Sedao Digital Signage

Tip number 2 - Clocks are important in Digital Signage, so don’t make them BORING!!!

2011-10-13T04:26:00.000-07:00

A good digital signage display needs to be both informative and useful. The information part is normally very easy to achieve but often people forget to include anything that is useful and relevant to all viewers.

There are several ways that you can easily include useful information on to your screen without it using up to much space and the easiest by far is to include a simple flash clock.

While it is important to ensure that you flash clock is readable for all users, this does not mean that it has to be dull. Dull clocks, like information are often ignored or overlooked.

If Sedao Digital Signage has a unique license that allows our customers to use a wide range of flash clocks designed by top digital artist Adam Dorman ( www.adamdoorman.co.uk), free of charge with any Sedao Digital Signage system. You can view a range of these clocks at www.sedao.co.uk/flashclocks

you don’t find a clock to suite your needs then Sedao QuickChange product range even includes a temple for creating your own branded clocks as well as offering a range of text based clocks that include a date in a variety of formats.

Don’t be fooled by Digital Signage

2011-10-05T08:15:00.000-07:00

It’s easy to make a costly mistake in Digital Signage. Expert David Oades explains what to look for and what to avoid when setting up a simple digital signage solution.

To most users Digital Signage (DS) is a bewildering array of products and services which appear to do the same thing yet vary massively in cost from hundreds of pounds to hundreds of thousands. Resellers promote different products as if they are all interchangeable, irrespective of whether you want signage for railway timetables, school notice boards, corporate TV channels or a thousand screen advertising network.

This stems from the industry wide use of the generic term’ Digital Signage’ for everything from a single roll-out of ten thousand screens to ten thousand different installations of a single screen. This gives rise to a level of confusion equivalent to having no words for car, plane, train, bicycle or boat but referring to all of these as transport.

Add manufacturers’ promoting products which are digital signage ‘planes’ to customers who need ‘cars’ and vice versa, there is no wonder everyone is confused.

Over the next few weeks David will be answer some of the commonly asked questions about Digital Signage so watch this space.

Tip number 1 - 20 easy ways to improve digital signage

2011-09-28T03:41:00.000-07:00

Most people who purchase digital signage will have had no creative training and will often only have a logo, a few photos and very little time to get a good looking screen up and running.

What you find tends to happen is most companies overlook the issue of ‘where does the content come from’ leaving customers to either struggle with pre-created screen layouts or to hire a costly designer which will tend to leave them turning back to familiar products to create there layouts from PowerPoint which are often not designed for digital signage.

With most systems it should be really easy to create a good looking screen with very little effort. All you should need is a flexible digital signage system, a pretty background graphic and some photos.

The only item in this list that most customers will not automatically have is a pretty background graphic to overlay there content on, this is where most systems fall down.

If you have a designer branded background you can easily, put TV in one zone, a photo slide show in another then add an RSS feed to finish (http://www.sedaolive.com/). You’ll have good looking digital signage created in minutes with messages that can be updated in seconds from anywhere in the world.

Sedao's BackgroundMaker software is designed to allow you to quickly create a designer quality background in just a few steps from a wide ranging selection of over 101 pre designed templates covering almost any industry sector that can be tailored in seconds using a logo, a few photos and your companies colours. for more information on BackgroundMaker please visit - http://www.sedao.co.uk/BackgroundMaker/index.htm

Sedao also offer a wide range of design services from creating full screen ImageFlyer layouts to single background images, if you'd like quote then please contact info@sedao.co.uk

Don’t be fooled by Digital Signage - Plane, train or Automobile?

2011-09-26T03:25:00.000-07:00

What is a digital signage ‘car’? Signage that is a multi-zoned information channel, mixing welcome message or in-house promotions with Live TV, movies etc. Signage for people who have tried using (or at least considered using) PowerPoint, but want something that’s easier to update, is more dynamic and doesn’t tie up a staff member collating everyone’s slides. Installations to improve communications whilst adding a bit of wow factor.

You want possibly a dozen screens that look great, your receptionist can update them in seconds and your IT person can do the rest in ten minutes. Digital Signage that is never going to expand into a global advertising channel.

What is a digital signage ‘plane or train’? Anything geared towards features needed for hundred or thousand screen roll-outs, usually driven by Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.

If you don’t want to accidentally buy a plane avoid systems that:

Have any on-going charges
Need plug-in modules to achieve basic functionality.
Have an advertising audit trail
Provide reference sites that are thousand screen installations
Divide into creation, deployment and play-out elements, with all three being needed to create a simple photo slide show.
Need a mobile phone network to update content

Hardware Player or Software Solution?

2010-02-16T08:34:00.000-08:00

This is entirely down to budget. You can’t beat having a built for purpose digital signage player but, if you have a limited budget, you can buy a license to put digital signage multi-zoning software on every PC in a school for less than the price of single Linux player.

Sedao offer digital signage software and digital signage hardware solutions to suit every budget, for more information on the Sedao digital signage product range please visit http://www.sedao.co.uk/

Why is content deployment so expensive?

2010-02-02T03:06:00.000-08:00

It should be free (or a few hundred pounds at the most) as content deployment is just copying files between computers. In Windows systems it can be drag and drop, for Linux and dedicated hardware it often uses a mechanism called FTP (file transfer protocol).

Ask your IT manager for advice as automatically copying files can be achieved using PC file backup utilities you may already own. If you can’t keep it in-house Sedao’s Content Manager is independent of manufacturer and can deliver content to most signage systems including Samsung, Sedao, Onelan, Web sites and FTP based hardware.

For more information on how Sedao can help cut the cost of your content deployment please visit http://www.sedao.co.uk/ContentManager/index.htm