m-cast v1.1

Consensus Software Awards

Brief product description

m-cast™ is an end-to-end distributed multimedia advertisement system, consisting of two product lines - m-cast™ Enterprise and m-cast™ One-to-One.

Both products are designed to achieve the one objective, to deliver unprecedented levels of accuracy in the deployment of large scale advertising campaigns. With m-cast™, delivery of electronic, multi-media advertising material can be managed from one location, distributed to many and targeted to appeal to very specific markets at very specific times. The system is designed to target specific demographics over a network of retail organisations so that the right messages are delivered to the right audience at the time of purchase. This is what we call "Precision marketing at the point of decision

The m-cast™ Enterprise system is designed to cater for network wide booking, scheduling, distribution, display and auditing of multimedia content and advertisements. 

The Enterprise product line consists of following modules:

• Authoring & Wrapping: This module allows content to be verified and security checked before distribution over network.

• Central Server: This module allows customer management, content management, booking and scheduling. It also does audit consolidation against bookings.

• Group Server: This module provides scalability and manages the stores as demographic groups for example all Sydney stores.

• Location Server: This manages a particular store. It handles content distribution within each store and specific scheduling for the plasma consoles. It also communicates with Group and Central servers.

• Display engine: This module controls the display on the plasma screen or any display device. It also has intelligence to recover from the network failures

m-cast™ One-to-One is designed from the point of view of customer interaction. It enables organisations to interact with their customers with the products and services offerings. The sophisticated rules engine allows interactive rules to be designed and distributed over the network. The rules are executed while interacting with the customers over POS (point of sale) terminal or ATM terminal or multimedia kiosks. This is interactive marketing at the point of contact. The product can be used at delivery part of CRM initiative 

The m-cast™ products are designed and developed using state-of-the-art technology and tools. Jasmine is used as the object infrastructure for developing the server components, XML is used for information exchange and Java is used as the development language. The products are designed for mission critical deployment and facilities like remote operations and systems management are provided.

Innovation

The goal of achieving worthwhile returns on advertising spend is becoming more and more difficult as the mediums used to deliver advertising continue to diversify. The tendency today is to deliver advertising at the point of purchase, whether that be at the shop front, the POS or the Web Site. As more vendors extend their multi-media advertising campaigns to these types of location, the difficulty of targeting their messages to the appropriate consumers increases. The paradox is that vendors have never had so much demographic information on their customers from which targeted messages can be delivered.

Now, for the first time m-cast™ multi-media advertising system allows vendors to harnesses the wealth of demographic information to schedule advertising to reach the right customers at the right time. For instance, web portals can use m-cast™ to manage thousands of banner advertisements such that the most appropriate ads are displayed to specific users of that Portal. Alternatively, retail organisations with widely distributed outlets can schedule different plasma screen delivered advertising to individual stores at different times of the day. This will allow large retail organisations to manage enterprise wide campaigns but also provide the capacity to schedule local organisations to advertise in specific store(s) only. 

The benefits of using m-cast™ multi-media advertising system include;

• Allows advertisers to provide very targeted campaigns.

• Facilitates the management and scheduling of multiple advertisements across multiple locations.

• Enhances the attractiveness of particular advertising mediums thus increasing advertising revenue.

Performance

The m-cast™ system is designed to be totally scalable and will manage an unlimited array of different advertising media, locations, servers, and screens all at the same time. 

Potential

The potential of m-cast™ is unlimited due to the market it targets, the delivery of multi-media advertising.

Large Retail Organisations
Organisations with multiple outlets can benefit from m-cast™ by being able to be very specific about which ads to run at which outlets at which time. By using the power of m-cast™ dimensions, retail organisations can offer advertising customers more choice in the locations they advertise their goods and at what time of the day.

Large Retail Outlets.
Organisations that manage shopping malls and centres can use m-cast™ to run very different advertising schedules on individual plasma screens. For instance, a plasma screen located in a Food Court could have a very different selection of advertisements running than a plasma screen located in a large Department store attached to the same shopping mall. Given this type of scenario, the shopping mall manager can generate higher advertising revenues because they can run significantly different advertisements on different plasma screens and the advertisers benefit from having targeted advertising at the point of purchase.

Internet Vendors.
Organisations with Internet presence depend largely on revenues from banner ads to maintain viability. Many of these Web sites store large amounts of demographic and statistical information about the individuals who visit them. With m-cast™ Banner Advertising System, e-business organisations can harness this valuable information to deliver very targeted banner advertisement to their users. With m-cast™, organisations can manage literally tens of thousands of banner ads and can have completely different ads scheduled to appear depending on which user has logged in. Not only can the e-business increase advertising revenues but the advertiser can run different versions of the same banner ad to enhance its effectiveness.

In Summary m-cast™ Banner Ad system:

1. Provides end-to-end solution to Publishers which help them compete against advertising channels

2. Enables precision marketing at the time of contact

3. Solution designed to maximise advertising revenue.

m-cast product has been developed as a collaboration between FAST and IOSS Pty Ltd

Other information the judges should know

Web-site: www.fastware.com 

Requested method of presentation

Product Demonstration in our office at Frenchs Forest.

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