To kick off our Widget of the Week series, we'll start at the top of the Widget menu with the Analogue clock. With no less than 19 different style of clock to choose from, the Analogue Clock widget is perfect for adding that bit of sparkle to a digital signage screen - although even we have to admit that with some of the clock styles, its probably a good idea to add a digital clock on the screen too!

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MediaCAT 4 saw the introduction of our new 'Scenes' content layout tool. This easy to use, drag and drop system can be used with conventional content such as images, video, web pages and RSS feeds to quickly build eye catching digital signage screens with rich mixed information. Scene layouts can be enhanced by using special 'widgets' which can provide simple things like an analogue clock, or much more complex displays such as diary events, canteen menus, dynamic wayfinding, property listings or even customer updates for customers having their car serviced!

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OK, the Solent is not quite the mid-atlantic, but it's still a challenging environment to try and show the World Cup in. Over at our favourite ferry company - Red Funnel - they're making sure passengers on their car ferries don't miss out on a minute of World Cup action by showing matches on the Digital Signage screens in the bars. Sounds simple, but it has taken a bit of engineering to make it happen!

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We've been very busy over the last few months putting together MediaCAT 4, which sees a major revamp to our player hardware with a whole host of new features added to the player OS and web interface and scheduling software. As the release deadline looms on the horizon, the dreaded T word is being muttered in hushed tones in the technical department - TESTING!

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Another week and we're preparing for yet another show. This time it's Screen Expo - more details about the show can be found on our latest events page.

At the last show, the AV cupboard in our stand became a rats nest of power, network and video cables within seconds, so we thought we'd spend some time before the next show tidying everything up. Its taken us a whole week just to find the right power plugs for the media players...

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The TechBlog has been a bit quiet recently whilst we've been working hard on the start of the show season - designing, building and creating content for our stands.

One area that we've had a lot of interest in at the shows is touch screens - something we've supported for many years, but only recently has touch screen pricing started to become more affordable.

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The last couple of weeks in the tech department have been pretty busy getting ready for Confex 2010 which starts on Tuesday next week at Earls Court.

Our stand (G621) is covered in digital signage screens showing off dynamic wayfinding, meeting room signs/booking, touchscreens and electronic notice boards and we've had our work cut out putting together all of the kit to drive them - we even had to roll a new MediaCAT operating system to drive some brand new embedded screens!

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Some of you may have read our recent news article about the wayfinding-solution-at-novotel-london-west" title="MediaCAT Digital Wayfinding Solution at Novotel London West">Digital Wayfinding system for the Novotel London West Hotel which we installed last year. Whilst digging through our photo archives to find some pictures of the system in action for the case study on our website, we came across some photos we took during testing in our office. If anyone left their desk for too long during that week, there was a good chance their screen would go missing!

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We've written yet another MediaCAT Digital Signage plugin - this one for Estate Agent window displays - except it's not actually a plugin. We actually spent more time arguing over whether it qualified as a plugin than we did writing it. We've now decided it's definitely not a plugin, but we're still not sure what to call it - perhaps a content pack is the best description for it at the moment!

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One of our hardware partners, Fairchild SDS, have just got hold of an extremely bright LED backlit LCD panel. Taking advantage of some rare winter sunshine, we took it outside to see if it really is any better than a normal LCD panel.

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