Something often overlooked in Digital Signage offerings is audio. DS offers a great way to engage and inform customers but sound is something that can follow the customer as they move around the area, be it a shopping mall, on-hold music or a reception area. CampaignManager 2009 includes a new audio-only player (Dappler*) along side the regular Digital Signage client. This means that you can now create your own “Radio Station” with music, information
or ads playing. Using Pooling (see below) you can go as far as creating your own Radio Channel. Pooling allows you to create patterns so that you could (for example) play your company jingle at the top and bottom of each hour and have the intervening slots filled with music and info drawn at random from large “Pools”. This gives the real impression that the customer is listening to an actual live radio station and not just Windows Media Player on “Shuffle”.
Dappler means you can very easily create your own in-store or in-company radio by drag and drop. The songs will never repeat until the Pool is exhausted and will never play in the same order (unless you want them to!). Think of it as “You-FM” in a box!
Been a long time! (New Website, New Branding and New News)
Wow! Has it really been six months? An update is called for. Since the DS Expo in Vegas in Feb, we’ve been quiet (More like Silent -Ed.) on the blog front, but busy as hell.
The expo was a great opportunity to meet with customers, gather feedback and understand
better what their real needs are. Since then, we’ve been working hard on the next
version of our software. This time round we’ve taken the time to get together and
do some serious planning and design reviews, away from the usual rush-to-release pressure
of normal life in a software company. What’s emerging is a hugely improved new platform
which is now slowly taking shape over the partition from where I write this. The team
is thoroughly enthused with the task that’s been set, and our offices are happily
ringing to lively debates between engineering and the rest of the company about just
how stuff will work.
Our new site went live today. It’s taken longer (doesn’t it always?) than we’d hoped,
but the new structure, information and branding is all live now. You’ll notice a distinct
lack of ‘flash’ on the website and that’s intentional. Do you really need to see animated
lightning bolts coming out of a screen in order to get that we sell Digital Signage
Software? We didn’t think so either. We asked the design team (http://www.reactive.com)
to come up with something friendly and different. We liked the results and we hope
you do too.
You’ll notice perhaps that we’ve changed the way we represent our product line up,
with our Audio and Corp comms applications now being given a fully seperate identity.
Be sure to check out Dappler and Zusa!
That’s it for the short update now. I’ve promised the marketing department I’ll do
this at least every two weeks from now on. It’s not that we’ve had nothign to say,
but we’ve been guilty of regarding ourselves as too busy to keep blogging. Mistake!
Watch this space. – Fergal.