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!

» Read More

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!

» Read More

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...

» Read More

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.

» Read More

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!

» Read More

Some of you may have read our recent news article about the 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!

» Read More

The tech blog has been a bit quiet for the last week or so because we've been busy updating our coporate websites - go to www.navaho.co.uk to see the brand new sites!

» Read More

Every other UK web site seems to have some snowy pictures on it, so we thought we'd post one from the New Forest.

All of that snow has melted away in the forest now and rather fittingly a Pine Trail has just appeared...an Intel Atom one that is...

» Read More

We're just putting the finishing touches to our new Education plugin which we will be unveiling at the BETT 2010 show which begins on Wednesday this week.

This new plugin should make it a lot easier for schools to use MediaCAT as Electronic Notice Boards, especially when you have several of them dotted around the site.

» Read More

Welcome to the MediaCAT TechBlog

In the Navaho R&D department we're always trying out new pieces of hardware to help improve our MediaCAT Digital Signage and Electronic Notice Board products. From embedded screens to the latest low-power Mini-ITX boards or video capture cards to solar powered bus stops we're always playing with some new tech in the office.

Much of what we work on is either customer specific, or never sees the light of day due to lack of demand, however whenever our sales guys mention what us techies have been up to in their meetings, it always generates a lot of interest. So that's what this blog is all about!

During the year we'll be regularly updating this blog with details of all the cool new toys we've got our hands on, the even cooler Digital Signage deployments we've been doing (where we're allowed to!), and no doubt a few entertaining snippets along the way

We'd also like to hear from you, our customers. If you like what you see, have any ideas or requirements that we might be able to help with or just want to know about the latest greatest ITX board we've just fired up for the first time, then please get in contact with us.