London, U.K., February 11, 2010 – NEC Corporation (NEC) announced today that it will showcase its digital signage solution, a leading-edge advertising service, at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2010. 

At Booth 8A125 in Hall 8, NEC will demonstrate its full scale digital signage service solution ”PanelDirector”, a cutting-edge advertisement distribution application service that enables telecom carriers to offer a first-class cloud service to their corporate customers while generating additional revenue.

In recent years, digital signage has become an interactive, integral part of the network   Its scope has broadened, making it suitable for all kinds of advertising activities, from mass-communications to long-tail.  NEC offers an interactive digital signage solution for carriers and service providers. 

Carriers’ highly reliable, wide-ranging and dense telecommunications networks mean that they are well situated to become major providers of digital signage services.  NEC prides itself on being an ideal partner to help carriers to achieve this through its end-to-end portfolio of  solutions and services. NEC can also support carriers with its Cloudbased ICT solutions.

The demonstration will feature:   
1) Audience measurement
NEC’s cutting-edge face recognition technology(*) that determines the age range and gender of individuals, along with its highly accurate audience measurement services, which calculate an individual’s distance from a display and the length of time they spend looking at it, deliver content that is more likely to appeal to a specific audience.

2) Signage distribution platform
The 40 inch flat display panel, distribution server, content management software, schedule management software, and operational monitoring tools necessary to utilize digital signage.

In recent years, the digital signage field has kept pace with the advancement of IT by capitalizing on the latest communications networks to offer advanced digital content distribution, management and effectiveness measurement technologies. These favorable market conditions have allowed the digital signage field to dramatically accelerate the creation of diverse new content and services.

NEC’s recognition of this changing market is reflected in the evolution of its digital signage business from a content delivery service to a channel for delivering “effective content” through the use of effectiveness measurement technologies, which are expected to significantly impact the expansion of future digital signage business.

NEC aims to further increase the value of digital signage through its IT and network technology, business consulting, system integration (SI) and service provision strength. NEC will continue to work with the PanelDirector digital signage service solution to further improve audience data analysis and environmental (temperature, humidity, etc) data analysis.

Furthermore, the latest networking capabilities (including NGN, WiMAX and LTE), display and sensor technologies will reinforce content distribution, contributing to the advancement of the digital signage industry and enabling NEC to develop strategic products, solutions and marketing plans that support its position as a leading industry innovator.

 (*)Press Release – Tokyo, Japan, January 20, 2010 NEC’s Face Recognition Technologies Ranked No.1 by the NIST in All Participating Categories