Navori Gets On The Android Train With Sub-$50 Player

February 14, 2013 by Dave Haynes

Swiss-based digital signage software firm NAVORI has ported its platform – which has run for years on Windows – to also run on the Google Android operating system.

“We have been developing our QL Android player engine way before the Android OS™ proved to emerge from the initial smartphone platform it was intended for to a true application OS,” says CEO Jerome Moeri in a release. “This renders our NAVORI QL platform into a Hybrid Digital Signage Software solution enabling to transparently manage both Microsoft Windows and Android player hardware.”

NAVORI (this ALL CAPS thing with tech companies seems to be a THING, thought NOT SURE WHY) says it started porting to Android platform two years ago. “This development was a strategic and well considered investment after a due diligence analysis of the Google platform – we now have at least a two years technical pole position towards other vendors in the Digital Signage Industry,” adds Moeri.

Except for Capital Networks and Park Media and Signagelive and some little guys I don’t really know.

Navori has a software development kit that will make integration with other systems and data – one of the big attractions of open source – easily done. The hardware the company is going with is USB stick-sized and should retail for less than $50 USD.

NOTE: No pic with release but found this earlier one (used up top) here

The NAVORI QL Hybrid Digital Signage Software platform will launch at Digital Signage Expo in less than two weeks. The company is at booth #1234.

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I know lots of people who’ve suggested the whole Android thing is goofy and that using crazily cheap Chinese media players is way too risky for serious network operators. But this is not a hobbyist/uber-nerd operating system. It runs on I don’t know how many hundreds of millions of devices. While a Fortune 500 company is not likely to look seriously at this sort of thing, there’s an awfully big SMB market out there and (as noted in the past) while a lot of these devices are unreliable junk, well-established companies like NAVORI would not go to market with crap. They’d have tested the hell out of what they’re peddling.

I’ll say it again … if you have a signage software business based on using $800-$1,200 PCs, you better have a really compelling argument why that level of gear is needed. And it is in many applications.

But for many simple messaging situations, it ain’t.