Display Installed at Red Sky Restaurant & Lounge

This week we installed a digital display in the store front window of the Red Sky Restaurant & Lounge (www.redskyboston.com) located in Boston, MA. It combines the food video and food beauty photography created earlier with information about the restaurant, including their menu, function rooms, and daily specials to produce a dynamic experience that will catch the eye of potential customers as they pass by the restaurant.

Located directly across the street from the famed Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Red Sky gets a ton of foot traffic passing by the restaurant as people visit the large array of shops, food, and entertainment. With 44 pushcarts, 18 full-service restaurants, and 35 food stalls, this is a highly competitive food-selling situation. Patrons love to look before they buy, but full-service restaurants typically only display a paper copy of their menu in the window. This leaves it up to the customer's imagination as to whether the food is compelling and desireable. With the digital display, people can not only actually "see" the menu, but they instantly realize their food is prepared to order with fresh ingredients.

After installation, it was great to see people become transfixed watching the display. Between the food video, motion graphics and text, the experience is very up beat and interesting. After asking one of the patrons what they thought of the display, he responded "I think I want a burger!

To install the display, a Hannspree 23" full HD LCD display, a custom bracket was fabricated by NAB Tool & Die to mount the display directly to the inside of the window. They also fabricated a custom shelf that was mounted at the top of the window close to the ceiling to hold the Blu-ray player. For convenience & absolutely no maintenance, the Blu-ray disc was authored such that the video would play instantly upon power up and then loop continuously. No fumbling with the remote or teaching the staff how to select the correct video. Simply powering up the player launches the video.

The content for the digital display was chosen specifically to enhance food sales. By showing the customer how great the food is we expect to influence them in a positive way to make a food purchase they were perhaps not planning to do. For instance, if someone had it in their mind that they wanted to have wings before coming to the restaurant, upon seeing how great the Seared Ahi Tuna looked they might upgrade their appetizer order. Similarly, someone already hungry for an appetizer might see the burger or steak tips and upgrade to an entree instead.

By showing how the food is freshly prepared without the use of microwaves or frozen products, the customers instantly form a positive bond to the food which creates a strong desire to try it. The deal is sealed by elegantly photographing the plated product. Who can resist that wonderful piece of bacon or the melted cheese oozing down the side of the burger?

With the aggressive pricing of HD displays and Blu-ray players, installing a digital display becomes a very attractive, realistic proposition for almost any sized business. For well under $1000 you can have a 50" LCD or plasma display that will attract attention from across the street and draw people to your store front. By creating custom content, anyone can have their own commercial running 24/7 to sell your products or services even when the business is closed.

For more information about how we can do this for you, please visit www.renderedgemedia.com.

Tea Cozy Product Photo Published in Philadelphia Inquirer!

The Philadelphia Inquirer recently published an article entitled "Tea-He: More Men Are Finding That This Other Brew Is Their Bag" that mentioned the product of a local Windham, NH company called Thistledown Cozies (www.thistledowncozies.com). A few months prior I had done an extensive photo shoot of their products, so they were ready to provide the newspaper with a nice product photo that they placed in the center of the layout (see left).

I've enlarged the area with the photo and the photo credit so it is easier to see.

Sadly, the on-line version doesn't use the same layout, but rather a photo gallery where the product photo is last in the series.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/image/86128057.html

iPad Underwhelming - First Impressions

I stopped by the Apple store yesterday to check out the new Apple iPad. The store was reasonably busy, but not anymore traffic than I've seen normally (who knows what it was like during opening weekend!). They had a table set up with eight (8) iPads to play with, and not all of them were being used.

After all the hype and hearing the initial impressions, I expected to love it -- but I didn't.

PRO'S

The iPad is VERY responsive. No hesitation when you select an icon, swipe your hand across, or even tilt the device every which way. This is an improvement over the iPod Touch, especially in the area when you re-orient the device. I find the iPod Touch delays too long when you tilt it from landscape to protrait mode, but the iPad was instant and dealt with going upside down as well - a really effective, natural feature when you give it to someone to else.

I thought the book reader application was very nice. The pages flip with ease. You can instantly change the size and type of font. And I thought is was very easy to read.

I was able to successfully play HD YouTube videos. The only disappointment being that 16x9 videos are letterboxed (those black stripes running across the top and bottom of the video). This is because the aspect ratio of the iPad display is not 16x9. I don't know why this negatively effected me, but I was not happy about it.

The photo gallery applications were very nice. Given what Apple has done in this arena this was expected, but they did an excellent good job here. You can even turn the device into a picture frame viewer.

CON'S

I was perplexed on the best way to type on the device. In landscape mode, the virtual keyboard is easy to line up your hands, but you have to lay the device down on something to type. This was less effective in portrait mode (due to the smaller width allocated for the virtual keyboard), so I found myself holding the device with my left hand and poking the keys with my right. Not very quick, but effective. I then tried holding the iPad phone-style with both hands and typing with my two thumbs. This actually worked well, but I found myself NOT gravitating to using it this way because for the most part you are browsing info which means using one hand primarily to hold the device while the other does the navigation. It takes too long to switch the position of the hands. Perhaps over time this would become natural.

Even though the device is very thin, somehow I wanted it be thinnner. Is that crazy? It's heft was more than I expected. My hand/arm became fatigued only after five minutes of usage. I know that time will extend as one uses the device more and more, but I wasn't happy about that part of the experience, probably because it was unexpected. I'm sure future versions will be lighter -- just look at the history of it iPod.

It's really hard to get good advice on which memory configuration would be best to buy. We all know more storage is better, but it does come at a premium, so it pays to understand how much you really need. The Apple representatives were not able to help make this decision. For instance, it would be nice to know how much storage is required to store an HD movie on the device. This is key because if I were to use it as a sales device, I would need to be able to store my portfolio on it and I would like to know the limits.

SUMMARY

The iPad I did not generate any real excitement within me. I did not have a moment when I said "I have to have this!" like when I saw the first Macintosh in 1984.

I'm planning on looking at the iPad again, this time going deeper into the applications and try and do some serious browsing with the device (to get more typing in). If I buy one, I would certainly get the 3G version so it can always be connected to the internet. Stay tuned.

Amazing Closeup of Dew on Moss

On my way out the door this morning, the dew on the moss caught my eye, and I took this photo. Spring is coming!