Why Digital Signage now?
People around me know that I have been talking about this 'Digital Signage' stuff all the time since last year. OK, we all know it's the AV industry's next big thing. But so what? All the major players are already in the field. Why Goro's so excited? What he with a small start-up company can do for this market?
Well, I am not planning to go into the major store-TV style digital signage market which requires server-client type of high-end content distribution system. That's nice exciting new technology, but not for me. At least not for now. It would be nice if the DS client can become little more intelligent to run web applications, so that you can distribute contents using AJAX technology, more like web2.0 style. But we don't have power to do that all by ourselves, yet.
What I am looking at right now is much smaller business applications like restaurants, medical offices and trade show booth.
By scaling down the system, those small businesses can receive the benefit from digital signage displays as well.
Instead of setting up an expensive content distribution system, they can use RSS feeds from a web log. Instead of pushing the content to the DS display using satellite feeds, you can pull contents in XML format from the internet. This makes content management easier, too. All you have to do is just update your weblog, and ta-da-, your desital signage updated!
Another potential I see in the "Digital Signage for Small Business" is that it can become AdSense for the real world.
Imagine a small flat panel display in your local restaurant showing ads of car dealer, cable company, softdrink, car insurance or Viagra (oops!). Just like the side bar of your web log, you have an ad space in your restaurant that major sponsors love to put their ads on.