Macintosh Based Signage Solution
Mark Solomon, Operations Manager at Design1080 (a division of Future Solutions UK Ltd.) is perhaps a bit over excited about this but it caught our eye as it is a Macintosh based signage solution.
It’s actually not that unique as a number of the free software signage solutions around at the moment also run on OSX (and we think even Sony’s Zirius solution has a Macintosh client).
Anyway, the Macintosh-based digital signage solution is called ~sedna presenter – the tilde (~) is a grapheme with several uses (wikipedia tells us that the name of the character comes from Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning a title or superscription) AND in this example is part of the product name – presumably though not pronounced ’tilde sedna presenter’ (but hey who the hell knows).
There were a number of features listed in the PDF but the most notable to us was a feature coming in January that allows one to dynamically drive ~sedna presenter schedules on the fly from an iPhone or an iPod touch (something that we figure wouldn’t be too difficult but is quite cool).
~sedna we are told is related to a German audio-visual staging and production company called Q-Bus but apart from that details were a bit sketchy.
February 6th, 2009 at 19:07 @838
I attended Macworld Expo where I visited sedna’s booth and even had a chance to talk to two of their software developers. Apart from the nice marketing surface (their booth looked really cool!) I think these guys are really cool and apparently have a very solid engineering background from what I can tell. I asked them some unpleasant questions and their responses were very nice plus they were very open about what their software can do and can’t.
Anyway, they sent me a demo version and must admit that it really rocks! What I think is ultimately great is the fact that the player preloads the media that is scheduled so you don’t get the flashes between different items in playlist as with other digital signage software products out there! Hey, this thing really does seamless loops!
They also said that the iPhone/iPod touch app for controlling the players will be out this month. This appears to be something like a gadget but I am sure there will be uses for this in retail and trade shows.