Digital Signage

Visix Names Expression Award Winners

Posted on Sep 25, 2009 by Jane Goodwin at 12:05 am

Over at the Daily DOOH, writer Gail Chiasson has posted a list of the Visix Expression Award winners:

Vanten And Quividi Team Up in Japan

Posted on Aug 31, 2009 by Jane Goodwin at 12:05 am

Chris Phelan at the Daily DOOH has posted an article about the first integrated digital signage  measurement service in Japan:

Vanten K.K. (Tokyo, Japan, CEO: Neil van Wouw) and Quividi (Paris, France, CEO: Olivier Duizabo) recently formed a strategic partnership where Vanten will act as an integration and sales partner to assist Quividi’s entry in the Japanese Digital Signage market with its automated audience measurement solution.

As part of this strategic partnership, Vanten will add audience measurement metrics to the existing Ad reporting in EngageMedia, Vanten’s Intelligent Signage Platform. The new service will be available starting Sept. 30, 2009. Both technical teams will work together to increase their competitive advantage in the market and investigate further options such as localizing and jointly operating Quividi’s VidiCenter service in Japan.

EngageMedia currently stores playback information in a database for all content and includes location, time, and actual duration as well as a time-stamped screenshot of each content playback. Customers can easily create reports for any content, time period, or group of displays. New functionalities will add information from Quividi’s VidiReports, keeping track of how many people looked at each content item and for how long. It will also record how many people in the vicinity of the displays have an Opportunity To See (OTS) the screens and how long they remain in range (dwell-time).

Vanten started testing Quividi’s audience measurement system at Yodobashi Camera’s in-store media, YodobiTV, in December 2008. The test period showed impressive results with a very high data collection accuracy and remarkably low requirements in terms of computing resources.

Until recently, audience measurement systems have been slow to detect faces and have used significant amounts of computing power, often requiring special, dedicated computing hardware. The accuracy was also insufficient for producing reliable metrics or quality customer reports. The high price tag also proved to be a major barrier to widespread adoption of the technology. Whereas alternative systems are usually deployed only in key locations, Quividi’s affordable pricing model makes it possible to consider audience measurement with each and every display.

“We’re very excited to be working with Quividi”, said Neil van Wouw, CEO of Vanten , “Our evaluation showed them to be a best-of-breed solution. Quividi showed commitment to standardization by quickly demonstrating consistency with the OVAB audience metric guidelines, and in our estimation, Quividi is currently the only practical way to bring true audience measurement to every display in a large scale deployment. Together we can leverage EngageMedia’s ability to bring more content and advertising variations than ever before, and Quividi’s ability to provide automated and precise metrics at fine grained, single content play level. This is the vision we are striving to realize.”

“Vanten is rapidly emerging as the leading player in Digital Signage in Japan, and we’re delighted to be teaming up with a such a visionary company”, said Olivier Duizabo, CEO of Quividi. “Vanten’s plan to include audience measurement in its standard offer is perfectly tuned to our own vision: ubiquitous real time metrics will generate trust and sharpen the execution of marketing campaigns to ultimately boost the performance of Digital Signage networks. We’re confident that, jointly, we will deliver a superior solution to the Japanese market”.

About Vanten

Vanten has been operating since September 1998, and currently delivers a full suite of digital signage services and solutions. Vanten’s Intelligent Signage Platform, EngageMedia, offers world class digital signage advertising and content management, data network management, security and dynamic content feature modules. Vanten also makes award winning content for Digital Signage, and with its AdChoice division, is a leading DOOH Agency in Japan.

Capital Networks Targets Campus Markets

Posted on Aug 21, 2009 by Jane Goodwin at 12:05 am

Gail Chiasson at the Daily DOOH has an excellent post up today about Capital Networks LTD’s new market initiative:

Markham, Ont.-based Capital Networks Ltd., a major provider of broadcasting and dynamic digital signage software, has launched a new market initiative into the Canadian educational sector.

CNL’s Audience.Campus offering has been designed specifically for educational installations, enabling high schools, colleges and universities to improve communication with students across multi-site campuses, as well as within individual faculties or departments. The Audience.Campus solution can run up to 100 channels simultaneously through a single deployment which ensures that individual departments can control the content on their digital screens and deliver local information such as room schedules, or class notifications – all of which can be uploaded easily by staff or students.

“While the university may want to control the general and emergency notices on screens, many university departments want to control their own information,” says Blake Reeves, CNL’s manager of business development. “They also often each control their own budgets so the system has to be flexible as well as powerful.

“Our system works on a contentious scheduling module, so all content is ready to go at a certain time. Emergency messages are ready to run and preempt as necessary whether in one building or right across a campus.”

CNL already has a range of high profile clients in the education sector, including the University of Waterloo, Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, Case Western Reserve University, UCLA and University of Regina.

“We know CNL has a good product for the the campus market so decided to specialize on the educational vertical sector as one of our key targets,” says Reeves.

Among others, CNL also works with the BBC, the US Marines, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,Pan Pacific Hotels in Singapore, Cablevision and OBN.

Reeves says, “The digital signage market now stands at over US$800 million according Digital Signage Resource, and is the broadcasting method of choice for a range of industries. It’s not surprising that it’s also becoming popular in large educational institutions, like colleges and universities, because it is designed to cope with the complex layout of the buildings and the wide-reaching audience. “

CNL, founded in 1991 and a privately held company headed by Bill Trainor, president, provides its broadcasting and dynamic digital signage software to 35 countries worldwide through authorized re-sellers. educational, broadcast, cable, retail, digital signage, hospitality, military and medical applications.

Daily DOOH Announces Top Ten Digital Signage Vendors

Posted on Jan 26, 2009 by Jane Goodwin at 12:05 am

As I mentioned last week in the post about EnQii’s participation in the NRF’s convention and expo, the Daily DOOH has indeed published an article listing their Top Ten Digital Signage Vendors, and the reasoning they used in their choices.

Their Top Ten List is as follows:

=1 Cisco
=1 EnQii
3. Broadsign
4. C-nario
5. YCD
6. ScreenRed
7. Scala
8. Remotemedia
9. TELentice
10.Stratacache

Some of the criteria used in the DOOH’s choices were:

Please read the entire article; it will not only clarify all of these things; it will also give you lists of other digital signage companies that bear watching!

The Daily DOOH’s article can be found right HERE.

EnQii President to Speak About Digital Signage at NRF Convention and Expo

Posted on Jan 22, 2009 by Jane Goodwin at 12:05 am

From Digital Signage Central comes this article about EnQii president Stuart Armstrong’s speaking engagement at the 2009 National Retail Federation’s Annual Convention & Expo last week, on Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2009, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City.

Entitled “Creating Competitive Advantage with In-Store Digital Signage”, the half hour speech at 3:00 P.M. is designed to point attendees in the best direction regarding the use of in-store digital signage.

Armstrong will be joined by Bernie Shimkovitz, president of Alliance Financing, in order to demonstrate various business models and how to avoid the traditional up-front capital expenditure (CapEx) outlay for a network.

“This is an excellent platform to convey some of the knowledge we have amassed at EnQii about digital signage,” Armstrong said. “I’ll be showing how to drive increases in core metrics such as conversions and sales uplifts, as well as putting teeth into cross-channel merchandising. And both myself and Bernie Shimkovitz with be talking about the effectiveness of digital merchandising when applied to financing options.”

Enqii was recently rated #1 of the Top Ten Digital Signage Vendors, according to the Daily DOOH.