Key West Debuts SignWave For Meeting Room Market

March 19, 2013 by Dave Haynes

Keywest Technology is the latest digital signage software developer to get on the Android OS bus, announcing a system called SignWave that’s expressly focused on event and meeting room signs.

The idea is to marry Android OS tablets with third-party property and event management systems that are commonly used in corporate, hospitality and higher education markets.

“SignWave represents a major transition forward in digital signage, and to be more specific, multiple transitions,” says Nick Nichols, Keywest’s president and CTO. “SignWave is in keeping with the company’s philosophy of making products that work…’technically, like a day at the beach,’ which is the slogan the company was founded on in 1998.”

Nichols says the first “transition” is going from Microsoft OS to Android. “Another transition is from an it-can-do-anything approach to technology to a specific-purpose application that enables us to develop for niche markets. Finally, for those that are tasked with implementing a digital conference sign solution, they now have an attractive option over difficult to operate and more costly solutions on the market today. We engineered the SignWave platform to be lower cost, easier to install, setup and maintain than anything else on the market.”

The tabs — 10-inch or a jumbo 22-inch — run on Android 4.0 or newer, and are set up to point at in-house systems and largely forget about after that.

The SignWave system includes a server that provides SQL data acquisition with built-in network security from the most popular event management software (EMS) and property management systems (PMS) used today. As of launch day, SignWave is compatible with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 / Outlook, Newmarket Delphi EMS, MICROS Fidelio Opera PMS and Dean Evans EMS. Nichols said that SignWave can easily adapt to any event management system and that Keywest Technology will be adding more third-party software interfaces to keep up with demand.

The design includes power-over-Ethernet (POE) as an option. KeyWest is already shipping and happy to have a chat with resellers.

This product is going after the specific market Visix has been in for the last couple of years with its own product, called MeetingMinder, which also runs POE but appears to have a lot more visual power. However, it also probably has more cost. Presumably, part of the idea here is using low-cost tabs as a base, point via browser to some live data that gets cleaned up and formatted, show it on a background visual, and you’re done.

It’s miles away from the very involved native Android player work done by companies like Capital Networks, BroadSign and Navori. The work here would have been on the third-party data integration. But it is another indication of a company stripping Microsoft licenses out of the mix and going low-cost, open source.

Key West, based in the Kansas City area, has been around the sector for years, but keeps pretty quiet.