Company Information

System Planning Corporation (SPC)’s success supporting U.S. defense initiatives is rooted in its commitment to innovative solutions through advanced technology development. The defense, homeland security and domestic preparedness challenges facing the nation have never been more complex, and SPC continues to lead the way in this rapidly changing frontier.

Project Summary

Right before a big open house was to occur at SPC, the digital display system they had invested in failed them. SPC’s Rich Griffin, network administrator, tells the story:

“System Planning Corporation provides research and development, systems engineering and technology support services to a wide variety of government and commercial clients. We had been using static signage to provide our conference customers with information on where to find the conference room locations for their meetings, but the building owner had become unhappy with our signs being placed all over the elevator lobbies.

So we were looking for a very modest digital sign alternative: dual elevator lobby monitors on three separate floors here at our corporate headquarters, as well as larger monitors in reception areas on the same three floors. As for content, our elevator lobby monitors would be used for corporate PR, new and existing employee spotlights, conferencing schedules for our internal users, as well as conference services we provide for external users, the occasional in-house produced video and cable TV.

When we first discovered Rise Display, we were essentially trying to find an acceptable digital display solution for a failed implementation provided by a previous vendor. We had contracted with a local digital signage provider, but after all the paperwork had been signed, it was determined that their solution would be wholly inadequate for our purposes.

There was a great deal of urgency, because the fact that the previous vendor’s signage product was completely unacceptable forced us to scramble to find another vendor who could meet our now compressed deadline. Basically, we needed to have our digital signage up and running in time for our Open House — which included a walk-through by our CEO to show off our newly remodeled corporate headquarters — that was scheduled quite soon.

I did some quick research and determined that Rise’s internet-based solution would meet our needs and that Rise could implement it within a very tight deadline that we were working under. After trying the Rise Display Network demo before we decided to purchase it, I felt confident that it would be an easily manageable solution.

We liked that it’s internet-based. We felt the combination of the Rise-created templates with our own in-house content, as well as the web-based management approach, was the easiest solution for us.
So we had Rise do the full installation of all monitors and monitor mounts, including three 42” monitors we had purchased from another vendor. They got it all done in time for our Open House. Rise was able to provide us with an attractive web-based solution with low overhead under a very tight deadline.

SPC’s managers and employees alike have been very pleased with the look of our Rise digital signage. The ability to integrate the subscription features, such as the weather, sports, news or stocks, has been a hit. And the overall look of our current templates is exactly what was envisioned when a digital signage solution was first proposed here at SPC.”

Digital Signage Software, LCD Displays Digital Signage Installation

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!

Digital Signage Software, Support

Customer Overview

Founded in 1842, Villanova University is a coeducational Roman Catholic institution that welcomes students of all faiths. Villanova University is the oldest and largest Catholic university in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, with more than 6,300 undergraduates enrolled in a wide variety of degree programs. For more than a decade, Villanova University has been ranked #1 by US News and World Report in the Best Universities-Master’s category in the northern region.

With a reputation for high-tech leadership that earned it PC Magazine and Princeton Review’s recognition one of the top 20 “Most Wired Colleges in the Nation,” Villanova University was an early adopter of digital signage, having installed its first LCD display in the business school’s applied finance lab several years ago.

Project Summary

Now, as more and more schools are equipping their own trading labs with digital signage, Villanova is busy creating a networked, campus-wide information system. With 17 large screens already installed on campus, and approximately another 35 planned, Villanova’s digital signage network is expanding rapidly, a testament to its popularity on campus.

“We wanted to introduce a better method for disseminating information throughout the University,” explained Michael Hoffberg, Villanova’s associate director of media technologies. “We were looking for an elegant and affordable way to convey up-to-date information — events, special activities, schedules, emergency notifications and so on — to students, staff and faculty in an attractive, timely, and eye-catching manner.”

The Final Result

Rise’s Display Wire gives University administrators complete control over the composition and timing of all content. Distributing information via digital signage enables the University to limit paper postings and is intended to cut down on the volume of emails sent to the Villanova community. In addition to displaying information about campus events, schedules, and emergency notifications, Villanova also sells advertising to local merchants that accept the school’s Wildcard debit card.

All members of the Villanova community use the Wildcard identification card to enter and check out books from the library and use campus resources such as vending machines, dorm laundry facilities and the bookstore. The Wildcard can also be used as a debit card that is accepted at a growing number of off-campus vendors including retail stores, restaurants, and fast-food chains. The Wildcard office is now selling advertising to local merchants that accept the Wildcard.’

“In each of the buildings that we’ve equipped with Rise engines and software, our clients now have a method for displaying important, current information critical to the students, faculty and/or staff,” said Mr. Hoffberg. “Based upon their feedback, this method of distributing information via digital signage far exceeds previous use of paper postings. It has also cut down on the barrage of emails that’s sent each day to the Villanova community.

“The big ‘payoff’,” he continued, “is the effective dissemination of information. It’s an effective, low- maintenance system that did not impact heavily on our limited staffing resources. Many of the current signage users have expressed interest in adding more monitors to their systems.”

Digital Signage Software, LCD Displays, Media Players

First off, boy can Google throw a conference. To promote Android and their latest release everyone (5,000 people) at the conference received two phones! Not to mention your usual t-shirt, pens and socks and did I mention they fed us – breakfast, lunch and dinner – unbelievable. Yes, you did read that right, I am now the owner of a pair of Google branded socks. I still don’t get that one.

Socks aside, what did I learn? So much my brain hurts and what follows is a slightly technical and very condensed summary which assumes you, the reader, knows digital signage, Google technology and where we’re going with marrying the two. And as always, if your missing something don’t hesitate to ask. Here goes:

Open sourced and extensible software provides for the fastest and greatest innovation possible. We have done the right thing in our next release by providing both a platform that is completely accessible through API’s and the open sourcing of our front end user interface and our digital signage player. Scary for the typical “create proprietary something and protect the crap out of it business dude” but it is time to park the brutally slow old ways and leverage the crowd for rapid innovation.

Gadgets are the future of content. Create once, embed anywhere and sell everywhere. And they are becoming more and more contextually aware.

Create the platform for large format displays running Mac, Linux or Windows Players then adopt Android to take it to mobile devices, TV (Google TV!) and large format displays – marry the sign post with the personal display and rather than standing separate from TV adopt and use it as a distribution medium.

Use Google advertising and the personal display (mobile advertising) to close the loop on “eyeball” verification for digital signage to increase potential advertising reach and therefore revenue. Don’t build advertising media asset and distribution management applications – use the web advertising model and incorporate web tools to provide the means to enable digital signage advertising management on our network.

You can build global digital signage management applications that can scale and be highly responsive. Our new benchmark – all user interactions must happen in 100ms or less – gulp – and the tool to make it happen – SpeedTracer (from Google) is awesome for finding every little bottleneck in code on the client side and now(!) on the server side as well.

Google web tool kit just got even better. We have incredible tools for creating a browser app that both meets the expectations of a typical desktop app and because of connectivity – available everywhere – exceed the desktop in every way.

Google Wave has gone to labs and it now works with enterprise Google accounts (which we have) – no more need for invitations – and it will support printing within the next month or two. We are going to move all of our scrums, collaboration and journals from email, docs and sites to Wave. Should be really interesting to see where this goes and what it does for productivity.

The future is HTML5 and it is here now. Build for HTML5, forget legacy browsers, they are going the way of the dinosaur and there is no point dumbing down what we do for them, from here on in we are aiming at the smartest browser possible.

HTML5 web app caching can and does solve all online / offline continuity issues. Chromium (our Player) can provide a reliable viewer for displays that have lousy internet connections.

Players that manage their updates by polling their servers have far too much overhead to maintain near real-time updates and monitoring. Real-time push to the browser is here and it is the way to go.

Google storage has arrived and it is designed for heavy data asset upload, storage, and download on a global basis and it can provide the repository for media asset management for digital signage on a scalable and predictive cost model.

The Google Apps marketplace is working and it does provide distribution opportunities for developers that they have never seen before. And, it is creating an expanding source of highly capable resellers for us.

Bottom line, we are on the right track, our next rev digital signage management application can and does leverage all of the above, and we can deliver it for far less than what our current app costs.

Thank you Google! I can’t wait for next years IO!

Digital Signage Software

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.

Digital Signage Software, Software, Support

Looking for video content for your digital signage? Interesting product from nowmov. As their tagline says “What’s the world watching now?”. Their product provides an endless stream of YouTube videos in a very clean and simple site that analyzes the Twitter public timeline to look for commonly shared YouTube links. Could be a very interesting product for digital signage content – TV replacement anyone? And, if you could take it one step further to make the timeline location aware so that you could narrow the interests even further that would be cool. For example I’m in Toronto, show me all videos that Toronto is following now, or another twist, use any element of the Twitter search API to narrow my interests or jump on the Facebook social graph bandwagon and see what the world is “liking” right now.

According to a YouTube video, Socialnomics, just posted 2 days ago, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and in the time it takes to watch their video (4 minutes and 25 seconds) over 100 hours of video will be uploaded. Doesn’t seem like there will be any shortage of great content to keep us entertained and if that content is crowd sourced what a great way to keep what is relevant, right now, and I mean right, right, right, now, on your screens to entertain your audience. To put it all in perspective, video content should be crowd sourced in real-time, using social media to direct it, and nothing better to put that in perspective than the YouTube video on just that:

Digital Signage Software

Customer Overview

Established in 1967, the University of Toronto Mississauga provides undergraduate and graduate studies and is the second largest division of the University of Toronto, Canada’s largest university. The university is set upon a park-like campus on the Credit River, approximately 33 kilometers west of Downtown Toronto.

The Hazel McCallion Academic Learning Centre, UTM’s library, is a central place for the students to meet and study. Tucked inside this library is the Li Koon Chun Finance Learning Centre, a new, state-of-the-art facility. Programming is provided on a variety of topics related to the stock markets and financial literacy for students, faculty, and staff of UTM. The Centre offers 32 computer stations and four Bloomberg terminals for student use and training purposes. In addition, the Centre is used as a unique classroom for students in the department of management.

Project Summary

“There are a couple of finance courses and an international business course held in the Centre,” explains Michael Meth, the Centre’s director. “The management program is one of our biggest supporters, but because of our location in the library, we reach a lot of people on our campus.”

Because of this reach, it was important to the University that the Centre offered cutting-edge communication solutions. That’s where Rise Display comes in.

“The service level, the pricing, and the fact that our needs were met were the factors in choosing Rise,” says Mr. Meth. “We were told that we were Canada’s first eight-color stock ticker. That was a neat thing that Rise got to innovate with us.”

The Rise Solution

The University of Toronto Mississauga had already selected an AV integration partner to provide the Sharp LCD screens for the room, and asked Rise to help define the rest of the digital signage solution along with the ticker. Rise worked closely with IT to build a media player that would support running a 2×1 video wall plus a separate single LCD screen from a server room nearly 1000 feet away. After the media player, video distribution system and LED ticker hardware components were defined, the creative staff went to work designing the content to give a broad overview of the markets worldwide.

The Final Result

The LED ticker, and all three LCDs, were installed and running for the Fall 2008 ribbon-cutting to greet the room’s donor and the media. A wall of windows lets library patrons see the technology from all angles. “The digital signage lets us push through market news, North American Exchange stock quotes and index data, and a live video feed from the Business News Network,” Mr. Meth says.

Mr. Meth has also found an effective way of utilizing the ticker at night, when the stock market is closed but the library is still open.

“We keep the closing prices running, but we also start running sports scores,” he says.

“I think people are pretty impressed by the digital signage,” says Mr. Meth. “People will often stand by the window and watch what’s going on the ticker and displays. Overall, they’ve been very favorably received.”

Digital Signage Software, Live Data

One more piece to add to your digital signage “mashup” brought to you by SongVote and as reported by Mashable here.
I can imagine a venue – a work place, campus and just about any place that people gather that plays music either in the foreground as the main attraction or in the background as ambient entertainment. Now, let the people who are in the venue see what’s on, vote for the next song in the queue or add a song to be voted upon, all from your mobile phone, all displayed on your signpost – your digital signage!

Digital Signage Software

Now this is very cool use of an interactive environment to teach us something.

Digital Signage Software, Interactive Touch Screens

Interesting article in Mashable on Why Schools are Turning to Google Apps. One of the largest growth areas for digital signage is education, and, if education is moving to adopt overwhelmingly Google then this is great news for our next version of our digital management web service, which, if you didn’t already know, we built it on top of the Google App engine.

The adoption of our new solution by an institution that has already moved to Google will be incredibly simple. Fortuitous!

Digital Signage Software