The much anticipated iPhone 3G will be on sale on the 11th July 2008. I know quite a number of people who have already placed an order for this unit or are in the process of placing an order. The iPhone and many of the other Apple products are quite innovative devices and we are very interested to see how many digital signage companies will be investing and researching at ways of integrating their digital signage solutions with these iPhones. We won’t be surprised if Apple makes their mark in the digital signage industry in the next couple of months.

Now, if we look at some of the features of the iPhones there are many obvious reasons why companies will be looking at integrating the iPhones with digital signage:

• 3G Speeds & Internet access – faster access to the Internet means faster upload and download speeds. So if you’re a digital signage network operator it would mean that staff will be able to manage the digital signage network from almost anywhere. If you’re a content provider, you will be able to take a video or picture and upload the file in real-time.

• Camera and photos with GPS- the iPhone 3G has a cool feature called geotagging. By using GPS and geotagging, almost any iPhone user will be able to become a mobile content provider for the travel industry. Just image you’re on holidays in Sydney and you take a photo of the Opera house and upload this image to Flickr. A content provider does a search for Opera house and because your photo has been tagged with sydney someone may end up using your photo -maybe even for a commission.
• Itunes and wireless networking – I guess digital signage operators may be able to leverage both of these technologies and enable the public to interact with the digital signage network, how you may ask… well I can’t reveal all my ideas in case we use this for our own digital signage technology.
• App Store – my guess is that many application developers will build a small applet to enable interaction between the digital signage network and the iPhone

I can’t wait until I get a hold of the iPhone and see how useful this device will be in the digital signage industry.

I hope that after you read this post, your mind is ticking with new ideas… just like mine!

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

For your light reading, here’s a few digital signage Books we’ve found on Amazon :

[amazonify]0240809769[/amazonify] [amazonify]0240810414[/amazonify]

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

It is surprising to see what how different businesses apply their content in the retail digital signage market. Not surprisingly, a very high percentage of digital signage applications focus on advertising – how to best create the most impact on promoting a sale. Depending on the nature of the business, the location of the screens and the intent of the campaign, this can prove to be a very effective strategy.

The other day I walked into a department store looking to pick up some outdoor gear. In the heap of trying to figure out what is best to buy, a digital signage screen in the middle of the aisle was playing short clips on some of the gear on how to use it, as well as offering useful outdoor tips. It was just like watching one of those “Infomercials” on outdoor travel.

It wasn’t till a few minutes later that it hit me – user experience. A strategy for making customers feel assured in their decision and comfortable of what they are buying, and bringing them back to the store. Now this is a different feeling that you walk away with compared to that of “I just scored a bargain!”

It will be interesting to find out what measures the store has in place for tracking sales made against the duration of the digital signage being played.

What will be even more interesting is to be able to track the number of sales made against the number of people entering that aisle looking for outdoor gear. In the wake of technology today, there are many tracking systems out there that do just that – track people’s presence, eye motion, and even human behaviour. But that is a different topic all together!

By the way, I ended up walking out of the store with over $200 in gear!

Discuss this topic here on digitalsignageportal.com.

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Events

The top 3 topics on the digitalsignageportal.com forum are:

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To view all the other topics on the digitalsignageportal.com forum click here.

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We’ve just received information that the digitalsignage.com (yes it was sold on a private auction website and we didn’t even know about it nor did we get an invite) was sold for a whopping $20,200. The new owners of the domain are from natehead.com. It looks like they have strong plans for this domain.

The previous owners of this domain (FocusInfo.com) apparently let the domain name expire – I’m sure they are now regretting it and someone in that company might have even got sacked for it.

In any case we are starting to wonder how much our domain http://www.digitalsignageblog.com is worth – and NO it’s not for sale.

Moral of the story: Whatever you do, don’t let your domain name expire.

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I recently returned back to Australia after a two week business trip in Washington DC, USA and I thought I’d share and comment on some of the digital signage implementations I saw.

Firstly, when I arrived in LA Airport for a stop over, I was welcomed by these screen – digital signage is pretty much everywhere you go in the airports:

If you look closely, there a four smaller screens at the bottom of the two larger screens. The smaller screens are in fact touch screens which can be used to find more information about hotels, restaurants etc within LA – there are also phones that can be used to contact businesses listed in the directory. I like the idea of using the bigger screens to attract the visitor’s attention and then direct them to the touch screens – a very clever “call to action” method.

Next stop was Washington DC Airport. Once again I was not surprised to see digital signage in this airport. I noticed that most of the screens were manufactured by NEC which showed Airline/passenger information. There were also LG screens which were displaying CNN News.

The colour themes on the screens at both airports were very similar. The text was white and the background was a light blue. The screens constantly kept passengers informed about flight information – the digital signage solution was also being used as a “visual announcement board” (this was used in conjunction with an audio message on the PA system) e.g Mr XXX please contact the United airlines customer service desk.

The next place with a strong presence of digital signage was Pentagon City Shopping Mall. Like in many shopping malls around the world, digital signage was used to advertise products and businesses. In this example, a product video from Consumerwatch was playing.

In the same shopping mall I encountered an innovative digital signage implementation. I have read about this type of interactive display on the Internet, but this is the very first time I have actually seen it with my own eyes. I don’t know who are the manufacturers of this solution but the one I’ve seen on the Internet is Catchyoo. From what I could tell, the solution is using a very large (the biggest projector I’ve ever seen), a mirror, a small form factor PC and some sort of motion detection camera. The solution works by displaying an image on the ground, the customers can walk on the image and interact with the display. During the short period I was watching the display, I noticed that only kids were interacting (more like playing) with the projected image. Now don’t get me wrong, the solution is very innovative but is this solution targeted to kids or potential customers? .

The next location that I found a digital signage solution was Borders – the book store. An LCD screen with a computer attached to it displayed a template with a zoning configuration (you can literally see the PC stick out above the screen) . The zones were setup to show the following:

a News scrolling ticketer at the bottom of the screen

• an Advertising Banner on the left hand side column which displayed internal products (CD’s, DVD’s, Books, and products from their cafe)
• the largest area on the screen was used to display videos (interviews, Film/Book previews) and the weather

My last stop was at Washington DC Chinatown. Walking through the busy streets of Chinatown, I noticed that the two large Telecomunications giants (Verizon and AT&T) both had external LED screens placed in front of their building. The Verizon Centre has the largest LED screen in town – very hard to miss.

At the time I took this photo, they were displaying stock information – I’m not too sure how many people are interested in this kind of information but it must be a reason why they were displaying this.

Although AT&T didn’t have the largest screens in town, they did however stand out from the crowd when it came to being noticed. Outside of their AT&T building (nicely located at the corner of the main street in Georgetown), there are 3 LED screens which display independent content from each other.

What took me by surprise was AT&T’s shop window front – they were using the whole of the glass window as a screen. If you look closely in this photo, there is a projected image on the glass window.

Well that’s the end of my trip. Hopefully I’ll get to see other digital signage implementations in the different parts of the world.

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On a daily basis, we filter through the many email emails we receive from digital signage vendors who approach our business with their digital signage products and services.

In order to expand our audio and video extention product range, we have decided to partner with SmartAvi. SmartAvi are now also blog contributors of this digital signage blog and we look forward to building a strong partnership with them.

About SmartAvi

SmartAVI manufactures and markets DVI extenders, video extenders, video switches, digital signage, kvm extenders, and ir extenders. SmartAVI DVI extenders extend DVI over CAT5 and fiber optic cables. SmartAVI’s video extender solutions are unique because of their long experience in the computer industry. It is this technology expertise that allows SmartAVI to give their customers flexible and unique video swicthes at very competitive prices.

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