Now, everything you see on the player stays on the device so you can pull the Internet plug out, and stop worrying if you don’t have a stable Internet connection. Even after restarting the player and with Internet connection not available, content will be still loaded and displayed, so you can sleep well. To fulfill need of offline features you probably also would like to have some way to update content even without Internet connection at all. Of course, that’s also possible! Now, in Studio, you can create, and later download packages with shows, or playlists inside. Those packages can be carried on a usb stick to the player device to change it’s contents. For now you will have to copy it to the player’s installation folder, but automatization is surely on our “todo” list.

As I mentioned, there are some other quite nice features. You can now see that you have tags on all the lists, not just assets. This will help you to manage your shows, playlist, and finnaly, probably most important – devices. You can easily find all the players tagged i.e. with your location description, and quickly assign the same content to all of them with just a mouse click. This is only the first step to the full-featured managing system, like folders or maybe gmail-like labels based on the search system.

Unfortunately, there are some drawbacks of this update. We do not focus on backward-compatibility (we surely will after the final release but now it’s not time to keep old, bad code), it’s time to move on. As a result some of your old shows may look a bit differently, or you can notice some other incompatibilities. If you will experince some strange behaviour please try to redo the whole show from the scratch.

For a dessert, those of you who have a smartphone with an Android operating system can have a look at Studio for mobile at http://android.screenbullet.com. Make sure you have Barcode Scanner from zxing installed in your phone before using ScreenBullet Mobile Studio. Assigning player to your account is now as easy as scanning the Player’s 2D barcode; changing player’s content is just like controlling TV with a remote-control. For now you can assign playlists so you have to prepare one in our Studio.

Enjoy!

OOH is the short for out-of-home advertising. According to Wikipedia, the annual income from this industry reaches 7 billion dollars. In a nutshell, the industry is deals with placing advertising billboards in cities and charging businesses according to the purchased campaign. With the growing popularity of big screens somebody has reached the conclusion that it is worth to call the new branch of the industry Digital-OOH. In my opinion it is too much of a simplification. Using computers for directing what and how should be displayed creates a whole new way of attracting the public’s interest. Besides, static billboards placed in public places influence the potential recipient for a much longer time, and their content is more likely to actually sink into the people’s minds. In case of advertising clips the viewing time must be much longer. Thus, placing huge LED screens at the crossroads in cities or next to highways is not the right strategy. More and more voices are against marring the streets with screens that present content which is beyond anyone’s control (here and here). In my opinion, the excitement coming from the possibility of placing an advertisement in the city center will soon pass, or become strongly limited. This means that calling the industry Digital-OOH will no longer be accurate. Maybe the board of OVAB (Out-of-home Video Advertising Bureau), the main organizer of the Amsterdam conference, had reached the same conclusion changing the name to DPAA (Digital Place-based Advertising Association) just one month after the ISE 2010. The fact that the decision in no way pushes the industry into a state of prosperity is very well addressed in the blogosphere (here, here and here).

Pooh + DOOH = PuDuS

Mobile phones are another direction willingly followed by gold diggers in the industry (which until today bears the unfortunate tag DOOH). According to Gartner’s report concluding the sales of mobile phones in Q4 of 2009, the total number of devices sold was 1.211 billion. The figure is really impressive. It is not hard to see why many treat advertising on mobile phone as a great source of income. The question is whether this is something that should remain within the interest of DOOH. Not necessarily. There are too many big players on the market (i.e. Google, Microsoft, et al.) who keep their eye on the ball. Besides, despite very quick technology progress, mobile phones are still mainly used for conversations or e-mailing. The percentage of users operating the advanced features is still rather small. The fact that 17 % of mobile phones in the USA are Smartphones does not necessarily reflect the situation on the global market, especially in countries such as Brazil, Russia, or India (it is difficult for me to include China here ). What is more, we shouldn’t ignore the latest events connected with releasing the iPad by Apple. It is hard resist the feeling that Apple has recognized the limits of a mobile phone and is launching a hybrid of a phone and a computer. In this situation I am beginning to wonder if at the next DOOH conference I’m going to hear that tablets are the future of this industry…

While reading the above statements it hard not to ask the question: if everything is so messy and undefined, nobody really knows what to do then why bother? It seems that I have just joined the collective search for the “goldmine”.

The ScreenBullet Team in Search of the Goldmine.

After starting our works we began to understand that we were designing a software solution commonly known as digital signage. It was easy to notice that there already was a large number of such solutions on the market. However, the one detail that decided about continuing the project was the fact that our application was supposed to function in a SaaS model. A quick (Google) analysis of similar solutions led to the conclusion that there wasn’t much potential competition. In addition, the advanced technologies that we applied enabled creating a solution whose functionality and ease of operating were well ahead of the competition.

Having made the decision of continuing the works, we also agreed not to watch the competition in any way. We did not want to be guided by already existing solutions. We wanted to create something ideally fitting our customers’ needs. Since then we successfully ignored all information, suggestions, or ideas that could in any way influence the direction of our system’s development.

Since we are planning to launch our system at the end of March 2010 and we are preparing for an advertising campaign, it has become necessary to learn about the current trends. Attending the DOOH conference which was a part of the ISE 2010 fair in Amsterdam was an attempt at learning what the experts, or so called “people from the DOOH field”, thought about such solutions.

In my next entries I will try to show how our solution meets the current trends and even takes a step ahead.

If you would like to be invited to our beta program please visit www.ScreenBullet.com and sign-up for an invitation.