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The following is a compensated review of Proton LED, a site which offers LED signage for outdoor advertising.

When you first arrive at ProtonLED’s website, you’re greeted by what looks like a rapidly spinning molecule and some jaunty music. In other words, a non-standard navigation interface, to say the least. Fortunately, it’s actually not that hard to click any of the links, as they slow down to a pretty manageable speed when you want to click on one. The music is a little annoying, and while it can be shut off by pressing a little blue dot in the bottom right of the screen, there’s no indication anywhere on the page that it’s the music control. Not a great start, but certainly different than your average website experience.

The actual product that ProtonLED offers is an animated sign display for your business that uses a 17MM pixel matrix to create pretty realistic video images on custom-sized screens that can stand up to any sort of inclement weather. From what I can tell, the quality is great for outdoor displays, but it’s tough to tell, because the website doesn’t really offer that many large views of what the actual product looks like. There are a few small images that you can expand from the ‘Technology’ part of the molecule, but then there’s no way to navigate back to look at the other blown-up images. It’s relatively difficult to get a good idea of the actual quality of the video displayed by the LED screens, since the largest video offered is pretty grainy itself and only about 240×240 in size.

The bottom line on ProtonLED seems to be that the product offered is relatively advanced and would make excellent signage for a business looking to advertise in front of their store or in another prominent location. From what their website shows, the quality on the product is high and the screens are available essentially custom-made to order. However, seriously interested parties will find themselves quickly calling the company for more information, as the site is a little over-the-top and lacking deeper content. As an initial interface, the molecule frontpage is novel and doesn’t completely prevent effective navigation, but there are only a few atoms in the molecule, and each is itself only a small tidbit of information that could be expanded upon into many, many more pages.

If you’ve tried or own a ProtonLED sign, please let me know how the experience has been in a comment below.

protonled, outdoor advertising, outdoor sign, video, animation, led sign, storefront, advertising

The temporary flaw in ESPN360.com’s security, which was fixed on Monday night, might have temporarily dissuaded some from the notion that they could watch their beloved teams compete in the World Cup online. Thankfully, a company in China has a much better notion: P2P TV channel streaming.

TVUNetworks, based in Shanghai, has a beta download of their TVUPlayer available on their website, www.tvunetworks.com. The player works in a simple, yet ingenious way. Utilizing concept similar to that employed in peer-to-peer downloading software such as Kazaa, TVUPlayer streams the TV channel to you from another user who is running the software, and in turn utilizes your extra available bandwidth to serve the video stream to others. The result: no matter how many people connect, the video plays smoothly, with little to no lag. Quality’s not the greatest, but it’s free, and you’re probably at work, so it beats the hell out of nothing at all. To give an idea of how effective this is, consider that the download of the software (from TVUNetworks‘ servers) is currently proceeding at a mere 8-9kBps on most people’s computers, probably as a result of high demand from World Cup viewers. The streams, however, run great, and often actually improve in quality as the number of viewers increases.

TVU is currently trying to secure contracts with TV channels to broadcast through the TVUPlayer, but until then, bless their hearts, they’re just offering a bunch of streams for free. In addition to the ESPN and ESPN2 available, there’s CNN and some other (often international) channels. Kind of makes ESPN 360 obsolete…