Concerto Digital Signage

Concerto is an open source digital information system that makes communicating messages to communities pain-free and dead simple. Built from scratch by the RPI Student Senate Web Technologies Group, Concerto enables students, staff, and faculty members to share graphical and text-based announcements on the Web and on networked flat panel viewscreens.

As a founder and core member of the Concerto team, I head up the end-user experience design of the software and lead the marketing push behind the system. I developed the name, logo, and many custom-tailored sales pitches to people and organizations that have contributed money to grow the system.

Leading up the design of Concerto for the end-user has been a constantly engaging, challenging endeavor. Our user interface is one of the greatest things about Concerto in the minds of many people who have used it. We always try to ensure that the system remains powerful yet fun to use, and through constant assessment of the needs of our target audience, we have been able to provide for an intuitive experience.

The first Concerto digital signage network launched at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in March 2008, and since then, well over 1,500 people with RPI web accounts have logged in and used Concerto to upload one or more ads. They can specify takedown dates automatically for each ad and design graphics for the network using common image editing software (or Powerpoint, which is also just fine).

Concerto at RPI has hosted over 3,500 unique messages, giving the campus community a fresh dose of university and world news, promotions, and notices. In addition to my leadership driving the user experience with the software, I helped build the RPI network into a 18-screen juggernaut, securing over $65,000 in funding support to grow the network from many different organizations in the campus community of RPI.

In the summer of 2009, I managed the launch of Concerto-Signage.com, the global homebase for the Concerto Project. Concerto is an open source project under the GNU Public License (v2), which means that the source code can be downloaded and used by anyone in the world, free of charge. We are seeking developers around the world to help us maintain and expand Concerto to become the premier open source digital signage platform.

To date, Concerto-Signage.com has received visitors from over 70 countries. Concerto itself has been successfully deployed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. We are also in talks with several other colleges and universities regarding new Concerto deployments.