Seneca Data's sleek little digital signage player

June 15, 2010 by Dave Haynes

When I was at Infocomm last week poking around the trade hall, acting interested and waiting furtively for the Christie Digital booth to start pouring beers, I saw a lot of little boxes from Seneca Data driving digital signage applications.

The upstate New York company only launched its slim little boxes a few months ago,so I was surprised to see how many vendors were already using them. In the small form factor game, it’s really been the Aopen digital engines and, more recently, the Mac Minis getting that  business. I have seen people using some other little guys like the Asus, but rarely at shows or in the wild.

The i-330 pictured above is only 6″ by 7″ by 1.7″, and weighs nothing. It apparently ships with a can of Red Bull and an iPhone, which is a nice touch. However, those things might just be to show relative size. But then, what if that is a Costco-sized Red Bull and that’s an iPad???

Anyway,  under the hood is an Intel Atom and the Nvidia Ion graphics that allow nice video playback on a not-all-that powerful box.

Street price is around $500, with OS. Go Linux and that’s pretty attractive. A new one is coming out in August with more horses and an upgrade Ion. These things come from offshore but Seneca has North American rights. They can apparently be white-labeled for software guys and so on.

Seneca is a custom manufacturer and distributor. Or, if you are one of those people who gets tingly doing mission statements:  “Creating and partnering throughout the technology lifecycle enables Seneca to drive value-focused collaborations with customers and partners.”

Those people make me giggle. And run.