Ooha Services India has installed its first Ooha Station in Chennai, offering free high-speed Internet to users for 15 minutes while carrying advertising on a public-facing LCD screen.

The station (pictured) is a 6.5-foot-high structure with an LCD monitor for free broadband Internet browsing and another 42-inch LCD mounted on top of it, according to Ooha’s founder and CEO Thomas John. The first station has been deployed at Abirami Mall in Chennai.

Ads on the exterior of the unit can be still or full-motion, with or without video. The kiosk can also print out coupons for promotions.

And advertising is displayed not only to the public through the exterior-facing LCD, but also to the Internet user.

“The catch is free Internet,” said John. “Once we have a user with us, then the person has to authenticate his or her identity. The monitor, during the registration phase, displays ads. [But] once the user is logged in, we ensure that the browsing experience isn’t diluted.”
Gathering information on usage patterns will help precise targeting of these ads, said John.

He added: “We are eyeing all sorts of public-access areas such as shopping malls, entertainment, educational institutes, theatres, hospitals and so on for placement of Ooha Stations.

“We initially plan to have 100 such stations in Chennai in the next six months. Post that we will focus on other southern Indian cities such as Bangalore and Kochi.”

The company, which pays rent to host locations, also has plans for other cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, and Pune, and is eyeing breakeven in one to two years.
Ooha has been funded by US-based ProgramX, a company also founded by John and specializing in supply-chain management and enterprise resource planning, and by Chennai-based private capital.

Dynamax Technologies is to provide its POV software to Clear Channel Outdoor to create an over-arching service that will allow centralised campaign booking and management for the outdoor giant’s inventory in nine European territories. The deal is expected to later be extended to Clear Channel’s operations outside of Europe, SCREENS.tv has learned.

The first stage of the deal, which follows more than a year of testing the POV software and competing systems by Clear Channel, will see POV installed at a network centre where it will be used to coordinate digital, non-digital and mixed campaigns across Europe. Individual territories’ local management systems will not be replaced by POV but will interface with it.

The deal is expected to have particular impact on Clear Channel’s sites in airports, public transportation, and malls (like the one pictured).

Clear Channel’s decision is not only a significant boost for Dynamax, which already counts Titan Outdoor UK among its clients and has just taken its first formal steps into the U.S. market – it also marks a notable foray by a screen-media firm into the world of non-digital outdoor, underlining the increasing importance of digital to the outdoor sector as a whole.

In what may give it a similar foothold in the North American outdoor market, digital-signage software provider Scala earlier this week said it was acquiring Canada’s Market Information Services, which offers management and analytical tools for non-digital outdoor.

Canada’s Omnivex says its latest screen-media software can link any on-screen graphical element to a dynamic data feed, allowing content to be automatically changed by the media player without human intervention.

“We started in the financial trading industry where real-time information and ROI are critical to business, so Omnivex recognizes the value of live data for updating content,” said president Jeff Collard.

The new package, Moxie, offers digital-signage design and management tools through a browser interface. It joins existing Omnivex software products such as Display, Control and DataPipe for digital signage, as well as DataDisplay and TickerDisplay for LEDs.

Omnivex also says that by exploiting the latest PC graphics technology, similar to that found in Microsoft’s Vista and in games, it can deliver graphics superior to much digital signage.

“With greater exposure to high-end graphics from computer games and with the pending [U.S.] cutover to HDTV by 2009, people’s expectations of video content are growing rapidly,” said Collard.

“3D vector graphics allow content to look like a movie without all the heavy lifting of rendering video files,” added spokesperson Christine Rojewski.

17-year-old Omnivex has specialised in a number of verticals for its screen-media systems, with clients including more than 20 American and Canadian universities; energy companies; financial institutions including Bank of Montreal and Royal Bank of Scotland; U.S. and Canadian government and military sites; healthcare organisations including Pfizer and the Howard Hughes Health Institute; and hospitality venues such as the Beverly Hilton and Metro Toronto Convention Centre (pictured).

It also has customers in the media, leisure, retail, transportation and manufacturing sectors.

A UK digital-out-of-home startup is set to install up to 500 cylindrical advertising pods at newspaper shops across England.

ICA Network Solutions told SCREENS.tv that in addition to local advertising and community messages, its iCan units will display live headline feeds from the Daily Mail newspaper.

The three-foot-high iCan pods (pictured) are based on advanced LED technology. When tri-colour LEDs are rotated at a certain speed, the device generates “virtual pixels”. This creates a full-colour cylindrical screen 300mm in diameter and 500mm high, capable of displaying video content. Each unit also functions as a POS device, with an attached rack to hold copies of the Daily Mail.

The screens are updated via wireless broadband and powered by PC technology with centralised control over ICA’s c360tv network. Web-based software developed in-house by ICA allows different content to be displayed on each unit, with support for a range of file formats (including MPEG, SWF, JPEG, GIF and TIFF).

“We don’t think there’s anything like this on the market at the moment in the UK,” said John Rowley, head of sales and development for ICA Network Solutions. “The site surveys from our pilot tests show amazing positive customer feedback. Although we plan to start with local advertisers, we think that the product will appeal to national brands in the future.”

Currently, there are ten units installed at locations around Horsham and Brighton in southeast England. However, according to Rowley, agreements are in place to set up the iCans in 500 further venues – all of them newspaper sellers – including locations in London, Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol.
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Rowley claims that the Daily Mail was looking for a method to communicate with its readers via a digital platform in-store across the UK. “The iCan was seen as the right solution,” said Rowley. “Live headlines can be broadcast to each store, where the consumer will be engaged with the display and the rich content, encouraging them to buy the paper.”

Associated Media, publisher of the Daily Mail and other papers, has already shown a willingness to try out-of-home digital promotions, using 32-inch LCD screens from Comtech M2M to display headlines for the Evening Standard, a daily London newspaper.

All 500 iCan devices are expected to be installed over the next four months. And Rowley believes that they also have potential in other high-footfall areas, such as shopping malls, airports, bars and clubs .

Although there is no clear picture yet of whether advertisers will get on board, the strong brand of the Daily Mail – Britain’s top-selling daily paper in the mid-market category – could be key to the success of the network.