Scheduling Update & Potential Problem

This week, we upgraded our scheduling system to improve how scheduling works with multiple time zones. As a by-product of this upgrade, some scheduled times may no longer appear correctly in your playlist. You may want to review all scheduled items to be sure they accurately reflect the times you want posters to play.

Weather Poster

Our provider of weather forecast data, Weather.com, is having unexpected and unannounced problems with their weather data, which has kept our weather posters from working properly. Currently, no weather posters are appearing on Signs, even if you have a weather poster in your playlist, until we resolve this problem. We anticipate we’ll have a solution within 5-10 business days.

Questions? Comments?

If you have any problems with your account or would like to vent or make suggestions, please contact us right away:

• Mon-Fri, 9-5 EST call 877-REDPOST (733-7678) ext. 2 for support
• Email and Google Talk instant message: support@theredpost.com

The cool thing is, the headline posters were automatically generated. They used an RSS feed with a custom stylesheet (CSS for you nerds), a feature that’s built into our software, so that they didn’t have to update the Sign manually, it was all automatic. Looks great, and good use of the RSS feature!

Does every business have a RedPost?

First, I’m glad the brand is being well-communicated, as said person (who I didn’t recognize) knew that what I was doing was somehow called RedPost. Second, to answer her question, no, not yet.

Each Sign is playing the same content, with the posters formatted in both 4:3 and 16:9 ratio. They developed a series of 8 posters that accomplish three goals:

1. let customers know about things the bookstore does that aren’t well known  (accept book donations, sell both new and used books, order books they don’t have in stock, and buy/sell textbooks)
2. promote specials at the store (the basement sale going on over the next two weeks, the bargain room, and the popular kids section)
3. build the bookstore’s brand (advertise for First Fridays, promote the green aspects of book donation, tout the large inventory in-store and in their warehouse)

Here are the posters. Note that at most they have 15 words, use bright colors to attract attention and simple visuals to communicate the message. Each posters displays for 10 seconds:

How we’ll measure the result: we’ll compare last year’s sales for July to this year’s. We’ll also compare book donations, bargain room sales and kid’s corner sales year over year to see if there’s an improvement.

Peacemaking is anything but passive.
It requires action. Compassion. Engagement.
To make peace, you need to find common ground and be ready to make some waves.
Find out how

Students can write on the booth walls with chalk, answering questions like “Who’s your peace hero? What does peace mean? What does peace look like?” They can also get their photo taken with a sign that says “I am making peace with…” in which they fill in the blank. The photos are then posted each hour on the 6 RedPost/Signs. It’s really more of an art exhibit than a trade show booth, but hey Mennonites are a creative people, I guess. Here are the photos:

The Signs are all running off a local network and local server we set up, to keep them from having to pay an internet connection fee for every single one, due to draconian convention center standards. Full disclosure: I grew up Mennonite and still consider myself one ideologically. Also, Goshen College is my alma mater.

The other Sign is at an educational conference in Texas with the guys of Haiku Learning Management Systems, another Goshen-based web startup tackling the education market with an awesome piece of web-software they’ve developed that helps teachers create online lessons, manage discussions, post grades and more.

I’ll have pics to post later this week.

This may sound all bad, but it’s not. I’ve been getting awesome gas mileage, about 45 MPG, which is much higher than the typical 35-40 MPG. Also, as someone who usually drives pretty fast, I’ve learned a lot about humility and patience.

However, this past week I put on about 1,000 miles between a trip to Chicago and 3 days in Indy. If you were one of those people who was extremely annoyed by the slowly accelerating white Jetta on the highways between Chicago, Indy and Goshen, I apologize, especially to the trucker who flipped me off and tried to run me off the road. I really was accelerating as fast as I could and was not trying to ruin your day.

My mechanic, Eckhert, a somewhat crusty old German man, will be tending to the TDI this week. If my working theory that it’s just a cracked air tube is correct, it’ll just be a $25 or so fix.

Here’s the short version: you may have heard of Microsoft Outlook, the most popular email program with 36% of the email program market. You also may have become accustomed to receiving nicely formatted emails that aren’t just plain text (called HTML email). HTML email is difficult to send, as there’s no set standard for how to display the emails across the many different email programs (Outlook, Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, Apple Mail, etc.), particularly when it comes to CSS, a standard for how to format stuff online that’s ubiquitous at this point, except in Outlook, of course. Almost everyone has agreed to an HTML email standard, except for Microsoft with their Outlook program. But not to worry, Outlook 2010 is coming out next year and will fix this major problem causing the rest of the industry lots of headaches.

Except it won’t. From Microsoft’s VP in charge of Outlook:

We are focused on creating a great e-mail experience for the end user, and we support any standard that makes this better. To that end, Microsoft welcomes the development of broadly-adopted e-mail standards. We understand that e-mail is about interoperability among various e-mail programs, and we believe that Outlook provides a good mix of a rich user experience and solid interoperability with a wide variety of other e-mail programs. There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products. We are constantly working to improve our products and the experience that they give to our customers.

The bold part is simply false, untrue, wrong — there are standards, called web standards. All email clients work to be standards-compliant and don’t allowing scripts to execute, because of security risks. But not Microsoft, except for Outlook 2000, which was more standards-compliant than Outlook 2007 (figure that one out). This is like going to a restaurant and refusing to order food because you say that menus do not exist, but forcing them to serve you what you want even though you won’t look at the menu.

Rumor has it that the real reason Microsoft is taking this position is that “the source of the problem is that the Outlook division doesn’t have budget to license IE8’s rendering engine from the IE division” (thanks Carl), although, it seems more like bad planning/management and a refusal to recognize the hugeness of this issue for the 67% of the computer using world that isn’t using Outlook.

There’s a campaign to draw attention to Microsoft’s stupidity, check it out here, there’s already 21,457 tweets about it.

It’s an HP LD4200 LCD (specs) built for use as a digital sign. High brightness, 1920×1080 full HD resolution, 1000:1 contrast ratio — a really nice display.

We’re going to be doing some fairly unscientific market research with the HP monitor over the next month in the bookstore our office is located in, advertising for specific events, sales and options, and then comparing that to the store’s sales from last year to try to measure the impact of in-store digital signs. We’ll report back here on the blog.

Thanks HP!

Look strangely familiar? Yep. It’s eerily like the RedPost website design we released this past fall (the current one), same color scheme, same frilly things in the background, same primary nav speech bubble thingies. It’s beyond eerie, it’s freaky. Elena came up with her design back in 2007…when the new RedPost website was merely a twinkle in an unborn baby’s eye. Odd how everything that’s been done has been done before.

But I guess if our universe is really just the product of a highly unlikely cosmic coincidence, things like this shouldn’t be a surprise.

Ultimately, Mindy and I went our separate ways, and we sold our client list and moved on to other things. This photo is from our third Everblue office here in Goshen, in the editing room. I remember thinking, when the photographer told me to lean on top of the monitor, “this is dumb.” I still think that:

Just minutes ago, they announced their 2009 Fellows, all of them “ready to spark change around the world, in areas such as civil and human rights, education and youth leadership, health, and public service.” Check out the blog post and video introduction here.

Congrats to the changemakers!

My friend Rachel forwarded me this WIRED article called “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online” by Kevin Kelly. Here’s the basic gist:

We’re not talking about your grandfather’s socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

An interesting, well-written article. So what does this shift have to do with digital signs? Here’s a list off the top of my head of how the open source (or socialist, as Kevin puts it) movement has impacted digital signs to date:

• Linux: a lot of digital sign hardware runs Linux, although quite a bit still runs Windows. Linux is getting better every year, more stable, less/hardly prone to viruses/spyware. Windows is…not.
• Hosted software: A lot of the new breed of hosted digital sign software platforms run on web servers, a lot of which run using all kinds of open source server software (like Ruby on Rails, which RedPost uses), Microsoft’s ASP/.NET platform being the exception. Cloud computing and other new technologies are built on top of earlier open source server technologies.
• The Internet: yep, the most basic component of most digital sign implementations, the Internet is largely a collaborative effort with much of its communication protocols and basic infrastructure open source.

I think that the biggest effect we’re beginning to see of Kevin’s socialist movement on digital signs is going to be in how people consumer and filter information. You’re beginning to see the early stages of this on many blogs and websites that allow commenting — filtration systems where users assign ratings to comments and then you can automatically filter out the crap. Imagine being able to vote down the content you see on a digital sign because it’s just plain crappy, or being able to tag it as crappy so that other people walking by don’t waste time on it.

In a world where everyone has an iPhone (ideally they’re connected right into our brains, but we’re not there yet) we’re not far from this sort of collective, everywhere/anywhere public information filtering. Digital Sign content will have to be highly contextual and relevant or be ignored entirely.

As an adult, it takes me a long time to finish books…I think it’s partially because I read a lot online and don’t feel like reading much once I get home. I also really don’t enjoy reading “business books” — I just don’t. I prefer sci-fi/fiction and memoirs to any sort of businessy book. I think it’s because book reading is an escape for me, like when I was a kid, when reading was this whole other imaginative world I entered.

But I do still get through a book now and then. This week, I finished Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s a businessy book that I actually didn’t mind, I think because it’s based so much in numbers and data, the analysis of which  fascinate me. Gladwell’s whole point is that, especially in American culture, we have this belief in the “rags to riches” outliers, like the Bill Gates/Steve Jobs, sports stars, Hollywood actors, business tycoons, etc. But really it’s a myth — family and cultural background, practice and simple timing play a much bigger role, family playing the biggest role, he argues, in who we become than any sort of magical luck factor or stroke of genius. It’s a great read that I connected with in many ways.

I just started Gang Leader for a Day. I’ll report back when I’m done.

Frequently Asked Questions

• How much does it cost? Your costs are: hardware, installation, maintenance and software. The first three vary quite a bit depending on your needs — you can check out our RedPost hardware here. The software starts at $15/month per Sign and the per month cost decreases the more Signs you have (see “Our Pricing Scheme: Simple” to the right).
• Can I connect multiple monitors to one PC? Do I pay per monitor or per PC? You pay per individual sign ID number in your neighborhood, so essentially per PC. If you duplicate the video signal coming out of the PC, you can send that duplicate signal out to how ever many monitors you’d like. It’ll just cost as if it’s one monitor since it’s one unique feed of content. If you try to use the same sign ID number on multiple PCs, nothing will work quite as it should and your Signs will get confused about who’s updated with the latest content. Ex: A retirement home distributes RedPost content over an internal cable channel and pays $15/mo for the PC connected to the cable channel, not $15/mo per TV viewing the cable channel.
• Do I have to sign a contract? No, you pay monthly or we can bill for a year if you’d like. But cancel at any time.
• What happens if my internet connection goes out? Will my Signs keep working? Yep, they will. Each Sign downloads and caches its playlist the first time it plays through — that’s what the lite grey loading bar in the lower left is doing. After the first time through, the Sign checks in every minute with our server for updates and continues playing what it already has until there is an update. If the internet connection goes out, the Sign will continue playing what it has for up to 24 hours, at which point it’ll flip to the default image for the neighborhood, which is customizable by going to Supervize > Settings > Default image.
• What types of file formats can be a poster? RedPost currently works with images (JPEG and PNG), Adobe Flash files, video clips (H.264, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Xvid compression — .mov, .mp4 or .avi), RSS feeds and Media RSS feeds.
• Is video supported on Windows and Mac? Currently, Video posters are only supported with Linux, which ships with all RedPost hardware.
• Can I schedule my Sign to turn on and off? We’re working on that feature but it’s not quite done yet. You can right now if you aren’t afraid of the command line or by installing a third-party app.
• How much bandwidth do the Signs use? It depends on the content, of course. However, the Signs cache content locally the first time they play through, so they’re not bandwidth intensive. Much less so than your average desktop user.
• Can I schedule content to play on certain dates and times? Yep, click the schedule button (it looks like a little calendar) in the playlist view to schedule posters to repeat each week or to play over a certain time.
• Who owns the content I upload into my account? You do, of course! Unlike Facebook, YouTube, etc., we claim no rights to your content. For a more in depth explanation, check out our Terms and Conditions.
• How secure is your service? Pretty secure (how’s that for a vague answer). All communication between the Sign and the server is encrypted. When you visit our website to update your neighborhood, everything is also encrypted. Only users you’ve invited to your neighborhood can see your content. The major holes in security are if you don’t use a secure password or if you give out or store insecurely the Sign ID to your Signs.

Hi,
I am interested in the 37″ display, and thanks for providing the prices. Most of the other annoying website do not clearly state what they are trying to sell!

From the start, I’ve wanted to be as transparent as possible about pricing. In the digital sign industry, it turns out, this is a big differentiator, as everyone has a contact form or phone number to call to get pricing info and it takes a song and dance to get what you need. For small networks (1-20 signs) a lot of places won’t even return your call.

I know this because we’ve done quite a bit of research on our competitors’ pricing and it is like pulling teeth. We have pricing info for 22 of our competitors that we haven’t signed NDAs or anything for — I’m tempted to publish it all online in a nice, searchable format, although that would probably result in a maelstrom of angry emails and cease and desist letters headed my way. I don’t see the benefit to doing so. There’s no need to cause waves unnecessarily.

Although…it would be fun… Have I ever mentioned that I played in the activist crowds in my early college years? (Featured at right is a poster I created for a meeting I helped organize on my college campus.) I went to a couple big protests and such, which quickly turned me off to that worldview and way of creating change, it’s not for me. But left me with the desire to disrupt the status quo.

Well, actually, that desire is probably more genetic/cultural than bred by college activism. A dose of Mennonite/anabaptism + a pinch of entrepreneurial drive + a mischievous gene or two = a slightly-over-developed desire to disrupt the status quo.

Ok, wow, this blog post just got a lot better. I was digging through my computer archives for a photo of Eric-the-college-protestor. Unfortunately, I was in college pre-affordable-digital-cameras/social media photo-sharing, so I don’t have a lot of photos of myself at protests. However, I did find several gems. One is an outline I wrote about Goshen College, where I was attending at the time, entitled “Goshen College > Goshen, Inc.?” It’s essentially all about how I saw my college becoming a “giant corporation,” with concentration of power, corporate structure, centralization, no living wage, etc. ALL SUPREMELY EVIL THINGS in my mind at the time.

Even though it was just 10 years ago, I’ve changed a lot. A LOT. Wow.

The second gem you can read below: an op-ed I wrote in December of 2000 about a protest trip I helped organize to the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia (now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation). I contacted the military and scheduled a trip for our group onto the Fort the day before the big protest to hear their side of the story and actually dialogue, something that ruffled the feathers of the protest organizers, as it got media coverage and took away from their.

Man. Even when I was being an activist I was being disruptive…against the disruptors. I guess I can’t get enough. Good thing I’m in the startup business…

My op-ed follows below the fold.

School of the Americas Op Ed
Eric Kanagy

I don’t consider myself a protest kind of guy. I watched and read media coverage of recent demonstrations in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and Los Angeles with some skepticism about motives and methods. But I do have my moments.

In November 1999, I committed a federal crime, with 5,000 other protestors, by illegally crossing onto the Fort Benning, Ga., property—an act punishable with a $5,000 fine and six months in jail. We were calling for the closure of the U.S. Army School of the Americas.

Students at Goshen (Ind.) College, where I am a junior, have participated in the Fort Benning demonstration since 1997. For a decade, the annual rally organized by the School of the Americas Watch group has included a nonviolent vigil and a symbolic funeral procession onto the military base, attempting to grab the attention of the nation, the media and politicians who hold the purse strings for this government-funded program. Conversation with the “enemy” is not part of the plan.

I had heard the stories about the place the SOA Watch calls the “School of Assassins.” Latin American graduates, including several dictators, have been charged with applying the school’s teachings to the raping, maiming and killing of indigenous people in their home countries in recent decades, including the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero and the 1981 slaughter of hundreds civilians in El Mozote, El Salvador. In September 1996, the Pentagon acknowledged that the SOA had used training manuals advocating torture, extortion and assassination.

As a Mennonite and a pacifist, I can neither accept nor condone these actions. But something about this portrayal of the SOA really bugged me—it seemed the rallies revolved around emotions associated with horrible things that happened more than a decade ago. The line bordering the school’s property was a good three miles from the actual buildings. The line dividing protestors and school officials felt even wider.

Yelling at the SOA and committing civil disobedience year after year has brought about some much-needed changes in the course materials and the administrative structure of the school, which is changing its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. But questions nagged at me, even as I chanted and sang protest songs in 1999: Who and what was I really shouting about? Where was I directing those shouts? At their roots, how did my actions differ from the violence and disruption that accompanied other demonstrations?

It seemed there should be other ways to work for change; ways in which we take the time to truly understand the other side. Shouldn’t real dialogue—listening, not just yelling—be a part of any protest?

This year, I wanted to hear the other side of the story—the side the SOA Watch did not represent. Before we left Indiana, I called an SOA representative to set up some time inside the base for our entire group. The school official seemed surprised to hear from a protestor, We expected a basic tour of the grounds, but received much more.

Our welcome came from the school’s commandant, Col. Glenn Weidner, who began a discussion that included professors, military personnel and Latin American students, not to mention many of their family members—quite a bit more than a five-cent tour.

The conversation between the military representatives and 50 college and high school students lasted more than four hours and touched on religious beliefs, just war theory, Mennonite ideas about pacifism, Jesus’ teachings and the role and philosophy of our military after the Cold War. There we were: a group of anti-war, anti-SOA protesters sitting with military personnel from all over this hemisphere, talking to each other and, perhaps more importantly, actually listening. The miracle still amazes me.

I left the School of the Americas with a deeper understanding of its role and philosophy. The school is a real institution with real people who have real views. SOA leaders believe that spreading democracy by its means throughout Latin America is a vital role that it can and must fulfill.

The SOA was no longer purely evil in my mind. It was, well, real.

The next day, I sang, chanted, and yelled for the closure of the SOA. Despite our cordial conversation and diligent debate, my fundamental opposition to the military institution and the ideals it is built upon remains. There are nonviolent, effective alternatives to the use of force. Too often, those alternatives are ignored in favor of rapid justification of the taking of human life as a means to an end.

Standing outside the Fort Benning gate this November, I finally felt I had a real right to protest. I understood what I was opposing and I had talked with the people I disagreed with. When you know your adversaries personally, It becomes harder to find your screaming voice, but my new knowledge empowered me to stand up against philosophies or practices I could not support.

As I looked onto the base, my eyes linked with those of the lieutenant colonel who had set up our meeting. We both smiled and waved. At that moment, I saw him, in his standard issue camouflage army uniform, as few in the crowd of 10,000 saw him—not as the faceless enemy, but as a man who I both respect and vehemently disagree with.

Our conversations narrowed the three-mile gap between us, helping both of us see that we are similar people living in the same world regardless of which side of the line we stand.

• 1280 x 720
• 1280 x 768
• 1366 x 768
• 1280 x 800
• 1280 x 854
• 1440 x 900
• 1440 x 960
• 1600 x 1200
• 1680 x 1050
• 1920 x 1080

And random LCDs will vary by just a pixel or two. Really? Is it so hard to standarize on pixel sizes? It makes it very difficult to design simple, easy-to-use software. And so far with RedPost, we’ve more or less punted on this whole issue. Our software will work with any resolution, but it’s up to the user to wade through the mess — not a good long term solution. We’re working on it!

For a good time, check out the Wikipedia image of all the different video standards.