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

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

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!!!

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

This was a video clip that one of our digital signage portal members Travis from Blue Pony submitted in the discussion forum and its about Augmented reality. This blew me away so I thought I’d share this with our digital signage blog readers so have a look at it yourself and let me know what you think.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News, Digital Signage Blog Video

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

This weekend we decided to look at the upcoming OS 6 version of the Blackberry and we were quite excited to see some of the amazing features. Also have a read of the comments of the video if you get a chance as its quite amusing. Also, I hope this version of the OS fixes some of the issues with the system memory – applications use system memory so I cannot install that many apps with only 256MB on the Storm.

So what do you think about the blackberry OS 6 video?

We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

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).

continue reading »

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.

continue reading »

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

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

continue reading »

Category: Digital Signage Weekend Fun, Featured Post

Coincidently on my third trip back to Melbourne for a digital signage project rollout, I came across something that is too familiar to me.

Digital Signage gone wrong

Almost 9 out of 10 times when digital signage goes wrong through my observations, they are running Windows. There is no perfect system out there regardless what hardware, operating system, or configuration you may have, but according to Murphy’s Law, when something does go wrong how do control it? Does your software allow you to show an exception or alternate display?

Weirdly enough, these observations have now become second nature to me, whereby I notice all other people would just walk right past it. Not to mention the urge for me to take out my blackberry to snap it.

Category: Digital Signage Blog Info

This weekend we almost missed an important event that was created and organised through the facebook events application. For some reason, the event displayed the correct date on the Facebook website, but on the iphone and the blackberry it showed the incorrect date (using the mobile application) – the reminders were not triggered because of this issue. My guess is that there is probably an issue related to the timezone (ie Australia). Does anyone else have the same issue?

If you’re integrating facebook with your digital signage application and are displaying events just make sure you check and test that the dates are displaying correctly before publishing this to the screens.

Category: Digital Signage Blog News

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

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.

 Loading ...

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:

 Loading ...

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