Digital Signage Articles

If you’re starting a business in the digital signage industry and are in the process of writing a business plan there are several areas that I would focus when writing your business plan and these are listed below:

1. CLEARLY STATE THE ROI - Your investors and the client will want to know what their ROI is. Based on the fact that you’re new to digital signage you may not have these figures available. There are several websites on the internet which may provide you with these numbers but my recommendation would be to engage the client to run a trial (for a fee or for free). During this trial you can use various measurement tools or devices to obtain your data. For example, the client may want to know how many people looked at the screen and purchased the product displayed. In this case you can use an audience measurement tool which tracks the number of faces that looked at the screen. One great thing about these tools is that it can help you also track demographic information. You can then correlate this information with the digital signage player logs and the retail management system logs.

In the past, we have been asked whether installing digital signage increases the number of customers walking into the store. The only way to determine this is to compare and track how many people walked into the store before installing digital signage and after. Some stores may already have some measurements tools to track this eg. people counter (uses infrared light to determine how many people entered the store) if they don’t then it may be worthwhile to install one.

2. NEED MONEY TO START YOUR BUSINESS – If your investors decide not to proceed with supporting you financially and your client is still keen to go ahead with your digital signage solution then you may want to consider leasing the equipment through a finance company. Have a read of this article about leasing vs purchasing outright vs rental:

http://www.digitalsignageblog.com/2008/07/20/digital-signage-purchasing-outright-vs-leased-vs- rental/

3. SWOT – All business plans should include the SWOT analysis i.e. clearly analyse your business Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and clearly understand where your business may stand in the current market condition. Keep in mind who your current competitors are and how difficult it might be to enter the market. Also keep in mind that a number of existing businesses who are in the video/audio industry are merging into the digital signage industry. These companies will already have existing clients so it will be difficult to win these clients if you don’t have the relevant experience or portfolio.

4. SCALABLE SOLUTION - if you don’t manufacture your own equipment then you will need to clearly state in your business plan what services or equipment you will be proviing. You will need to look for a digital signage solution that is scalable, affordable (also one that will make you a profit) and one that reduces administration costs. A centrally managed solution is the perfect choice for your clients needs.

Browse through our Digital Signage Portal Products pages to get more information about what are some of the products available in the market.

5. GET HELP IF YOU NEED IT – Partner with high profile digital signage manufacturers who can guide you and assist you with winning the projects. Do this even before you execute your business plan. Getting your foot in the door is always hard and working with an existing and experienced business will provide you with that extra support.

6. ROI FIGURES – In the ROI include potential advertising revenues figures from manufacturers. In your business plan, you will obviously do your maths and provide figures and number of how much your business will be earning, even if it’s making a loss in the first couple of year. Sometimes you may have to clearly draw the line and decide when it’s best to pull out from the business but generally, the first 5 years is always the toughest and most businesses fail in this period.

7. UNIQUE – are you providing anything unique in the current digital signage industry? If you are, then your business plan should clearly revolve around what additional benefits your product/solution/service will bring to the industry. Otherwise, the competition will be quite rough with existing established businesses.

Hopefully these points helped you in putting together your business plan.

Do you have anything further to add to this list?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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Post tags: business plan, equipment, manufacture, portfolio, services, solution, swot

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The digital signage portal is a forum for promoting and growing YOUR business, with the aim to lift the level of awareness of your business and digital signage.

We are excited to announce additional features to the digital signage portal website to make your experience and member profile more personalised. The whole intention for establishing the digital signage portal was to provide a means for businesses to connect with one another and also with potential customers but more importantly we wanted to centralise the digital signage community and information in one single location – that’s when the digital signage portal was born.

Now, here is a short list of some of the features we have recently added:

1. Biz Wall – you are now able to write messages on another member’s wall. Basically this can be used to share information with each other, keep each other updated and to improve communication.

2. myBlog – we have added the facility for registered members to create their own blog entries and share this with the rest of the digital signage community. We understand that most of you don’t have a business blog or don’t have either the technical expertise or knowledge to set one up. So we’ve done most of the hard work for you. All you have to do now is just post your entries.

3. myComments – you are now able to comment on articles and other peoples blog posts.

4. Member List – this is the list of all the current members registered on the portal and its something we forgot to originally include when we first launched the website. Think of this as a large contact list so you can get in touch with other registered members.

5. Twitter Status – for those of you that have a twitter account then you now have the option to display your twitter status on your profile.

6. myNoticeboard – yes this is your own noticeboard that you can use to add messages to your profile. You can use it to tell others what you’re doing…basically use it as a noticeboard.

7. More features – we’ve added so many other features which may take too long to list so why not log in to the digital signage portal and see it for yourself. We will soon be adding a dedicated page and video to capture all these features so keep an eye out for this.

For those of you who haven’t visited the website in a while, I highly recommend you to log back in and pay a visit and don’t forget to add your business logo to your profile in order to expose your business further – as you are already aware branding is very important.If you need help with this visit our F.A.Q section.

We always love to hear your feedback so let us know what you think or what you would like to see on the digital signage portal.

Have you read the latest digital signage portal newsletters? Click here to view the latest newsletters.

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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Post tags: articles, blog, comments, community, members, newsletter, noticeboard, portal, wall

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We came across an interesting article about an outdoor LCDs that  is able to cope in different weather conditions. 

Screen NT has installed a 42in outdoor LCD display to cope with the snow and ice of an Austrian winter. The display not only has to deal with the extreme Austrian winter but the hot temperatures in the summer as well.

The LCD display is installed at the Hotel Tirolerhof in the town of Zell am Ziller, in the Tirol region of the Austrian Alps.

Transreflective screen harnessess the sun to increase the brightness f the picture while a filter system protects the liquid crystals from the sun’s IR and UV rays.  The unit also features an automatic air-conditioning system to ensure safe operating temperatures are maintainined throughout the year.

Article and Image Source: avinteractive.com.uk

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Post tags: austria, av interactive, lcd, outdoor, weather

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Just the other day one of my tooth fillings suddenly broke and being annoyed at having a hole in my tooth I immediately visited the local dentist. I was quite surprised that quite a number of Dentists are not using digital signage in their theaters or offices – let me explain how digital signage can be used in this industry.

The majority of us will at least once a year visit the dentist, so you all should know what I’m referring to when I use the term “the Dentist chair” – yes that comfortable chair that has a little basin on the side, an extendable arm with a light, and is able to arch all the way back so that the person sitting on it ends up staring at the ceiling (see the top image). If you’re thinking in the right frame of mind you may have just encountered a “light bulb” moment – yes… that’s the spot for digital signage. We talked about location, location, location in one of our previous posts and I believe that’s the perfect location for digital signage.

How long do we generally sit on the Dentist chair, 10 minutes? 30 minutes? Well, my visit lasted 45 minutes starting at a blank ceiling and I must honestly say it was very boring.   If there was a digital signage solution installed it can be used for quite a number of purposes and these are:

1.      Depending on the age group, the dentist can offer to show a movie, music, a kid’s show to entertain the patient. Rather than having a screaming child, showing one of their favourite shows will help them to calm down making the experience for both the dentist and the patient more comfortable.

2.      You may be able to potentially connect headphones to the digital signage solution and let the patient listen to calm music or the audio coming from the video. This is better than listening to all the drilling and crunching noises

3.      Educational information – use it to display educational information/videos on teeth maintenance and oral care

4.      For those who are intrigued at watching the dentist working inside your mouth, why not have a small camera attached to the drill bit thingy and show the video capture on the screen

5.      Advertising – basically you can make some passive income from displaying advertisements. Colgate, OralB and other toothbrush/paste manufacturers would definitely jump on board if there was a network of screens

6.      Motivational quotes – I recently watched a movie and in one scene the dentist had two posters stuck on the ceiling. If I remember correctly the quotes where:

Hang in there baby!!!

“Only a life lived for others is worth living.” – quoted from Albert Einstein

Wouldn’t it be great if the dentist a had digital signage solution to display a number of animated motivational quotes rather than a static poster.

So there you go, that’s how we would have used digital signage in this location. I do hope that the next time I visit the dentist I would be able to sit on that chair and maybe watch a movie or see something interesting or educational.

How have you seen digital signage implemented at the dentist?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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Post tags: albert einstein, colgate, dentist, dentist chair, drilling, movies, oralb, posters, sound, toothbrush, video

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We’ve all heard the saying “content is king” and the success of any digital signage business is dependent on what content is  displayed. In this particular post we won’t go into too much detail on how important content is… we all know that without content, a digital signage network becomes useless – not many people like watching a blank screen.  However, I decided to raise the question whether businesses have a system in place for backing up their content from their digital signage players.  Would you be able to reproduce the same content from scratch if you didn’t have a copy of the content somewhere?

I guess this is something businesses operating a digital signage network should think about. In the past, experiencing a hard-drive failure can be quite devasting and often quite expensive if you count the number of hours it would take to reproduce the same content. From the top of my head, I could only come up with several ways of backing up the content and these are:

1. Centralise and store the content onto a dedicated server with RAID configuration harddrives. In addition to this, have the files scheduled to be copied to an external storage such as a USB external HHD.
2. If you cannot afford a dedicated server, have the harddrives on the digital signage player set up in a RAID configuration – most operating systems are able to have this function but it will mean have at least two physical hard drives. Otherwise you could always copy the files onto an external medium (CD, DVD, Memory card, HHD, etc).
3. Have files distributed across multiple servers or across an external site (e.g. data center)

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

For those techies out there, what is the best backup strategy?

Feel free to submit your answer as a comment.

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Post tags: cd, content, dvd, hard disk, hard drive, king, medium, memory card, operating system

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