Are you planning to attend the Digital Signage Expo in Las Vegas on March 16 and 17, 2016?
I will be at the Navori booth (#2218) for both days so be sure to come on over and say Hi!
Looking forward to another great DSE.
Digital signage has become really popular with the food service industry. Some folks will point to new advertising regulations but there is more to it than dietary information. You can simply do much more with digital signage content.
However, there are a few rules you should always follow.
Call or email to learn more about digital signage content for your restaurant.
Industrial Digital Signage Content Example
Digital signage is used by a wide range of businesses and your software training should meet your specific needs. For example, restaurant owners use digital signage differently than banks or automobile dealerships.
Consider these facts when deciding how to spend your training dollars.
Live eLearning sessions are delivered on the web using screen sharing tools and attendees can join individually or share a meeting room equipped for video conferencing.
Are you looking to implement the Navori QL digital signage software platform for your organisation?
Click here to receive my detailed Navori QL eLearning program notes and rate information.
This is a new article aimed at educators and training professionals who provide eLearning services online. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Check out the article here.
Flypaper was a neat software program that let you build rich multimedia content with zero programming. You would save your projects as an interactive Flash app or a video clip which made it a great tool for digital signage and wayfinding. Flypaper even supported external data through Google docs integration. Sadly the product was discontinued on May 2015 by it’s current owner, Trivantis Corporation, leaving Flypaper users out to fend for themselves.
At least, the software kept running even though many of it’s advanced features stopped working almost immediately. You could still launch Flypaper but it wouldn’t connect to Google docs anymore. However, the built-in weather feeds still worked as did many other features which meant you could still edit old projects and even create new ones.
You would get the odd error prompt while launching the app, but it still worked… as long as you didn’t try to reinstall the software. You see, when Trivantis closed down Flypaper, they also shut down their license activation servers which means you can no longer activate a new copy of the software. It doesn’t matter if you own a valid licence. You can’t transfer the software to a new PC or reinstall it if you have a serious hard drive crash.
Trivantis is still in business but it’s focused on eLearning now. Too bad they couldn’t keep the Flypaper licensing servers running. It’s one thing to stop offering customer support but not letting registered users reinstall the software is pretty sad.
So here’s a warning to every Flypaper user still out there. Your software may still run today, but it may not work for long so it’s time to move on.
Time to find a different solution!
Navori Labs is introducing a new, more powerful Android media player for 2016. The QL StiX 3500 will be available with 16GB of data storage, upgradeable to 32GB. The “stick” form factor means this device will be easy to hide behind any screen and installation is a cinch. Just plug the unit in any available HDMI and USB port.
The device supports WiFi and cabled connections for easier integration in corporate environments.
This is not your typical consumer grade Android media player. The QL StiX 3500 offers 4K support and a 16 core GPU so you can expect performance that will surpass many PC based players. When you also consider this device supports TeamViewer, there is even less reason to use a PC for your screen deployments.
It’s important to note the Navori QL software platform supports PCs and Android devices natively making it very easy to manage mixed OS environments through a unified user interface.
The QL StiX 3500 will be shown at the upcoming ISE Amsterdam and DSE Las Vegas shows.
I’ve been reading about proximity beacons (or iBeacons) for the last couple of years. From a digital signage perspective, you can use beacons to trigger personalized content on screens to promote products and services that are directly relevant to the viewer. However, competing standards and plarforms (mainly iOS & Android) meant beacons were still mostly a curiosity. There were few big deployments to speak of, until now.
Today, the Rite Aid pharmacy retail chain announced it is deploying beacons in more than 4,500 US stores. It will be interesting to see if other retailers jump in and start deploying beacons as part of their marketing strategies.
Seems someone at Google zigged when they should have zagged!
News of Chrome OS merging with Android made quite a stir on the web but it now looks like the reports were a bit premature as Google is clarifying their plans.
There was lots of speculation about what this would mean for existing Chromebox users. Since Google showed off their Chrome OS and Chromebox solutions at DSE 2015, we’ve seen a lot of interest for the platform with several well established digital signage vendors announcing their support. Well it now looks like there’s more to it than simply merging both platforms into a single OS. The latest news out of the Googleplex points to a different approach where the traditional Chrome OS will stay around and become more compatible with apps developed for Android. This would make a lot of sense since Android has a lot more apps to offer. Making all these apps available for Chrome OS users would be a big boost for the platform. If this rumor is true, Google OS might become a much more interesting platform for digital signage vendors because there are already a lot of Android digital signage apps out there.
In the long term we may see Android become totally focused on mobile while Chrome OS takes back some of the traditional commercial business. This could mean more digital signage vendors selling Android digital signage apps to folks deploying on Chromeboxes and other Chrome OS devices.
It’s still a big win for digital signage users.
The latest news from Google had me scratching my head. Google had quite a large presence at DSE 2015 and Chrome OS and Chromeboxes were front and center. There were many third party software developers who were showing their solutions adapted to run on the Chrome OS and it looked like this was going to become the company’s “official” digital signage platform.
While Android has been very popular with digital signage solution providers, the OS lacked some key features such as remote device management. What it had going for were an abundance of super-cheap devices and ease of deployment but that would only carry the OS so far. You could easily see that without some form of remote device management feature, the future of Android in digital signage seemed bleak.
So this recent announcement that Google was abandoning the Chrome OS, essentially merging it with Android, is good news for everyone. This probably means Android will gain some of the Chrome exclusive features and you can bet remote device management will be one of them.
The future is looking a bit brighter today if you’re an Android fan!
I have finally decided to redo my web site. I have brought my blog back into my main site so watch this space for useful insights, industry comments and just plain old gossip. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’re interested in digital signage or have a question about the medium.
Cheers,