Acquire recently announced that its software platform was chosen by Helios for its first installation of interactive digital signage systems in Turkey. A combination of digital signs and kiosks has been installed in three major shopping malls: The largest shopping mall in Europe, the Forum Istanbul, has thirty five systems; the Forum Mersin has five; and the Forum Cappodocia four.
As a specialist in interactive digital signage solutions, Helios has developed its own wayfinder application that sits atop of the Acquire software platform. This combination enables the kiosk to not only display the ‘wayfinder’ but to also show an ‘attractor’ screen (images or video designed to entice visitors to interact with the kiosk) and display adverts on different parts of the screen.
Due to security limitations, Acquire says, content is not permitted to be sent to the devices via the Internet, so new content is sent to the kiosks and LCD screens over the local area network (LAN) using Acquire’s Point2Point technology. However, the service level agreement (SLA) does permit Helios to perform remote monitoring of the screens, which they carry out using Acquire’s built-in ‘Site Manager’ tool. Site Manager works in tandem with a software watchdog (called ‘Sentinel’) installed on the kiosk and digital signage PCs. This software combination has many remote monitoring capabilities, but in simple terms it locks down the PC preventing external access, and monitors activity such as application resource issues and device failures. In the event of any failure, the support engineer is alerted by email (SMS is also available). The engineer can then connect directly to the PC to perform remote diagnostics.
