Digital Signage and the iPhone

Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 7:31 pm by DigitalSignageBlog, 0 Comments »

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