What is digital signage? Well it is the use of new technologies to market products or services to existing and new customers; these are broken down in to the following categories.

• Location advertising - to up sell product lines
• Advertising by media companies to local stores or service providers
• Enhance your customers experience – displays in restaurant waiting areas to reduce the perceived waiting time

Now to maximise any investment in digital signage, you need to have in place the digital network infrastructure. These normally consist of Internet access, a media player, distribution network to the electronic displays and some way to manage the network. So let us take each component and look at them a little deeper.

Internet access – this can be either hard wired or wireless. A wired connection normally goes through cable or a DSL modem with the wireless connection going through a mobile broadband modem or satellite connection. To give an example of these networks, mobile connections are used for updates on public transport such as buses and trains.

Media players – what are these? Well, media players are computers that play the content via the software installed on them. The content can be installed by three methods, USB memory stick, wired/wireless connection or by uploading from a DVD inserted into the computer. Content is then distributed to the chain of networked displays using a wired connection, using structured cabling such as Category 5 data cabling, or if using a wireless connection wireless adapters are used with the computer.

Distribution network – this is group of locations where the digital signs are to be located, so it could be in restaurants, in a mall or even at gas pumps. They can be local or even in different countries; it totally depends upon what the product is and your budget!

Electronic display – this can be a regular TFT or LCD television, nothing special!

Network Management - the network is then managed from 1 central point, were updates are distributed from, the network is monitored reporting any maintenance issues.

However, there is a more affordable way to distribute content providing, time is not an issue and that is to use DVDs, create the content and then burn the content to discs and then mail them to the locations within the network, this does not require the heavy investment the wired/wireless networks do, but it does have its draw backs.

We specialise in various digital signage solutions from digital posters through to LCD enclosures for outdoor digital signage.

We at Computer Security & Solutions are supporting the Red Nose Appeal this year, by donating £25 per sale for each computer enclosure or PC enclosure sold, throughout the month of March (2009).

The Red Nose Appeals is a way to raise funds for under privileged children in the UK and in Africa, so come on and do your bit…

I came across this picture, if you were around in 1919 (just before prohibition started) and came upon the following poster………

I mean seriously, Would you quit drinking?

There are several ways to kill a computer and just sometimes, we all know a way or two, (don’t we!) However, with more businesses computerising the factory floor, the following concerns need addressing.

Dust.

This must be avoided at all costs, should dust got on the hard drive, this could wipe valuable data or even worse, cause the hard drive to fail, resulting in lost production time. People have tried to covering the computer with plastic, which restricts the air flow and can cause the computer to over heat.

Fluid.

Will computers needing electricity to function, imagine what would happen if water got to the electronic parts…someone would be get a nasty shock. Even worse if coolant form a machine got in it would corrode the contacts of the electronics and reduce the computer to failure.

Anyone of these hazards can render a brand new computer useless in a matter of days, so if you are looking to automate production, you need to look at computer enclosures, they are also called computer garages (why, I don’t know!) and PC enclosure - these are specialised cases, that will accommodate the computer, monitor and keyboard in a sealed and safe environment. Even the air is filtered, preventing dust ingress in to the unit.

This certainly will make the computer’s last much longer and will pay for it’s self in a few months. From the computer enclosure range of products, our new product the LCD enclosure was born, specifically for outdoor digital signage or public information displays. You are able to site outdoor digital signage in a set and forget manner, with remote access to the computer, so you could be the other side of the world and still upload new content to the remote locations in a matter of minutes.

Digital signage is huge, no matter where you are today, you will have seen at least 1 digital sign, promoting a companies product or service.  Now a lot of people are put off digital signage as soon as they discover they have to create content…

I intend on describing the basics of digital signage, to try and explain the black art! For any outdoor digital signage or public access signage you will need the following:

1. An LCD or plasma display, this will depend entirely on your budget, however LCD TV’s in the range of 32″ upwards are coming down in price daily!
2. An LCD enclosure, this is a special protective enclosure that will accommodate the display and offer protection to the weather and potential vandalism, to IP66 and NEMA 4X. Some times plasma TV’s are used and the standard LCD enclosures are also classed as a plasma TV enclosure.
3. Small, form factor PC, this is the computer that will run the media content. As the name says, it’s small, much smaller than a standard computer, allowing it to fit inside the enclosure.
4. Internet access, either via a secure wireless link through the form factor PC or hard wired. The hard wired option is perfect for remote locations, for example if you were based in Fort Myers, Florida and had stores in California, all you would have to do to upload content to the entire digital network would be to dial into the remote computer and upload the new content, ruling out expensive travel to the actual sites or even CD duplication of the content. You could also schedule the upload to be done at a set time when no one was in the store and reboot the system. The wireless option is ideal for 1 or 2 digital signs that are in a close locality, i.e. 2 in a single restaurant, it’s just like connecting to a hot spot, enter your user name and password and your in…
5. Power is needed to feed the display and computer, most areas have power supplies near by.
6. CONTENT CREATION! Well it’s far easier than you think, for example if you are a baker and create some wonderful cakes for weddings and special birthdays, all you have to do is take some good pictures of the finished cakes and have the digital signage near your front door, people who were passing your store front will see the amazing cakes via the digital sign and will be getting your marketing message across.

Now all you need for a simple digital signage solution is to get a display that has an inbuilt memory card reader, most new LCD and plasma TV’s have them now. Then you connect your computer with the images of your product, such as the cakes and drag the images to the memory card, then once complete you insert the card into the display and the images will be displayed on a rotation.

A more cost effective option would be to drag the images to the memory card and then insert the memory card into a digital signage poster, this is a “mini digital sign” around 12″ wide x 24″ long and can be situated in store windows, it does the same job but the entire solution would probably cost the equivalent to the LCD display on it’s own.

For more information on cost effective solutions for outdoor digital signage, LCD enclosures or PC enclosures, just contact us on +44 (0)844 8841899.

We have some unique enquiries recently and the one to top them all is an enclosure for a PC/server that will be installed in the Antarctic…the enclosure will be heated to protect the PC or server from the sub zero temperatures, we just hope a polar bear doesn’t try and hack in!

We have supplied our range of computer enclosure to the military, we have supplied our range of PC enclosure to car manufacturers such as Toyota, Ford, Jaguar, Nissan and Honda. Our LCD enclosures that are used for outdoor digital signage have been supplied to several UK airports as well as ferry terminals providing passenger information.

We have even supplied Intermec - one of the world’s leading manufacturers of industrial printers with out protective printer enclosure. This enclosures provides the ideal environment to protect the printer from dust and fluids that are traditionally on factory production lines.

industrial printer enclosure

Our range of printer enclosures can be seen by visiting our website.

If you would like to discuss your requirements, I am sure we can provide a cost effective solution. Contact us on 0844 8841899.

You may have seen digital signage advertisements on buildings, outside restaurants, at petrol pumps even at swimming pools, if you have a wall that is free, you are possibly missing a sales opportunity to up sell your merchandise or service.

If your business has 100 visitors per day and you capture the attention of 5% of your current customers and you up sell them a product of $5, that’s an extra $7,800 per year extra revenue, for maximising your marketing message.

Many organisations are looking at the new technology to make their marketing budget go further and with the decline in costs of LCD displays and an LCD enclosure, makes the solution an affordable one. You can now get free digital signage software allover the Internet making it easy for any store owner to create their own media content.

We have put many digital signage solutions outside, as soon as you put the standard LCD display into our outdoor LCD enclosure, it offers IP68 protection (NEMA x4) against the weather, this is far more cost effective than buying a waterproof TV! Our outdoor digital signage are one of the most cost effective on the market, with solutions from as little as $500.

If you would like to discuss your requirements, contact us on +44 (0)844 8841899.

We have been looking at different methods of creating media content in the office and we wondered how popular a solution would be if the owner of the digital sign didn’t have to pay expensive software companies to create the media content.

We came up with only 3 real options:

1) To outsource or employ someone who specialises in media creation, so they can create multiple zoned play lists or one full size ad on the display and they then upload the content to the network or individual display.

2) To create your own media content using a free trial, if you can import an image into an email you will be able to create some fantastic media content with this free software, just be sure to mention www.pcenclosures-direct.com. The link for the media content software is http://www.ezevue.com/www/download1.asp

3) The easiest way is to drag and drop content from your computer onto a memory card and then arrange it so that the images or content is refreshed between 3 and 10 seconds. Then plug the memory card into the digital poster and immediately your content is displayed - no need for expensive software developers…

We have tried the 3 solutions and the easiest one by far is option 3, however option 2 gives a more professional appearance without the expense of option 1.

Below is a digital poster, as you can see it can be used any were, only restricted by your imagination.

digital advertising poster

You could use this affordable solution to trial any digital advertising campaign and see the results immediately, before investing in large LCD displays and LCD enclosures for protecting the digital signage solution.

If you would like to discuss your digtial signage requirements, please contact us on +44 (0)844 8841899 or visit our digital signage solutions.

Anyone who uses a pointing device on a factory floor, knows that a pointing device has to be almost bullet proof, to cope with the hazards the factory floor throughs at it. Imagine if water or dust got inside the pointing device, it would be ruined, to you need something that is waterproof and dust proof.

The best solution is a trackball, this is a housing that mounts onto a panel, then the actual ball can be removed for easy cleaning, so that bacteria etc cannot build up. Some units even have the facility to drain the housing from fluids.

If you want to discuss your requirements for trackballs and industrial keyboards, contact us on 0844 8841899.

Computer Security & Solutions has decided that they needed to improve their “green” policy (we can all do our bit), so they have taken the following steps:

• In January 2009 they decided to offer a buy back program were old or damaged units a customer has, Computer Security & Solutions will buy back the old/damaged PC enclosures and recycle it back into it’s original raw material, so that it can be used again.
• In February 09 they chose to look at their road transport and decided that the only way forward is to reduce carbon footprint, so they contacted the only road haulage company that uses electric delivery vehicles, these have a range of 300 miles, so if any customer is based within a 290 miles radius of London or Manchester we can deliver to you using the electric vans at no extra extra cost…this is charged at the same rate as using a traditional diesel fueled vehicle.

This makes our industrial computer enclosures a greener solution - for more details contact Computer Security & Solutions on 0844 8841899.