Camvine
Camvine
- formally Cambridge Visual Networks Ltd - was a company I started in 2007 to bring modern, internet-based management to the world of digital signage. Nowadays, it would be called an ‘Internet of Things’ company, but nobody had come up with that phrase at the time!
We created a system called CODA - the Content Delivery Architecture - which allows you simply to drag and drop your content onto network-connected displays using a browser, regardless of where you, or they, are in the world - and the content starts playing immediately.
CODA systems have been installed in a wide variety of locations around the world.
CODA provides pupils with timetable information in a school canteen
You could learn the basics of CODA in about 10 minutes, while other systems had training courses lasting days. There is still, to my knowledge, nothing in the industry to compare with it for ease of use.
CODA welcomes visitors in a corporate reception area
After a couple of years, I handed over the CEO role to my good friend, Dan Clemens, and I focussed on developing custom CODA-based systems in the Professional Services group. As well as having a friendly user-interface, CODA has a great API, which makes it a good platform for all sorts of information-delivery systems.
CODA tells students about upcoming events in a Detroit university building
It was a fun place to work and I made many great friends there, before I moved on to start Telemarq in late 2011.
CODA drives advertising screens built in to petrol pumps
Sadly, the economic conditions of the time meant that, despite having many happy customers who liked the product and came back for repeat orders, it was hard to sustain a company of even modest size on the revenues, and in early 2012, Camvine was closed down.
But the technology lives on, and in fact is going from strength to strength!
It was taken over by, and is being actively developed by Numed Healthcare, with the management and ongoing software development being done by Telemarq. (A separate branch of the CODA system was developed by Scene Digital, in conjunction with Telemarq, and has since been adopted in-house by Dover Fueling Solutions for use in their fuel pumps.)
At the time of writing, for example, Numed have CODA-based installations in nearly 3000 GP surgeries, hospitals, and veterinary surgeries, with more systems being installed every week. CODA is also proving to be a good platform for development of custom applications in this general area.
Please get in touch if you’d like to know more.
