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:

About Cisco Systems

Cisco, is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Events, Digital Signage Blog Info

This question has been on my mind this past week and I’ve been wondering whether digital signage businesses have been impacted from this economic downfall.

After speaking to several people about this topic I came to the understanding that out of all the departments in a company, the marketing team would be the first group to go. The marketing team generally spends money to make money so this is one of the main reason why a business would strategically decrease the head count of this department. What this may potentially mean for digital signage companies is that less marketing people would look for spending money in deploying digital signage solutions even thought the solution may increase sales and profit (needs to be qualified and quantified).

We haven’t felt the wave yet in Australia but I’m sure that it will hit us any time soon.

What are your thoughts on this? Visit the digital signage portal forum to discuss further.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News

SaaS stands for Software As A Service and is gaining momentum in the digital signage industry.

Wikipedia defines SaaS as:

“a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the Internet. By eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own computer, SaaS alleviates the customer’s burden of software maintenance, ongoing operation, and support. Conversely, customers relinquish control over software versions or changing requirements; moreover, costs to use the service become a continuous expense, rather than a single expense at time of purchase. Using SaaS also can conceivably reduce the up-front expense of software purchases, through less costly, on-demand pricing. From the software vendor’s standpoint, SaaS has the attraction of providing stronger protection of its intellectual property and establishing an ongoing revenue stream. The SaaS software vendor may host the application on its own web server, or this function may be handled by a third-party application service provider (ASP). This way, end users may reduce their investment on server hardware too.“

For more information about SaaS visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_Service

The main benefits of using Digital Signage SaaS are :

• affordable and cost savings – low monthly costs (no maintenance, ongoing operation and support costs) . Some companies are even providing this service for free.
• cut the upfront costs associated with digital signage deployments
• all the digital signage software is centrally hosted and managed by the company which means all software upgraded are performed by the company

Finally, watch out for SaaS as it will be the next model in the digital signage industry.

To discuss this further visit our digital signage portal forum.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog News