Yesterday an interesting digital signage news article came in: "Unicon Systems Ships the Helios Digital Signage System." My first reaction was, "hey, they spelled 'Helius' incorrectly." After some further investigation, I was made very aware of my mistake: Unicon is a completely different company entirely.

Helius--a Hughes Company based in Lindon, UT--has nothing whatsoever to do with Unicon Systems' new hardware piece known as the Helios. "The Unicon Systems Helios features a powerful compact Linux-based platform attached directly to the back of the display screen (no tuner board required). It offers dependable and secure content delivery over a range of network connections. The Helios also boasts minimal power consumption, low heat generation and is virtually maintenance free. Applications of the Helios platform include digital advertising, retail and transportation information display, point-of-sale, vending, kiosk and security systems." In short, it's a hardware device used specifically for digital signage applications.

After a visit to the Unicon Systems website I realized that the company is keeping with their Greek gods theme for the hardware pieces they already provide. Currently, they provide Zeus (a soon-to-be-released product), Apollo (a mobile product with a TFT color touchscreen), Aphrodite (a product still displayed on the site as "coming soon"), Pegasus (a  modular PC board with a dual-core ARM11 CPU) , Hermes (a mobile, Linux-based phone/PDA unit), and of course Helios. The interesting, and most alarming aspect is the fact that their digital signage-specific hardware piece nearly exactly resembles the brand owned by Hughes. In fact, after doing some reading, I realized that the Greek god Helius had various similar spellings in different literature, among them was Helios. This was not a good move for Unicon Systems. I smell legal action--especially since they specifically chose the name for the digital signage product.