Six hundred exhibitors are gathered here in the Windy City this week at GlobalShop 2013. The range of products and services on display is fantastic—everything from interactive digital signage to mannequins, from logistics software to shelving and end caps. And everywhere you turn on the gigantic floor at McCormick Place, you hear someone questioning, discussing or worrying about omnichannel retailing.
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the 125th Anniversary Celebration of Belk’s Department Store in Charlotte, NC. Micro Industries demonstrated a fashion experience touchscreen application on our Touch&Go Messenger 46P Lollipop as part of a technology display sponsored by Intel.
But have you ever tried to buy a decent pair of jeans?
This was the headline in a recent MIT Technology Review magazine cover attributed to Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin who joined Neil Armstrong on the first manned mission to the moon in 1969 (see the online article “Why we can’t solve Big Problems” by Jason Pontin). Eight years earlier, the then president John F.
I recently had the opportunity to attend CETI Industry Day at Ohio State University's College of Engineering. The Center for Enterprise Transformation and Innovation (CETI) (http://www.ceti.cse.ohio-state.edu) is a program funded partially by the National Science Foundation and partially by industry partners like Micro Industries. The program serves as a vehicle for industry and the university to collaborate on computer science oriented research projects.
This month, Micro announced a new Recycling and Incentive Program. Our program provides customers the opportunity to upgrade older Touch&Go Messenger, Paige and PriceChecker models to the latest Touch&Go Computers at a substantial discount, while providing an environmentally friendly method of disposing the older product.
We are now seeing more deployments relying solely on the cellular approach as the main method of communicating with remote systems as the cost for dedicated land lines continue to increase. With this approach there are some basic issues that need to be addressed to ensure the stability of the interactive applications and the security of your systems.
When was the last time you used a smart phone application that just locked up on you and quit? Probably not too long ago. There’s a great selection of different phone apps available, but a lot to be desired in as far as how they actually work. We’re kind of opinionated on this topic since we’ve been developing interactive touchscreen and smart phone applications for many years. Our customers expect things to work dependably and consistently, especially when a transaction is involved.
At LogicJunction, an interactive-software development company that specializes in interactive hospital wayfinding, we created the LogicJunction Wayfinder to improve the hospital experience for patients and visitors alike.
It appears that the relationship between Intel and Apple is benefitting the entire computer community. The introduction of the Ivy Bridge Processor family by Intel has transformed the processors from simple computer engines to media processors.
The quality of any electronic product is directly related to the manufacturing process. You can tell a great deal about any CEM by looking at first-pass test yields—the number of assemblies that pass electrical testing compared with total assemblies manufactured.
It was our pleasure to host a meeting for the Ohio State University Design Circle last week. The Design Circle is a university sponsored student group in the Department of Design and is composed of students studying Industrial Design, Interior Design and Visual Communications Design. Their youthful enthusiasm and insightful questions as we toured the facility was refreshing.
I recently returned from GlobalShop in Las Vegas, where we introduced our newest Touch&Go Messenger 65 Digital Lollipop™ 3Dg system. My feet are aching and I’m a bit jet-lagged, but I can’t complain—after all, the Lollipop 3Dg was a huge hit.
I recently returned from New York and our annual excursion to the National Retail Federation’s winter blowout, Retail’s BIG Show. The huge crowd of retailers was a welcome sight. All the exhibitors agreed that attendance was way up from recent years.
To differentiate themselves from the next guy, exhibitors today must elevate their game. They have to provide not only the basic, traditional attendee experience, but also an engaging, interactive digital experience—just as retailers have learned to do over the past five years.
After supplying medical systems to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for many years, Micro Industries introduced our specially designed medical computers under the brand name Touch&Care®.
You might have read about MercBank’s participation in ArtPrize in a recent ArtsPost blogfrom the Washington Post. The bank is hosting seven artists in a pop-art gallery at 48 West Fulton Street, in the center of downtown. There, in addition to the art, you’ll also see the bank’s two dynamic interactive kiosks, which we built right here at Micro Industries.
You’re investing in interactive digital signage or retail kiosks for your store(s). What should you keep in mind? Here are eight key things to help ensure your success.
I recently was privileged to take time away from interactive digital signage to be a judge at the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum at The Ohio State University. It was inspiring!
The big issue facing the industry is standardizing touch operations so they can be effectively integrated into engaging software applications. That will all take time. Here at Micro Industries, meanwhile, we’re working with a variety of touchscreen technologies (capacitive, SAW and IR) to insure that our customers have access to the very best multi-touch technology on the market today and in the future.
The fact is that everything will be interactive sooner rather than later - from mundane tasks to the more exotic ones - in hospitals and clinics to retail stores to office buildings.
I work mainly on embedded-computer design, so I’ve had little contact with Oracle or data-center operations. All that changed at Oracle Open World 2010 in September in San Francisco. Intel invited Micro Industries to demonstrate the “Social Sun” application we developed with Sunglass Hut. It became part of Intel’s keynote presentation to show the power of linked database systems.
We’ve been reviewing how best to deploy interactive kiosk computer systems into retail settings. In the first of our three parts, we considered the management requirements and Intel’s excellent Active Management Technology (AMT). In Part 2, we looked at the five basic communications choices with an interactive network. Now, wrapping up, we’ll address how to get everything into the field and functioning.
Any kiosk management system has to communicate with a central server to provide status information and update applications. That makes the communications network a critical component in deploying your interactive systems.
Interactive kiosk computer systems seem to be popping up everywhere. Exotic implementations attract and engage retail customers to promote a product or brand. For many retailers, this involves a relatively straightforward implementation on a few interactive displays. Problems expand exponentially, though, when you scale up to hundreds or thousands of displays.
In the United States and around the world, we’ve come to accept the premise that manufacturers design products with shorter and shorter lifecycles . . . that we’ll throw these products away once they’re no longer useful.
Here at Micro Industries, we offer retailers one of the most advance queueing systems available. We designed our Touch&Go Checkout Director™ to manage multiple cueing lines. This gives a retailer several options for controlling checkout flow, so that customers don’t disrupt in-store traffic patterns.
Everyone at Micro Industries gets together around July 4 every year to celebrate the fact that we still manufacture products here in Westerville, Ohio.
