I just stumbled across an image of a bike with digital screens. Is this real or is it fake?

Here’s the picture:

If it is real, here’s a list of my concerns:

• theft – now it gives thieves more of a reason to steal your bike… they now will get a free screen
• what happens if it rain? is it a waterproof screen?
• what happens if there’s a strong wind? will the bike fall?
• will pedalling generate more electricity for the battery to run the screens?
• safety – if the screens draw too much attention to drivers will it cause accidents?

I must give it to the company or engineers that came up with this idea… but to be honest this digital signage implementation is not my cup of tea.

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

This is an awesome video of a digital signage cube by Sharp Electronics. It appears that the cube is made up of 64 60″ monitors …. no I physically didn’t count them but there was a sign on the side saying that. I wonder what the purpose of this cube was for. It’s also quite interesting to see how the installation took place and here’s the video for this fun weekend:

Category: Digital Signage Blog Video, Digital Signage Weekend Fun

Here’s another awesome and innovative solution. This weekend we were able to catch up on some fun and stumbled across a video of a smile-activated ice cream machine. Basically it’s a digital signage vending machine that uses facial recognition to capture and measure your smile 15 times a second which determines the age and gender and – if you smile big enough – rewards you with ice cream. You can even upload and share your smile-for-free-ice-cream picture on Facebook. Just watching the video makes me smile. It will be anytime soon that we’ll soon see one here in Australia.

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

The video that we came across this weekend is titled “Kraft Store Kiosk Scans Your Face Then Knows What to Feed It”. When you look at the video you’ll notice that the interactive software allows users to choose food recipes based on items on the shopping list. For some reason I really like the design of the interface and I like the way you can add items to your mobile phone. The really good twist to the solution is the ability to receive a free sample to feel and taste the experience – how awesome is that!!!

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Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

Looks like the Japanese has done it again – this time in the toilets.  Sega has just launched a trial for this  month at four male bathrooms in pubs and game arcades. Basically, you can play games using your urine. I while ago I blogged about Digital Signage: Location, location, location and how important it is to target the right audience and mentioned how toilets was an example of targeting a specific gender. I’m glad someone thought about this. continue reading »

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

I stumbled across a funny Youtube video titled “How to wall mount a Plasma/LCD WITHOUT a bracket!Exclusive… it really works!!!” Since it’s the weekend, have a look at this video.

Lesson learnt, use a bracket and a professional to mount a LCD or Plasma screen. Once the screen is dropped…. it will never be the same.

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

I came across a video on youtube called “??? digital signage Sinagawa Station Tokyo” – I don’t know what the first 3 Japanese Characters are but I think they spelt the name of the station incorrectly…

Anyways, the first 1 1/2 minute of the video is quite boring so if you are going to watch the video make sure you start from 1:30. From there it get’s interesting and I was amazed to see the number of screen located in the tunnel. I did a quick count and if my maths is correct there was 44 screens just in the tunnel – geezzz that’s a lot of screens in the space of a few meters. Keep in mind that this must be a high traffic area so there’s $$$$$ revenue for advertising. Great work for whoever came up with this implementation.

Oh and he’s the video if you want to watch it… the end is quite boring as well.

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

Our http://www.advertiseme.com.au website has been on the first page of the Australian google search result for the term digital signage for many years now. I think just this year, we’ve managed to rank second on the list (minus the sponsored links).

If you don’t believe us follow these steps:

1. Clean your cache and temporary files
2. Go to www.google.com.au
3. Enter the term digital signage
4. Look at the second search result – we should be listed there
5. Click on our website and you’ll see what we’ve done to our website for the natural Search Engine Optimisation

Here’s a pic of what we see:

You can confirm this yourself if you don’t believe us.

Now as you can clearly see wikipedia is at the top of the listing. I was wondering this weekened whether there was any ways of getting our website to the top and beat wikipedia… anyone have any ideas?

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

This one is a new one for me but seems like it’s an oldie. It’s amazing what humans can achieve when they all work together. This is almost as good as the countdown at the 2009 Olympics in Beijing.

Some viewers are skeptical as to whether the video is real or not but to me it looks real. Too bad it doesn’t have subtitles. Anyone know what they are saying?

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

This weekend my son my playing on my brothers Iphone and guess what I saw… a blackberry advertisement for the app world. I found it strange and funny that the Iphone application doodle was actually displaying an advertisement for it’s competitor Research In Motion. I decided to take a photo of it on my Blackberry just to share it with everyone since it was quite amusing.

blackberry advertisement

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

Although this video seems a bit old I found it quite interesting – specially during the weekend. It’s basically a video of an in-store interactive digital signage that transforms consumers fashion into NIKEiD designed shoes in Fukuoka Japan. It has a color analyzing programmed camera which uses the colours of the consumers clothes and it automatically designs nike shoes based on these colours. It’s a very cool idea.
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Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

Due to the hype coming from the media in the last couple of weeks, we decided to further research about the Microsoft Surface. The unit was first announced in May 2007 and the first unit was sold in Australia this month. Apparently the unit costs $20,000 (ouch).

The  Microsoft Surface is a table-like display that is multi-touch. Basically responds to touch, natural hand gestures and placement of real-world objects which includes digital cameras, mobile phones and even business cards (I’m not sure how it would work with the business card).

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Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

This weekend I decided to play around with the google search features and stumbled across the “Wonder Wheel”. So what I did was I typed the search term “digital signage” in the google search bar. Google displayed the most relevant websites related to this search term, in Australia our advertise me and Digital Signage portal are on the 1st page and we’re pretty happy about this result.

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Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

Besides the hot and then rainy weather in Sydney Australia, we thought we’d do something crazy and clean up our spammed comments since it was taking up a considerable amount of space in our database. We had 23,123 comments marked as spam since the beginning of last year and most of them were not relating to digital signage. The process of cleaning up this spammed comments in WordPress isn’t as straight forward as I thought it would be. Under the Edit Comments section there is a button called “Empty Spam”. Obviously I want to empty  these comments so when I click on the button the process seems to time out… probably due to the number of spam comments. I basically end up getting a white page after about 40 seconds. When I logged back in to see how many spam comments were removed, the system somehow managed to remove about 1000 comments before it timed out – that’s what I’m guessing happened. If you do the maths, I had to do this about 20 times and I also just calculated that the ratio of the number of post to the number of spam comments  is approximately 1:107 – this is a large number?

So, to avoid this in future we will aim to remove spam comments on a monthly basis and please… don’t spam our digital signage blog. We have noticed several businesses adding their website links in their comments, although we don’t prevent you from doing so or added a plugin feature to automatically remove these, it does look a “bit” obvious on what you’re trying to do.

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

There seems to be quite a hype about Intels latest technology and I can see why. Have a look at this video and read some of the comments.

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

Blackberry Storm v5

For those of you with a Blackberry in Australia did you notice the Blackberry App World icon and v5 of the OS? On Saturday morning I restarted by blackberry and whilst browsing the icons on the home menu I noticed an new icon…. it was the App World Icon. To be honest I initially didn’t know what it was but after pressing on this icon, my jaws dropped. I then checked the Blackberry Desktop Manager and noticed v5 was available – this is where i jumped out of my seat and did the “dance of joy”.

I spend the next hour or so installing and browsing through the applications available on the App World and upgrading to v5. I was surprised to see most of the applications were FREE. I ended up installing and testing some of these applications and found some to be very useful.  I was however disappointed to the number of applications, in particular the number of games available.

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Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

This weekend we thought we’d further connect with the social community and added the Gigya toolbar. What this means is that our readers will now be able to use the toolbar to share our posts on their Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Myspace, Email and more.

The toolbar looks like this and you will notice it at the end of the page:

Gigya Toolbar

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Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

This week we had the opportunity to drive the Audi A4 convertible and we realised how most luxury cars or new model cars will have LCD screens. These are the perfect opportunities to utilise these screens for digital signage and I wonder how many car manufacturing companies are actually thinking about this.

Audi A4 Convertible Front

Audi A4 Convertible Dashboard

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Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun, Featured Post

What a fun weekend!! Just recently RIM released the desktop manager v5.0.1 which introduces the feature to EASILY setup the Blackberry as an IP modem (tethered modem) and I’ve been using this all weekend.

Now, all you have to do is click on several buttons and you’ll be connected to the Internet via the Blackberry Desktop Manager – you just have to make sure your blackberry is connected to your laptop or pc. Great stuff guys! Here’s some screenshots:

Blackberry desktop manager main window

Blackberry Desktop Manager with IP Modem window

Blackberry Desktop Manager IP Modem connected

Category: Digital Signage Techie, Digital Signage Weekend Fun, Featured Post

If you thought digital signage could impress with advertising, have a look at what a water fountain can do!

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

The other day during a digital signage client install, we were asked the question, “is there a keyboard we can install at our kiosks without it being ripped out every couple of weeks?”.
I’m not sure if this is a possible solution, but it is definitely on the right track.

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

This is just funny… it physically looks like the smallest computer in the world:

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

This weekend I thought I’d play around with the Nikon D60 Digital SLR camera and test my skills in trying to take those “awesome” shots. Now, since we’re in the digital signage industry I thought I’d take photos of something relating to this industry (basically anything I had lying around) and here’s what I could find:

	High Definition Set Top Box and DVD player. Both were connected to a rear projector screen.
	S-video cable – this is becoming almost obsolete but you’ll be surprised on how many digital signage players are actually using this type of connectors
	Short VGA cable – at Advertise Me, we like to make sure all cables are to the correct lengths

I also took several photos of a vegetarian place I went to called Zen Oasis in Berrima Australia. We have a strong belief in our company that “a healthy body and mind allows one to achieve higher levels of growth”. The food was awesome and the environment was tranquil and peaceful. If you’re around that area, I highly recommend that you visit this place (make sure you book in advance as it’s always busy). Here’s a few photos that I took:  (by the way, I’ve had no lessons on photography so apologies if they look amateur).

	As soon as you walk into the restaurant you are greeted by this statue. For this particular photo I thought it would look good if the focus was on the flowers and this was the result.
	This is an all you can eat (just make sure you don’t waste the food) and there was so much variety. Yum… can’t wait to go there again.
	I think this is an “Awesome” shot. There is a stage with a piano surrounded by an aura of stillness.
	This picture was outside the Zen oasis restaurant that showcases a big tree with a wishing well.

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

This is a funny digital signage video. It’s titled Amazing Powerful Window Shop Digital Interaction… I honestly don’t know whether its really meant to be serious or not but it was worth a watch (actually… I had to watch it several times just to make sure I understood what the video was about).

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

I spend quite a lot of time on my blackberry to  perform certain tasks (besides reading emails) for my digital signage work. So this weekend I will share with you some of the free applications I use on the blackberry. Here’s the list in no particular order:

	1. Viigo – this is a RSS reader application with a nice intuitive interface. I use it to read most blog entries related to digital signage (and of course I’ve added the http://www.digitalsignageblog.com/feed to the list… don’t forget to do that as well). You can download Viigo from the Application Center on the blackberry or you can download it from here: www.viigo.com
	2. WordPress for blackberry – I use this to type some of the digital signage blog entries whilst on the go. I found it a bit hard to navigate on the Blackberry Storm (it was not designed for the touchscreen and surepress technology) but it does the job. You can download wordpress for blackberry here http://blackberry.wordpress.org/
	3. Nav4All – this is an awesome application that is basically like the navman but free…well until 1-1-2010. It is a mobile phone navigation application which gives you turn by turn instructions. I use this when I have to travel to unfamiliar locations for meetings etc. The website has a whole list of mobile phones that it supports so head over there now to download it. http://www.nav4all.com
	4. GPSed – this is an application that maps your tracks and photos. I use it for both tracking when I go running and also for tracking locations where I saw digital signage solution installs. Great little application and it’s free. http://www.gpsed.com/
	5. BBFileScout – a file browser for the blackberry. There are times whereby I have to send files and photos to our clients so this is a perfect solution for browsing files. You can download the application from here. http://www.emacberry.com/bbfilescout.html
	6. Twitterberry – the twitter application for the blackberry. We use this to update our twitter status http://www.twitter.com/advertisemeAU I also find it hard to navigate using this application as it wasn’t designed for the Blackberry Storm. You can download this application from here: http://orangatame.com/products/twitterberry/
	7. Core applications – Finally, there’s the built in apps like Youtube, the camera, emails, browser etc that we use and there’s always Facebook – I don’t think anyone can resist from installing this application if they have a facebook account.

There may be others which I haven’t used before. Let me know if there’s any other application which I should use for my digital signage work.

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun

For this weekend fun, we want to share with you a comic on digital signage. I think this one has been floating around for a couple of days and it’s from the Blondie comic series by Dean Young & John Marshall. Thanks guys, we’re glad to see that the digital signage industry is getting noticed and acknowledged by the comic industry. Also, thanks to Ronnie for sharing this.

Blondie comic - digital signage

Source of the image: http://www.jsonline.com/comics/32402404.html?feature_id=Blondie&feature_date=2009-08-25

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Weekend Fun

This week we were approached by an individual who was interested in purchasing one of our domain names. We are not too sure what their intentions were but we thought that for this weekend fun post we would ask our readers how much do they think this domain name (www.digitalsignageblog.com) is worth. By the way… we are NOT selling this domain name.

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

It’s another weekend and for this particular post we’re going to look at a fun and innovative digital signage solution in Taoyuan Airport. Basically, as you’re waling down the duty free alley in the Taoyuan airport Terminal 2, you will notice that an advertisement follows you. I’m not sure whether the ads as targeted specifically based on the gender or characteristics of the person walking past but do you find this too intrusive? Have a look at the video:

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Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Polls, Digital Signage Weekend Fun

It’s the weekend and thought I’d share an exciting and fun video clip – you’ll be also surprised as well.

We previously talked about how the iPhone can be used as a digital signage player (there’s already a few companies out there who have created an application on the iPhone) but now how would you like to be served by a humanoid robot with an iPhone attached to it’s head? Watch the funky video and we’ll discuss later:

In the examples in the video, the humanoid robot with the iPhone attached as it’s head, can be used to:

• wake you up – morning!!! maybe even give you a hug or a slap
• entertain – it’s a dance machine…shake it’s robo booty
• teach it new tricks and moves – next thing you know it will start imitating your moves
• and if you’re nice to it… it might even make you a coffee (just kidding – ummmm may be it is possible)

BUT more importantly it can interact with YOU – think about it from a sales and marketing perspective and you’ll start realising that this robot can be used to attract more customers into your store and even possibly serve it’s customers (stick your own photo image as it’s head ). The screen itself can be used even to promote sales, products and specials whilst it’s dancing around entertaining it’s customers (yes it’s  digital signage after all). And yes…. I’ve said it before… the possibilities seem to be endless with the future of mobile phones as digital signage players.

So that’s our weekend fun for this week and we all hope you’re having a great weekend.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info, Digital Signage Blog Products, Digital Signage Blog Video, Digital Signage Ideas, Digital Signage Weekend Fun