Category: Automation

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Messaging with ZTEXT

ZTEXT is a newly released web service from ZEE Digital that solves a lot of communications for small businesses. The problem statement is that small businesses do not have a central way send SMS and MMS messages to their guests, customers, subscribers, and members. It is not effective to use a mobile phone to send a company official SMS for many reasons. How about if the employee is on vacation or loses their mobile phone that is used to send the message?

This is where ZEXT comes. With its web portal, businesses can centrally manage their SMS and MMS communications. There is a plethora of features as shown on the ZTEXT website.

In this post, we’ll go through basic way to send SMS messages with the ZTEXT web portal. After your portal instance is provisioned, log into your portal instance and then you arrive at the dashboard. Clicking on Messages will take you to the main Messages page.

Once in the main Messages page, you choose to Compose SMS.

Now you reach the Compose SMS page. From here you can will have to do a couple of easy tasks to send your message. The first is to select the number you are sending the SMS from. Some businesses may want to have multiple numbers for multiple purposes so ZTEXT is equipped to handle this requirement.

The second task is to select which number you want to send to. You can either manually enter the number or you can choose from contacts if you have already entered the contact into the portal.

So then, the third task is to enter your SMS message. And lastly before you click Submit, check your Messaging Compliance to ensure you are appending a compliance message for opt-out. And that’s it!

But wait, there’s more….

As shown on the features list, there is a lot of functionality on ZTEXT that are not covered in the post. For example, if you want to send promotional items to your customers, you can use the built in Canva integration on the ZTEXT portal to develop materials and distribute them. These’s a lot more and also ZTEXT can be customized to your needs.

If you are interested, reach out (info@zeedigital.net).

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Digital Signage For Everyone

Digital Signage is everywhere these days. What is it? Essentially, it is any type of media that can be displayed on an electronic screen such as a billboard. Here’s what Wikipedia notes.

Digital signage is a sub-segment of electronic signage. Digital displays use technologies such as LCD, LED, projection and e-paper to display digital images, video, web pages, weather data, restaurant menus, or text. They can be found in public spaces, transportation systems, museums, stadiums, retail stores, hotels, restaurants and corporate buildings etc., to provide wayfinding, exhibitions, marketing and outdoor advertising

Digital signage is useful for various businesses and non-profits. Here’s a couple of examples where it might be helpful to have digital signage:

  • Menus at restaurants
  • Informational videos at a waiting room
  • Religious messages in lobbies of places of worship
  • Event schedules at cultural centers or conferences
  • Streaming Live TV with sports news at a sports restaurant or bar

Building a Digital Signage solution can be fairly simple or also fairly difficult depending on what you want to achieve. The simplest form of digital signage is to stick a video or slideshow presentation loaded on portable memory device and plug that to your TV. This works however, it is difficult to change content and it is only one type of content that is being delivered.

Zee Digital is offering a solution that will assist businesses and nonprofits to achieve their messaging goals with digital signage. It is a service that connects your existing HDMI-included TV screen with a Zee Digital Signage Player (ZDSP).

HDMI on TV next to RCA connections

The dynamic content can be programed to change on a schedule, however, changes to the content on-demand would require a LAN or WIFI network connection to the Internet so that Zee Digital can push content down to the screen.

The video below at Zee Digital Labs gives a highlight of what the physical raw setup is and what type of content can be projected.

Here are more examples of the content available through digital signage.

Twitter Hashtag feed
Updates from news agencies in the form of a slide show
Restaurant menu

As you can see, there are various content that can be projected with Zee Digital signage. The example shown in the video and photos above are using a YouTube live feed so in this case, Internet Access is necessary.

See the Zee Digital page for contact information.

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iClever SmartHome Plug review

Imagine you can turn on lights or small devices remotely. Yes, everyone is doing it these days with their SmartHome devices. Zee Digital Labs, our testing outfit played around with the iClever Smart plug. Here’s what we found.

Scroll to the very bottom to see the testing video.

We start with our unboxing.

Here’s what we see when we open the box.

It came with two sockets.

And here’s a view of the device all around so you can see the prongs and the maximum amperage.

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Once you plug it in, you have to use the SmartLife App to pair it. Download the SmartLife application and register if you don’t have an account.

SmartLife for iOS devices

SmartLife for Android devices

It is fairly straight forward process. Now let us look at the SmartLife App. If you havent added your device, you can click on “Add Device”.

There are two ways to add your devices, either manually of Auto Scan.

For manually, pick the Lighting category and then Lightning Wifi).

We tried it with AutoScan. Make sure you click the iClever Device side button for 5 seconds straight and then start scanning on the SmartLife app.

Your iClever Device should be now detected.

Once you click Next, it will take you the device details. From here, you can turning on and off the plug.

There are three options here, Socket On, CountDown, or Schedule. We played around with the first two options.

Generally speaking, once the socket is turned on, the light turns on like this.

Finally, let’s go through a quick video demo.