sixteen:nine – the digital signage blog

The hoo-hah continues about big LED boards and their impact in communities.

The latest comes from Grand Forks, North Dakota (final resting place of many brain cells – the cheapest road trip from my college days in Winnipeg), where authorities have put a hold on such boards on the very flat prairie outside the little river city’s limits.

Grand Forks County placed a six-month moratorium on the placing of digital billboards outside Grand Forks, reports the local paper.

Not that it’s an immediate issue. County Planner Lane Magnuson said there have been no requests to place digital billboards in rural Grand Forks County.

Regional outdoor player Newman Outdoor Advertising has one LED board in Grand Forks and 5 down the interstate in Fargo.

Magnuson said digital billboards, which are made up of LED light bulbs, could pose hazards outside cities.

“In a rural setting, you can literally see them for miles,” he said.

And having done lots of highway miles in North Dakota, something … ANYTHING … to look at while driving, is actually a good thing. And probably a safety enhancement, not a risk.

When I started this thing I was under the spell of a British CEO at my old employers, who convinced me the world was moving away from the term digital signage. Screen media was the handle that was to be on the tip of every tongue!

Well, clearly I’d skipped my meds that day, yet again, and I went with screenmedia as the handle for my WordPress blog.

Giant, slippery piles of nonsense later, here I sit with 100s of posts on the unwieldy blog URL: screenmedia.wordpress.com

I have been thinking for a while I should really have my own blog site, and maybe add some things. So $45 later (honest), I had sixteen-nine.net as a domain and a year of hosting on a web server, with the content management tool Joomla already installed.

I am still figuring out how to use the thing (fortunately, a few people I know have stupidly blurted that they were Joomla power users), but have started populating it with the same posts as on this main WordPress blog. The intent is to cut over at some point … soon-ish.

Among the things I want to add:

• an events calendar that points to industry events
• more, better links
• and more than anything, a job board for companies looking for people, and people looking for companies. I have been playing matchmaker, informally, for a while now, and this is an easy way to broaden that with very little additional work.

The nice thing about Joomla is that it is largely modular and use style sheets and components to make updating dead simple and quick, so the extra work should be minimal.

I am interested in your thoughts on the switch, and any ideas about other things to add. Let me know!

Neo Media is a client, but I’m not at all involved with their activity on the other side of the Atlantic – where the company seems to be getting a real vote of confidence in the marketplace.

As AKA and others have reported, the UK-based mall and bar network Avanti Screenmedia had been struggling for some time, with the share price dropping to one pence from a high of 17 pence.

News last week that Swiss-based Neo Media, which has networks in several European countries as well as a mall network up here in the tundra, has injected some cash into the company has made a dramatic difference on Avanti’s prospects.

Since the announcement late last week of an $800,000 convertible loan, Avanti’s share price has jumped past three cents and leveled off in late day trading in London today at 3.31 pence. It’s a nice vote of confidence for the sector over there, and generally, given a lot of the gloom and doom lately.