Arreya offers up new widgets as it expands customer base

Arreya Digital Signage Suite has added two new widgets to its base package, enabling customers to quickly and easily include countdowns, or to add Hebrew dates.

The company provides a cloud based, software-as-a-service offering for creating interactive touchscreens and digital signage and says it has extended beyond the traditional digital signage reach to provide real time view 'from almost any device that has an internet connection' with no extra licensing fees to provide the information on extra screens.

Editing is done via a web browser, with Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari supported, with real time content updates. Built in analytics are also included.

Arreya lead developer Walter Moore says the company offers a completely cloud based digital signage suite, with its software built on the Chrome platform.

The company is a Google for Work partner and Moore says Google's Chrome platform is fast, secure, flexible and scalable.

"Chrome platform fits with our goals because it is fast, it automatically updates, is using the latest technology and all of this combines to build a platform that lets us focus on the latest in digital communcations rather than trying to keep devices running and managing hardware.

The company's partnership with Google Chrome means Arreya can be combined with Chromebox to power displays and manage devices remotely with Chrome Management Console.

Moore says Chrome allows Arreya to bring true digital signage into the browser enabling the use of web cams and do media capture, or provide offline support.

While Arreya says it has five key markets – schools and education, corporate communications, marketing, digital donor walls and non-profits and the healthcare industry – a spokesperson says Arreya 'is so flexible it becomes whatever people can imagine'.

"It's fun to see all the new ways people dream up.

One area of increasing demand for the company is the healthcare market, with hospitals using Arreya in elevators, patient rooms, entrances and throughout hospitals at key intersections.

"One hospital used to ride their elevators for five hours just to update their elevator monitors with flashdrives.

"Now with Arreya, they do the updates from their office and remotely push content to all the monitors at once.

As well as saving time, the hospital saves money and can update their information more frequently, ensuring content is more relevant.

"Because the Arreya editor/creative studio shows real time, live, information, they no longer have to check the elevator monitors to see if their content got the updates – what you see is what you get.

Moore says the company is focused on providing interactive and truly dynamic content in a world where digital out of home isn't just a one screen in one location, but encompasses

"What about all the other screens and locations you could be showing that content. This gets into BYOD and content on demand.

"More and more people have devices in their own hands and want to be able to pull up information as they need it.

Of its new widgets, Arreya says the countdown widget allows customers to count up or down from a point in time and display an optional message when the countdownn is complete.

The Hebrew data widget, as its name suggests, allows customers to display the Hewbrew data in their presentation, either as Hebrew or as the English transliteration, something Arreya says customers have been requesting.