Written by Guest Blogger: Barbara Jolie

Let me preface this post with the fact that I absolutely love Do-It-Yourself (DIY) hobbies and projects. There is nothing like building or accomplishing something yourself, having it look great and exactly the way you want it, and paying less for it too. I love DIY activities as much as the next industrious, frugal individual, but when it comes to digital signage, there may be some things you just want left to the pros.

Finding Your Limitations

Depending on your needs (and your skills of course), digital signage can just about be a complete DIY project. But your digital sign setup probably won’t be without some limitations. For instance, you can go out and buy your own LCD screens, design a Powerpoint or some sort of slideshow, and transmit your display through some type of computer or vod player that’s close enough to connect through wire to your monitor.

But what if you don’t want to tether a computer only a few feet away from your display monitor? What if you want to leave your sign somewhere outside your business where people could easily walk by and take your computer or even your whole monitor system for that matter? What if you don’t want to constantly create new content for your sign or have the same content repeating for months?

The more you actually try to make use of your digital signage, the more you’ll probably realize that you will need the help of at least some professionals. Perhaps you can mount the equipment yourself, or maybe you can design and create the content, but there’s likely no chance that you can do all of that in addition to network troubleshooting and everything else, even if you do have a fairly large and bright staff with even slightly appropriate skills.

How Professionals Can Help

One of the largest benefits to hiring professionals for digital signage is that you have multiple avenues you can take. You can go to a one-stop shop that will take care of all ends of your digital signage needs, but you can also select specific services from specific professionals.

And once you’ve received adequate service from a professional for one aspect of digital signage, they can refer you to other professionals that can help you out in other areas of digital signage. Having access to a network like this is valuable enough on its own.

Of course you can try out certain areas of digital signage on your own. Perhaps you have a knack for design and content strategy and would like to handle that whole aspect of digital signage. Why not at least give it a shot right? Just remember that, after all your own work, if you end up needing a professional, you have wasted some of your own resources that could have been spent elsewhere. You run this risk when you take on any DIY project rather than consorting with professionals.

About the Guest Blogger:

This guest post is contributed by Barbara Jolie, who writes for online classes.

Category: Digital Signage Guest Posts

Written by Guest Blogger: Nadia Jones

Every sign has a purpose. Of course, some have more than others. The trend of using digital signage has become so rampant these days that many businesses and institutions, in my opinion, are getting them before even considering why they need them. Digital signs are awesome. But there’s nothing more cringe-inducing or face-palming than seeing a digital sign that offers no more variation or usability than a sign composed of a piece of paper and a Sharpee.

Schedules, Updates, and More Schedules

This should go without saying, but any sign or outpost that contains many schedules that are updated daily would be a perfect use of digital signage. Buildings with good numbers of conferences and institutions that hold a lot of meetings (such as universities) are prime candidates for digital signage. For conferences and lectures in particular, these digital signs can be helpful not only in updating time and locations of events, but also in providing descriptions and advertising for these types of events.

Of course any public transportation company or service should and probably is using digital signs; not using this technology in a field or situation that relies on relaying constant updates to customers is simply inexcusable. Maybe five years ago that sort of thing would be ok, but not this decade.

Pretty Pictures, Even videos!

If you feel like your signs could have a lot of digital media to offer, be them pictures or especially video, digital signage would work absolutely perfectly for your needs. For pictures and graphics, digital signage works great because it gives you an excellent quality image that you can then reuse or change without having to pay extra printing fees like you would for physical prints. Dollar for dollar, when you take into account long term costs of high quality prints, digital signage will always be cheaper and usually look better too.

For video, the need for digital signage is obvious. Frankly put, there is simply no other way to convey video through a sign without digital signage. Now, audio can get a bit more complicated, but it all depends on what you’re using to host the media for the sign.

Touch Media, Oh My!

While this technology is still pretty new and therefore expensive, touch signs can be a godsend for your digital signage needs. Particularly if you intend the sign to be used for information-getting and navigational purposes, having a touch-screen sign makes it so that you can offer a lot of information in one place without having it all cluttered and bunched together. Touch screen is definitely the future of digital signage.

About the Guest Blogger:

This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at online college about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, movie related topics.

Category: Digital Signage Guest Posts

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

Let’s keep this simple, the only reason why you should install digital signage for your business is because everyone else is doing it. Yes, that’s my blog post for today. Short and simple.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Before we first started our company advertise me – we didn’t have a clue what the industry was called and the different terminologies that was used to describe this booming industry. Back then, the idea of having advertisements  or content such as menus, images, videos, weather feeds, and text displayed on digital screens was still at its infancy. Commercial plasma screens was becoming more popular and with the introduction of LCD screens, prices of plasmas was becoming more affordable. If you look at the below image of google trends for the term digital signage, you’ll notice that this term became more popular (from google’s search perspective) in 2007.  I tried trending the term digital out of home and dooh but google responsed with “do not have enough search volume to show graphs.”

digital signage google trends

One of the terminologies that we were unfamiliar with was  DOOH – to date we still don’t use this term that often since it has been replaced by Digital Signage. Now to me, the two terms DOOH and Digital Signage can be used interchaneably and I don’t care if there is a difference. One might say that DOOH (since it’s not at home) is a screen network in a public area and that digital signage can be located in a corporate building to display internal communications. To me, both are the same but Digital Signage sounds shorter and easier to say so we’ll stick with this.

If you have a different opinion let us know.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Written by Guest Blogger: Bryan Cochand

Communication is crucial to any type of business, but choosing the right way to communicate can be challenging. digital signage — a term for publicly displaying important information and announcements on a large plasma, LED, or LCD screen — is a cutting-edge method for businesses or organizations to get their message out to their consumers in an economical and flexible way. Catching up to all the advantages of this method can be an easy and very lucrative improvement. So if you are looking for new methods to increase the exposure of your company or organization, it may be worthwhile to check out the benefits of using digital signage.

continue reading »

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Guest Posts

The Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Newcastle has implemented a digital signage solution  to help communicate information (course timetables, date/time and important notices) to students. The 50″ Screen is installed on a professional and sturdy stand that is located near the front entrance hall of the building. One of the main reasons why the screen is positioned in portrait mode is due to space – it was envisaged students would accidentally bump the screen if it is located in landscape. However, we supplied the University with a versatile stand that allows the client to easily rotate the screen in  either landscape or portrait.

Here’s a few photos of the installation:

View our portfolio here.

About The University Of Newcastle

Sector leader in providing opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds.

Over 40,000 students including onshore, offshore and distance education.

Expanded into the Newcastle city centre on a campus accommodating business, law and creative arts students. Planning underway to establish education, humanities and social sciences disciplines in the city.

Home to the best engineering and health faculties in the country relative to size.

Even stronger health and medical research capabilities through the new state of the art Hunter Medical Research Institute building.

Increased reach across the region and overseas through expanded online program delivery.

Established infrastructure and support systems that provide one of the best student experiences in the country.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Case Study

If your business provides an end to end digital signage solution, have you thought about which type of network switching infrastructure you should use for your digital signage solution? Basically, in the networking realm there are two main types of switches, one is managed and the other is unmanaged. What does this mean? Well, for an unmanaged switch you don’t need to administer or make any configuration changes – you power it up and connect your cables and that’s it, it will work. The only downside with this is that you don’t get the extra features like being able to remotely or locally manage the devices and use additional features e.g VLANs, Quality of Service, Security etc.  Many small to medium business would most likely use an unmanaged switch because it does not require additional resources and man hours to complete the setup. In this case, it means that connecting the digital signage players and servers to the network is simple and straight forward.

However, based on our experience working with large corporations they are most likely to have a Cisco or HP managed switches. To be honest working with this infrastructure can become very troublesome in some ways. Especially if the company uses VLAN tagging and manually disables each port. This means the installer needs to co-ordinate and rely on the IT network administrator to make the necessary changes on the networking switches. If it’s not done correctly or in a timely fashion, it could mean that the installer has no way of testing the digital signage players.

In my opinion, unless you need the additional features mentioned before I would personally just use an unmanaged switch – the overall solution becomes cheaper as well. As part of advertise me‘s services, we design and supply all the necessary infrastructure to build an enterprise digital signage solution that includes the networking component.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

It’s interesting to see that the University of Melbourne has a Google Map of where their digital signage screens are located in their campus. In total (based on the information on the map) the University has 43 LCD screens and 1 Projector as part of their digital signage infrastructure. What’s more interesting is that they are using the NDS PADS system (based on a URL I discovered). The University uses this system to promote university events and initiatives to staff and students.

Here’s a map of their digital signage screens:

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

The title of this post may lead you to believe that I’ll be writing about a movie but I decided to share with our readers my thoughts on the digital signage screens/hardware in the current market. This is divided between the Beauty and the Beast.

Let me explain. The Beauty are those devices that look very expensive and pleasing to the eye but functionally, the system behind it is useless. It may catch your attention at first but then when you get to know the ins and outs of the device, you’ll just put it to the side and wished you never purchased it. Then you have the Beast, which I classify as devices that look weird, ugly and cheap but is sturdy and the overall system is exactly what you want. So which one are you currently using at the moment?

In the years that I’ve been in the digital signage industry, I’ve seen so many Beauties and Beasts. We constantly receive emails from overseas businesses showcasing their products and to be honest there’s never been one that just stood out. Maybe it could be time for us to start developing our own system.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

Tomorrow (AEST) is the beginning of our long weekend. Given that it’s Easter, we decided to do something very different and fun on our blog. As of tomorrow, 22 August 2011 at 10am (AEST) we will hide a virtual Easter egg (just a picture) on  a particular post. You will need to find this post and the virtual Easter egg and place a comment “Happy Easter digital signage blog!”. The first person to do this will receive a free advertising tile on the right hand side of the digital signage blog sidebar for 12 months. Obviously, the image on the tile will need to be reviewed and approved  by us.

Happy Easter everyone!

Category: Digital Signage Blog Events

I’m not sure whether most of you have seen this tender before but I thought I’d better share it with you all. It appears a Utility company (Kenya Electricity Generating Company Limited) is looking for a company to supply a digital signage system for several of their power stations. The date of the submission will be open on the 21st April 2011.

There’s not much detail about the number of screens or what they are looking for and good luck to those that are applying for the tender. Here’s the link to the tender information. http://www.hellotrade.com/tenders/details/328898614/

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info

Take away stores are fast adopting the use of digital menu boards rather than static poster or light boxes. The advantages of moving to digital is quite obvious but let me summarise them again:

• You can quickly and easily update prices on a digital board rather than spending more money to print the posters
• Use animation to grab attention. A video clip of the food is more enticing than a static image.
• Schedule the food menu based on the time of the day. E.g. Breakfast for the morning, lunchtime for the afternoon and dinner for the evening.
• Easily manage and update the content yourself rather than relying on a designer. Once you have the template designed, all you need to do is just update the content. The process of changing the content has now become so much easier.
• It’s now more affordable!!!!

Now this week, we assisted a Pizza Take away store with the implementation of a digital signage solution.3 screens were installed behind the front counter and 1 near the front. The front screen is used for specials whereas the 3 behind the counter is used to display the menu. The solution is simple but most importantly affordable – this was the main criteria for the business owner.

Below are a few pictures of the implementation:

Digital menu boards can be implemented with the most simplest solution e.g. using a Screen with a built in player or for a large retail chain it can be a network of digital signage players with Content Management Servers.

It’s only a matter of time before we will see all menu boards going digital. So if you’re interested in a digital menu board have a look at this special package.

View our portfolio here.

Category: Digital Signage Case Study, Featured Post

Looks like there’s a job opening at a reputable company in Seattle.

According to the Sharp website,  here’s the job description – to apply click on this link:

This position is responsible for the sales of Sharp Electronics digital signage equipment, consisting of primary equipment, accessories, software and ancillary services. Responsibilities will include territorial business development and providing sales support.

RESPONSIBILITIES
Responsible for prospecting and developing relationships with C Level Purchasing Executives in order to market and sell SEC digital signage equipment and accessories
Implements a top-down digital signage sales approach targeting Presidents, CFOs, and HR Directors to convert prospects into clients.
Supplies product information to selected customers in an assigned territory and/or arranges for business analyses of customer’s business communication requirements and develops benchmark demonstrations, proposals and value propositions that exceed customers’ requirements resulting in the development of new customers and retention of existing accounts.
Organizes and implements post-sale delivery and implementation of SEC digital signage equipment at customer locations.
Acts as the primary point of contact for all digital signage sales paperwork for customer orders.
Works closely with SBS sales representatives to identify digital signage opportunities within current SBS customer base
Promotes Sharp digital signage products and represent Company at off-site customer meetings, trade shows and conferences.
Maintains records of all account activity within sales database.
Identifies contacts in accounts and conducts strategic calls.
Serves as first line of contact with digital signage customers.

POSITION SPECIFICATIONS
Minimum BA/BS or related technical degree required
At least 2 years experience providing technical and sales support
Successful Sales History and Close Rate
Financial Modeling and business forecasting experience
Team building, time management and problem-solving skills
Must be able to Travel 50% of the time
Must be proficient in performing business and account analysis
Strong creative vision relative to digital signage
Strong understanding of display solutions
Team player with ability to coordinate efforts with sales reps to sell
Strong computer skills with current technical knowledge
Solid interpersonal skills in order to close deals and make presentations
A strong background in developing technical solutions that meet customer needs
A Valid Drivers License

All applications must include salary requirements & a resume. Local applicants only.

Good luck to those that will be applying.

Category: Digital Signage Jobs

Written by Guest Blogger Eugene Capon II from Capon Design

I first started in the digital signage space a year and a half ago. All my experience was in graphic design, web design and print. After a 3 month internship where there was an intense learning curve about the digital signage space, I was hired as the head of creative for a digital signage manufacturer. As a requirement, I often did tech support for those
trying to design their own creative. But after a while I noticed a trend. 90% of the phone calls were from print shops who have had years of experience working in print space and were now trying to tackle this new medium. This tutorial will help you get started in making content for digital displays as it addresses differences between the print and digital mediums. continue reading »

Category: Digital Signage Guest Posts