Handy AV Switches Allegiance?
Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Handy AV who we most recently wrote about after their Harrods Dior installation had some nice things on their stand at Screen Expo Europe – including our first chance to see an Orion Infinite Plasma screen – basically a large tiled PDP Screen.
In a press release issued just before the show, Handy AV announced that they were to become ONELAN Distributors. We think this signals a change of allegiance – only last year Handy AV were on the Dynamax stand at the SIGN show up at the NEC, Birmingham.
We asked Aubrey Wright, Director at Handy AV how this new deal fitted in with that work last year and he told us “My view on Content Management Systems is not a secret. It is a case of fitting the right product to the clients needs. Dynamax is great for retail implementation where advanced accounting is required to track brand advertising. Onelan produce a viable solution with the NTB3000 and NTB50 players, which provides a scalable solution. Cost wise it also seems to be on a par”.
Also on the stand was some through the glass projection stuff and an interesting interactive 40 inch table running Blackjack, Poker and Roulette software – the table uses projective capacitance technology and contains an integral 40in (or greater) LCD screen, works with gloved or ungloveds is unaffected by moisture, solvents or condensation.
The Orion M-PDP 4220 seamless plasma display was shown in Portrait mode running ONELAN and in Landscape mode running Dynamax PointofViewNG content management system.
It’s worth pointing out that ONELAN almost made our last year’s list of ‘ONES TO WATCH’ in our Top 10 Digital Signage vendors publication.
From http://www.dailydooh.com/archives/720
In alphabetical order: –
* 121View
* MediaTile
* MultiQ
* Ryarc Media Systems
* Wirespring
If you look at the above folks you can come to the same conclusion as us, that ONELAN missed out because they were very much UK only and very, very tied to the Education market.
Although ONELAN’s Net Top Box (NTB) is really just a Hewlett-Packard PC (albeit custom built) they are a big Linux shop and have very good in-house development skills.
David Dalzell, ONELAN’s owner / MD even spoke at a POPAIdigital networking event last year and spoke freely of his hesitation to get into markets other than education. Since then he has got a good sales guy on board who is working the DACH market (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and this deal with Handy AV (who have been doing some innovative stuff with screens recently) we feel is perhaps a foray into Retail.
Whatever Aubrey says we don’t think anyone can “serve two masters” and so at some point when selling to Retail, Handy AV or their customer will have to make a decision. The Retail IT folks we speak to usually insist on Linux. We think that Dynamax have lost a key ally in the UK retail space here and ONELAN have ultimately gained one.
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