Irvine, California and Taipei, Taiwan (February 3, 2014) – IAdea, the global digital signage media appliance and digital signboard maker, gains significant market traction with thousands of its newest digital signage devices sold during just the first few weeks of 2014. A slew of announcements are coming from well-known market leaders including Matrox, Scala, Signagelive, YCD Multimedia, and DISE. The advantage of IAdea’s Android platform will be demonstrated at multiple partner booths throughout the upcoming Integrated Systems Europe and Digital Signage Expo shows.
IAdea’s strong line of digital signage hardware is re-inventing 100,000+ locations, including retail, restaurant, corporate, and education, by dynamically and cost-effectively changing the appearance and experience at the physical space through digital technologies. It offers small, integrated displays with players built-in, as well as HDMI- and VGA-equipped media appliances that can drive video walls of virtually any size. Its latest technology takes advantage of and dives deep into Google’s Android system kernel to tightly fuse its hardware with market-focused solutions from industry-leading partners.
“We focus on making partners shine. Together we deliver to the end-user a truly integrated solution that is simple to manage and cost-effective to deploy.” Says Rex Chen, Executive Vice President of IAdea. “While the Android platform provides the basic layer for our partners to integrate their knowledge and expertise with our hardware, to the end-user we help partners hide the complexities and short-comings of the Android system, as well as adding many improvements to ensure successful project roll-outs.” IAdea’s CEO John Wang will be joining a heated panel discussion titled “Digital Signage Disrupted” at the upcoming Digital Signage Expo where he is expected to talk about new forces shaping our industry.
IAdea’s dedication in developing products using post-PC technologies has gained strong support from market leaders. Recently it has won a large project with partner Matrox to provide a multiple-display solution that is simple to maintain across hundreds of sites in Europe. “Integrators looking for an attractive, low-cost, multi-screen digital signage solution can now combine IAdea’s media players with Matrox TripleHead2Go multi-display adapters,” said Caroline Injoyan, Business Development Manager at Matrox Graphics Inc., a global leader in professional video and graphics solutions. “We are excited about new opportunities that our product compatibility opens up, including a recent design win [with IAdea] for a project involving hundreds of locations.”
An even more impressive project win in Asia opens 2014 for IAdea and its long-term partner Scala, market leader for digital signage management software. Tom Nix, CEO of Scala, shared, “Scala is enthusiastic about working with IAdea to deliver a solution on their innovative and stable Android platform. IAdea and Scala are long time successful partners and have started off 2014 by winning an impressive 7,500-unit project.” The project mixes small and large displays across thousands of locations, utilizing the new dual-display feature of the IAdea signboard to drive a secondary display via HDMI. The conventional Android tablet was initially considered by the solution provider but quickly rejected for its problems in both deployment and maintenance. A combination of IAdea’s media appliances and digital signboards showed clear and decisive advantages for projects of this scale. Its tight integration with Scala’s management software provided a unified solution that is easy to roll-out, robust to maintain and flexible to operate. “We look forward to continued success with such great industry hardware leaders,” Nix concluded.
IAdea made it significantly easier for partners to add advanced digital signage features on top of its products. Where Android falls short, it augments with a content engine based on the open W3C SMIL and HTML5 open standards. Jason Cremins, CEO of Signagelive, another long-time IAdea partner, talked about his decision to take full advantage of the IAdea player engine. “Signagelive provides one of the most comprehensive support for SMIL, which is a mature and leading industry open standard. We choose to support IAdea’s implementation of SMIL on its Android players and signboard for IAdea’s leading market penetration and its ability to provide global service and logistics support, which is key to global-scale project rollouts.” Signagelive and IAdea have worked is close partnership for a number of years and together won several projects serving large networks run by well-known brand franchise groups. “As the digital signage market expands globally, the need for robust and reliable devices that unlock the capabilities of HTML5 interactivity is paramount, and IAdea are industry leaders whom we are proud to work alongside globally.”
Retailers around the globe are embracing IAdea solutions to re-invent their stores. According to Eran Sharon, Vice President of Product Management at YCD Multimedia, “Thanks to the explosive growth of Android device adoption, retailers worldwide are waking up to the benefits of deploying small digital signs at their stores. With its innovative product-centric approach, YCD|RAMP is the perfect fit for product promotions that influence the buying decision.” YCD searched the industry for a suitable hardware that will bring out the best of its innovative solution, and was not satisfied until they tested and deeply integrated with IAdea’s devices. “While conventional Android tablets may work well for a controlled demo, you really want a purpose-built device for robust commercial deployments.” Sharon stated, “Thanks to IAdea’s ‘hardened’ Android signboards we can now recommend a complete, hardware-software solution.”
High-performance digital signage software provider DISE underwent similar experience when it searched for its next-gen hardware platform. “When we decided to embrace Android as a platform for DISE it was with some hesitation. DISE is a high performance software, known for its synchronized, dynamic multi-screen features. Would Android devices be up to the task?” CEO of DISE Andreas Ekmark questioned. “After extensive search, IAdea’s line of media players and signboards is the first that passed our list of requirements and earned our official recommendation.” DISE was delighted after it started tighter integration beyond the Android API into the service environment that IAdea offered. “We are especially excited to find that IAdea has made it really easy for software providers to lock down the Android system and provide the stability and 24/7 operation that is expected from a DISE system,” added Ekmark. “We believe that IAdea hardware and DISE software is a winning combination.”
IAdea enables software partners to tightly integrate their market-oriented solutions into the system firmware, enabling them to deliver higher performance while providing unmatched system stability and ease of deployment. With distribution partners around the globe, IAdea provides partners a supporting infrastructure to grow business globally.
IAdea will be available for private meetings at the upcoming Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) show in Amsterdam, Netherlands, February 4-6, 2014, and Digital Signage Expo (DSE) in Las Vegas, USA, February 12-13. Join IAdea’s CEO at the Digital Signage Disrupted panel on February 12, 4 PM during the DSE to discuss the trends that will impact our industry. Contact them at www.IAdea.com/contact-us for meeting arrangements.
About IAdea
IAdea helps re-invent 100,000+ locations including retail, restaurant, corporate, and education with dynamic display technology. It focuses on the development of cutting-edge commercial-grade digital signage players and integrated displays. IAdea powers many large-scale digital signage projects, offering proven robustness and lowered total cost of ownership (TCO). Founded in 2000 with offices worldwide, IAdea provides uninterrupted product service throughout the globe. Visit www.IAdea.com
