team, this shirt might be too big for you now but you’ll grow into it soon.

Here’s the cake that one of your aunties made (thanks Lilia), its one of the best cakes that I have ever seen.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Today, we came across a news article titled “Porn shock for tourists”  – just from reading the title of the article you’re thinking – “what has this got to do with digital signage?”. There is a lesson to learn from this article so here is a copy of the article:

Computer pranksters in Croatia hacked into tourism board computers and downloaded blue movies onto a town centre information screen.

Red faced officials in Slavonski Brod managed to shut down the link but only after a cheering crowd had gathered around the screen, which normally gives cultural tips to visitors.

Police called in special IT crime experts to help track down the hackers.

Meanwhile the local council have pledged to splash out on a computer security upgrade to make sure nothing similar happens again.

Deputy mayor Zeljka Kristof said: “This is something we take very seriously because we have worked hard to give our town an image among tourists and visitors that we do not want sullied in any way.

“This incident shocked a lot of people and made our visitors feel very uncomfortable. It just proves our computer systems need to be made more secure.”

Source: http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_3074964.html

Like any other IT solution, digital signage needs to be secure – it needs to protect the solution from hackers and unauthorised access. In this case, the screen was hijacked and the tourist information was replaced with a porn video. We might have giggled when reading the article but it’s a serious issue if it happened to us *Not many parents would have been impressed if their children were there*. The consequences could have been more devastating – the screen could have been used to display sensitive information.

Like the Internet, digital signage solutions have many vulnerabilities and security holes and it is the responsibility of the network operators to ensure the solution is secure.

We also previously talked about ways to mitigate various security issues in our previous post called “How Secure Is Your Digital Signage Solution?“. Here’s the link if you’re interested to read further.

Lesson learnt: make sure your digital signage solution is secure before you have the public looking at your screen!!!

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

digital signage blog is viewed by thousands of unique people every month and this number continues to grow with the high popularity and interest in digital signage technologies.

We are partnered together with our sister site Digital Signage Portal combined to maximise our audience and your exposure.

Whether you want to showcase a new product or just be heard, this is the opportunity for you to reach out to the digital signage community and stir up some viral impressions.

Quick Stats

• Thousands of unique visitors every month to a global audience (and growing)
• Ranked 1st out of 3.5 million search entries from google.com (as well as google.com.au, google.co.uk, etc)
• Top Ten Digital Signage Blogs by Nate Nead
• Our blog entries are used and displayed by other digital signage websites and blogs
• Increasingly growing number of daily RSS readers
• Over 95% of our readers have some sort of involvement in the digital signage industry, and all have a found knowledge in digital signage technologies

(Detailed statistics are available upon request)

Our blog entries are also picked up by Google Alerts for all users using the Google Alerts notification service (on digital signage). If we post a blog entry on that day, you can be sure that users subscribed to the service will receive a link to our blog entry in that day’s alert.

Advertising and Sponsorship

We currently offer two ways of advertising – through Ads and Sponsorships.

Ads

Ads are served on a rotation basis with a selection of either at the top header of the page (468 x 60), on the right side pane below the sponsors (300 x 250), or both (discount applies for multiple ads).

Ads are offered on an impressions basis and are available in prepaid blocks.

Sponsorship

Sponsorships are made available in the dedicated sponsorship section on the right side pane (125 x 125). They do not rotate and stay fixed.

Sponsorships are offered at a fixed monthly rate (discount applies for longer periods).

We also provide statistics of both the advertising and sponsorship campaigns for your benefit.

If you’d like to advertise through our blog or secure a sponsorship with us, please contact us here and we can help you come up with a suitable plan. Or simply email us at info@digitalsignageblog.com.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

Today is Melbourne Cup day in Australia – for those of you who don’t know what this event is about have a quick wiki read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Cup
You may be wondering “what is all the excitement about a horse racing event”, but like the “Superbowl” and any of the “World Cup Events” at approximately 3:00pm almost the whole nation stops to watch this event. Mind you, the event is also about dressing up for the glamour, drinking, gambling but more importantly, bringing people together to celebrate an annual horse race.

So just before the start of the race, millions of people in Australia have their eyes glue to screens to watch the event. If you’re a pub owner or a shop owner have you thought about ways of promoting your own products during this event? If not, then you’re obviously missing out on making money.

With the current digital signage technology out in the market, you will be able to display Live TV feeds whilst displaying your own advertising. Have a quick read of this previous post for more information about this technology.
Good luck to those who are placing bets!!!

Category: Digital Signage Blog Events, Digital Signage Blog News

If you’re a business and are new to digital signage, the first thing that you might wonder is “How will I earn revenue through digital signage?”. The answer is simple, ADVERTISING. You basically sell advertising space on your digital signage screens to potential customers/advertising agencies/manufacturers for a premium price.

How will you sell this idea? People like to deal with facts and figures and the best way to sell advertising space is to let your advertisers know what they’ll get. Now, the only problem you will encounter is how to provide your clients or advertisers with “proof of play” reporting information. Currently, the only methods of tracking this information is to use either the built-in reporting tools (what time, how long and what content was played) that comes with the digital signage player/software or you can purchase additional equipment to capture information about your audience i.e face recognition (normally the cost of this unit is almost the same amount as the digital signage player so the overall solution may have just doubled in cost and there may be potential privacy concerns).

For most businesses, it will be difficult at first to get advertisers interested especially when there are several limitations on the methods to track whether an advertisement was played and who saw it. Simply providing a report that states that the player executed a command to play a file is not good enough. Even providing a report that someone (gender and potentially what age) saw the screen may also be not good enough.

If I was an advertiser I would want to know whether my advertisement was actually displayed on the screen (the screen may have been turned off or the cable between the player to the screen could have been disconnected – so why should I pay for advertisements that were not displayed) and then potentially determine whether the advertisement met its targeted audience.

At the moment a complete digital signage tracking solution is missing in the market. We hope that a company will come up with an ALL-IN-ONE solution to further engage more advertisers.

If there is a solution out there, let us know. You can be our eyes and ears on this one.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

A lot has been made of the visual aspects of digital signage. We all know it’s a great tool to view items or sales but the benefit of digital signage over the ordinary paper advertising has always been the multimedia aspect of digital signage.

For this very reason, it’s interesting to note that the audio aspect has not been given much of a chance when digital signage solutions have been implemented.

Now I know what you are thinking, sometimes having the sound turned on interferes with the message you are trying to get out there but I think the use of sound in your digital signage solution does depend on what you want to achieve.

Sound is one of the easiest ways to ge someone’s attention but what is the best way to do this? Having someone yell out the content on your digital signage screens will get what’s on your digital signage screen some attention but then you may lose customers this way. Having music playing will create a great atmosphere but will it get the content on your digital signage screen any attention?

This is where creative thinking and a flexible digital signage solution will be able to help.

Including sound for some of the content on your digital signage screen will get people’s attention for specific content for example the item that you are trying to really sell that week while giving people the noise freedom not to have to constantly listen to someone telling them what’s on sale.

Creating a song or special sound to indicate hourly specials may keep customers in your store for longer.

If it’s a service you’re trying to promote then create a video clip which explains what you are selling – infomercials work and they work because not only can you see what you are getting but you are also able to get to know the product/service without having a read the fine print.

So next time you are considering how to best use digital signage ask yourself – can you hear it?

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

The wait is over… WE’VE JUST LAUNCHED OUR NEW DIGITAL SIGNAGE BLOG!!! Can you feel the excitement?

As promised, our team has worked hard (let’s call it fast-tracked) to get this new blog out so that you, the reader, can further enjoy this new facelift. Now, we hope you like the new look and feel as we have designed it to make it more attractive (wink!) and user friendly. More importantly, our aim is to encourage more readers to return as well as contribute to our blog.

So browse around and tell us what you think as we love hearing people’s feedback/comments (we strongly believe in the improvement process – hey no one is perfect)!

Feel free to comment. Happy reading!

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

It has almost been a year since we officially launched the digital signage blog and during this period we had a significant growth in the online digital signage space. We have managed to get to the top of search engines for various search terms but more importantly our website is getting more popular (more visitor hits and page views). We also have other businesses linking and feeding our content which gives us a good indication that people find this website useful and because of these reasons we will be soon launching a new website.

What changes will you see?

The most significant change that you will see is the design of the website. It is clean, professional and has an easy to use interface. Our team at Advertise Me has customised and designed the new website.

We have improved the searching capabilities and we have reserved space for advertising and sponsorship.

When do we plan to launch the new website?

We intend to launch the new website in the next couple of days (that’s if everything goes well), so come back and visit the digital signage blog soon.

Once we have completed this new website, we will then update our digital signage portal so watch out for that as well.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

The KioskCom Self Service and the digital signage Show event will run over the next two days (15th and 16th October 2008).

For those who didn’t know, the KioskCom Self Service Expo delivers strategic, marketing and technical business solutions for organizations utilizing – or looking to utilize – self-service technology whilst the Digital Signage Show is designed for technology and marketing executives from a diverse range of industries. The event will be held in New York City.

We are excited to get visitors or exhibitors to send us information (this includes pictures brochures etc) of anything you found interesting during this event.

You can either comment on this blog post or discuss it on the digital signage portal forum thread.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Events

Last month, we were excited when we were approached and invited by a Cisco’s Product Sales Specialist (Emerging Technologies) to attend a meeting at their head office in North Sydney Australia.  To cut a long story short, the Product Sales Specialist landed on our digital signage portal website (www.digitalsignageportal.com) and wanted to talk to Advertise Me about the direction of the website and Cisco’s digital signage products. We were keen to understand more about Cisco’s digital signage presence in the industry and because Cisco is an International and reputable company, we couldn’t say no.

We obviously won’t be able to tell you exactly what we discussed in the meeting but it was quite interesting to understand Cisco’s digital signage products and company’s direction in the digital signage industry.

Early last year, I was reading an article about Cisco’s acquisition of a company called Tivella. I’ve never actually heard of this company in the past, but Cisco saw enormous potential for digital signage to be integrated into its existing enterprise streaming and live video broadcasting system and hence the acquisition.

There are two models of the Cisco Digital Media player (4400G and 4305G). In the demonstration we only had the opportunity to see the 4305G but the main differences between the two models are as follows:

	4305G	4400G
	Cisco Digital Media Player 4305G	Cisco Digital Media Player 4400G
Internal storage	2GB CF	4GB CF
Network Port	10/100Mbps	10/100/1000Mbps
Number of USB ports	1	2
Adobe Flash Support	Version 7	Version 9
Physical Dimensions/Weight	7.5 x 5 x 1.5 in. (190 x 127 x 38 mm); weighs 1 lb (0.45 kg)	10 x 8 x 2 in. (254 x 203 x 51 mm); weighs 4.5 lb (2 kg)
Video codec	Video MPEG4 Part 2: Advanced Simple Profile at Level 5	Video MPEG4 Part 10 Baseline and Main profiles

Now, the great feature about this unit is that it supports the HDMI video connector – meaning it is able to play High Definition video. This is actually the first small form factor unit (with no moving parts) we have ever encountered that has a HDMI connector. The other great thing about these units is that it comes with a remote control. Yes… a remote control unit which enables people who are interfacing with the digital signage player to control and browse through the content displayed on the screen. The overall system can also be used as a Video On Demand solution, so it’s ideal in hotels and corporate environments.

During the demonstration we actually saw a live streaming video feed from the US and the video quality was awesome. We found it difficult to distinguish whether it was a live streaming video feed or not because the quality was crisp and the video didn’t appear to have any lag or jitter – we were very impressed with this technology. Basically, we were advised that Cisco’s digital signage players actually use 2 video rendering chips – most other digital signage players use software video rending.

Cisco Digital Media Manager is the backbone system for managing, scheduling and publishing content to the Digital Media Systems (Digital Signage, Enterprise TV, and desktop video). It has a great tool to create the digital signage content. It’s actually all web based (java based to be exact). The application enables content owners to easily upload, catalogue, edit, package and publish digital media content for live or on-demand playback.

The only downsides we saw with Cisco’s Digital Signage solution are:

• Proof of play reporting. The unit doesn’t actually provide a detailed report on what content was played. Just keep in mind that Cisco developed these units for the corporate environment and not retail.
• The overall solution is quite expensive – we were told that a typical digital signage solution would cost around the $80k – $100k mark

Here are a couple of pointers that we took away from the meeting and the demonstration:

• Cisco doesn’t just sell switches, firewall and routers. They have a large product range that includes equipment such as wireless CCTV cameras, Video encoders, Desktop Video, and the list goes on
• With the convergence of voice, data and IP video technology there is an increasing dependency for a stable network infrastructure and this is where Cisco can also help
• The Cisco Digital Media solution is scalable and has been designed so that it can be integrated with other systems eg Microsoft Outlook
• Cisco Australia is interested in the direction of the digital signage portal and wants to be more involved in this area
• We found the solution to have good value in the digital signage market and we intend to work with Cisco and Cisco’s channel partners

Finally, here’s a Cisco product video for the Digital Media Player:

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Events, Digital Signage Blog Info