“With our Beta now being tested by our existing resellers in full force, I am taking part in training sessions to bring everyone up to speed on how the new system works. Recently I was working with Paul Benson Sr. and his team over at Virtual Communication Specialists, and during the training Paul made a fantastic comment that I wanted to share with everyone. He recognized the potential in the new system being entirely HTML based with these words: “Robb, correct me if I am wrong, but with the new system being HTML based, the possibilities are limitless as to what we can put into a presentation, correct?” Paul absolutely hit the nail on the head, and recognized that being HTML driven, it’s hard to imagine anything that you can’t put into your presentation.

I wanted to share Paul’s comment with everyone in the hopes that they feel the same about our new release, and I look forward to seeing the content that the team over at Virtual Communication Specialists come up with!”

The next release of our digital signage solution uses HTML and more importantly HTML5, for Presentation content. No more proprietary file formats for us. But, we also wanted to take it a step further and have the ability to not only create content in HTML but also share it with other Presentations, users and even other web publishing systems – easily. To accomplish this we added full support for an another open source system – Google Gadgets. Which according to Wikipedia are defined as:

Google Gadgets are dynamic web content that can be placed on any page on the web. Gadgets can be games, mini applications, news feeds, maps or any content…

With Google Gadgets anyone who has a free Google account can create and publish them without having to pay for the cost of hosting them like you would with a traditional web page. Other users can add the Gadget to their iGoogle page or altenatively web designers can copy and modify the Gadget and put it on their web site. Gadgets can be hosted directly on the Google directory as well as on the user’s iGoogle home page. Google Gadgets do not need to be published to the public Google directory if the gadget creator doesn’t wish to.

And here is the next best part; you can host your Gadget in the Google cloud and put it on everyone of your displays for absolutely no cost. You don’t need to pay a thing to have that Gadget hosted.

Gadgets can be simple or complex, and anyone can make the simple version. You don’t need to be a programmer, you just need an idea and the Google Gadget Editor, which you can add to your iGoogle Page, preview all your Gadgets there and when you’re ready, save your Gadget to the Google cloud. The best introduction on how to do this that I have found is this one http://www.seoish.com/how-to-make-google-gadgets/. It will take about 20 minutes to go through all 7 steps and by the end of it you will know just about everything that you need to make or manage the development of Gadgets. For the more complex Gadgets, you may want to contract a Professional Gadget Developer, of which there are plenty. Just do a Google search for “Google Gadget Developers” to see what I mean.

To get your Presentations started we are creating what we call Seed Gadgets. These are generic Gadgets that we’re building that anyone can use to add content to their Presentations. The Gadgets have been built with the same Developer API that is available to you and we have released all of them as Open Source under an MIT License on a Google Project here. We want you to take them, use them, modify them, whatever you need to build the amazing content that you want to make. Some of the Gadgets that we have created so far include:

• Single Image and Text Gadget
• Google Presentation Gadget
• RSS Gadget
• Background Gadget
• Google Wave Gadget

• Video Player Gadget
• Veetle IPTV Gadget
• Sliderocket Presentation Gadget
• Picasa Image Slideshow Gadget

And now here is where you come in. I need ideas for more Gadgets. I would like to build and release one or two per month from this point on. Please keep in mind that we don’t want to build niche market specific Gadgets, that is where you, our Operators, come in, but we do want to build and seed an amazing set of core Gadgets. So, what Gadgets would you like me to build? If you have any ideas drop us a note to support@risevision.com.

One question we are always being asked is can PowerPoint slideshows be put into a presentation, and unfortunately they can’t. When discussing if we would support Powerpoint in the next version of the system, we discovered Sliderocket. Sliderocket is an online presentation tool, that in my opinion totally blows Powerpoint out of the water.

Take a look at some of the features of Sliderocket:

• Import existing Powerpoint slideshows into Sliderocket
• Create polls that users can text in their responses to and it updates in real time
• Show quotes from famous or historical people.
• Stock prices that update in real time.
• Twitter feeds based on keywords that update in real time.
• Link to Google Spreadsheets and create graphs from those spreadsheets that update when any data is changed.
• Add Youtube videos directly into the presentation.

You can create a Sliderocket presentation and insert it into your existing RDN presentations using the “Share” link provided, and we are currently building a Gadget for the next release that supports Sliderocket presentations for which the specifications are here.

Recently we made a change to how our News is delivered to our Live Content Elements. Due to this change, there may be some instances where your news may appear to become stale and not update. If this occurs, simply reboot your appliance, or restart the Rise Display Network Service on your Appliance, and everything will begin updating normally. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our Support Team at support@risevision.com.

Thanks!

Check out these new videos about integrating IPTV and Scheduling Content on your displays. Also in the Forum, we have a short video about how to test your internet speed. Let us know what you think!

We are happy to announce that Proof of Play is back up and running. We apologize for any inconvenience that the temporary removal of Proof Of Play has caused and If you have any questions, please contact our support team at support@risevision.com. Thank you!

The system will be undergoing scheduled maintenance and will not be available from 12:30 -1 am CST on the morning of Monday May 17th. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our Support team at support@risevision.com

These videos show a quick overview of some of the things I have been testing for our next release of our digital signage app. Video 1: Key Features, Video 2: Examples, and Video 3: Sneak Preview.

Due to a technical problem our services were unavailable from 1:32 am to  6:20 am this morning. We believe the problem originated with our proof of play system and as such we have had to disable it. The proof of play service is currently being investigated and as soon as we can safely turn it back on we will do so. We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and as always we will keep you posted.

Our next version of our display management software works on Linux, Mac and Windows and if you want to take advantage of the Mac or Linux operating systems you may want to review which software you are using to remotely connect to and control your client’s computers for remote diagnostic purposes. Whatever it is it just might not work on Linux or Mac.

We’ve used and recommend TeamViewer for Linux and Windows, and LogMeIn for Mac and Windows. If anyone has any other suggestions for good remote control tools for one or more of these OS’s we would really like to hear about them.