What are digital and personal signage?

Personal signage is an evolution from digital signage, aimed at extending digital signage and bringing relevant content to mobile devices.

Digital signage is the offering of relevant information through screens with extended information management modules attached to them. These screens are used nowadays in airports, train stations, restaurants, shopping centres, hotels, cinemas, etc. The content shown on these screens varies from advertisements, trailers, and floor plans, to timetables, and room schedules.

Asoreco repurposes this content, and aims to deliver it to handheld devices of the people near the screen, together with a custom made packet of relevant services. Furthermore we allow interaction with the screen, since we are working on integrating our personal signage solution with existing digital signage solutions.

Why would you choose personal signage?

Nowadays more and more people are using smartphones, tablets, and netbooks, allowing them to be connected all the time through mobile internet connections (3G) or Wi-Fi networks. They are also actively looking up information and entertainment on-the go (see article)

Currently there are some issues regarding media usage on smartphones:

• Weak 3G coverage (see link)
• How to effectively repurpose content for smartphones
• High expectations regarding the quality of content
• Problems with delivering high bandwidth content (e.g. video)
• Finally, digital signage is often limited to one-way interaction

Asoreco offers the solution to these issues with its personal service platform:

• It enables fluid high-bandwidth content delivery due to local caching
• The quality of the delivered content is good
• A broad range of mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, netbooks, etc.) are supported
• The platform automatically repurposes video content to the right format for each mobile device
• Content providers only have to upload a video once onto the content management system for it to be available on every mobile device
• The personal service platform allows for interactivity (polls, social media)

How does it work?

A service point comes to life by installing a "narrowcaster". It is a plug-and-play device with local caching that sets up a local WiFi network. The narrowcaster periodically synchronizes with our content management server to check for updates (new services) and to update the viewing logs (which advertisements/polls/services have been viewed by who, when, and where).

The service point can be monitored and configured from any location, by simply surfing to the content management server's back-end interface. In the back-end website service providers can update and add new services within a few minutes. Also advertisers can launch new campaigns with a few mouse clicks, and send them to the service points of their choice.