Aug 09

Those Dreaded Words: Back-to-School Shopping

By Michael Curran DOOH Trends, Digital Signage, Digital Signage Content Management, Queue Management, Queuing Systems, Technology Comments Off

Queue Management

Touch&Go Checkout Director

It’s time for streams of parents to drag their reluctant kids into stores all over the country to try on school clothes and pick up tons of classroom supplies. As if dealing with adolescent attitudes weren’t enough, many retailers make it difficult to check out and leave once you have your merchandise in hand. Invariably, I get stuck in the slowest line.

It’s no wonder that time-crunched parents are increasingly purchasing online these days. But that can be problematic, too, especially when buying clothes. (Just how much did that kid grow over the summer, anyway?) This leaves the dreaded trip to the mall. Fortunately, some retailers are adopting strategies to lessen your pain; these range from adding unconventional checkout stations to using cueing systems. As a New York Times article said recently, “The science of keeping lines moving, known as queue management, is a big deal to big business.”

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 queuing lines. This gives a retailer several options for controlling checkout flow, so that customers don’t disrupt in-store traffic patterns. The Checkout Director incorporates one or more all-in-one computer display systems and provides both voice and visual indications of the next available checkout register. These announcements are triggered either by a wireless connection activated by a store associate at the point of sale (POS) or directly through a LAN connection. Available with a 32-, 46- or 60-inch LCD display, the Checkout Director is effective for stores with as few as four POS systems; it’s also scalable for up to 64 checkout lines.

Our system gives customers an immediate indication when a checkout register is available. A store associate simply presses a button after completing a customer transaction. This notifies the Checkout Director to display an animated number that indicates the open checkout line, along with an audio announcement. The process improves checkout times as much as 40 percent.

Micro’s Checkout Director also can support up to seven queuing lines when space is at a premium. It even can support separate express lines for customers buying a limited number of items. All of these features are easily configurable through a smart phone.

You might remember all of this the next time you’re stuck in a checkout line, loaded down with notebooks, paper, crayons and book bags, with harried sales associates waving their arms and shouting for the next person in line. Then you could suggest that the store install a Checkout Director to improve your customer experience . . . because some other retailer certainly will.

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May 24

Report from NYC: The SGH Launch Party

By Michael Curran Creative Content for Digital Signage and Kiosks, DOOH Trends, Digital Signage, Digital Signage Content Management, In-store Social Networking, Interactive Digital Signage, Retail Kiosks, Technology Comments Off

With all the glitz and glamour of a Hollywood premier, Sunglass Hut opened its flagship store on Fifth Avenue late last month. SGH then hopped the Atlantic to open its London flagship store with just as much fanfare on Oxford Street the very next night!

A steady stream of celebrities, dignitaries and SGH execs talking with the press caused chaos on the New York sidewalks, where passersby strained for glimpses of Rachel Bilson, Coco Rocha, Zoe Kravitz and many others. Inside, we were greeted by an exquisitely choreographed show, with sleek models snapping pictures of other models posing in chic sunglasses. Everyone was encouraged to try on shades and pose for SHG’s innovative Social Sun system.

What exactly did Big Apple glitterati have to do with digital signage? We were invited to Fifth Avenue because Micro Industries Touch&Go Paige® is a key component of the fun. Our mCosm team developed the software named “Social Sun” by Sunglass Hut. Social Sun lets customers try on sunglasses, digitally capture and compare their looks, and share the images with family and friends. You can email the pictures, post them to Facebook or even upload them to the Social Sun page on Sunglass Hut’s website. In-store, you can also post pictures to our fantastic Touch&Go Messenger 65—in New York, our pictures joined the photos of the partiers who packed the event.

Micro Industries Mike and Mandy Curran

Sunglass Hut CEO Fabio d’Angelantonio said he wanted to make the Fifth Avenue store a better showcase for the company’s products than the simple glass counters for the shades Luxottica makes for such fashion houses as Prada, Chanel and Polo Ralph Lauren. “The New York and London flagships provide an opportunity to make the brand a consumer destination that showcases sunglasses like no other retailer in the world,” d’Angelantonio said later in London. Consumers own far fewer sunglasses than shoes, which he believes leaves significant potential for the category to expand if sunglasses are seen as essential fashion accessories.

To mark the NYC flagship launch, many of the fashion houses that work with Luxottica provided original artwork, which hung in a private showing room in the rear of the store. Such big fashion names as Dolce & Gabbana, Tiffany, Burberry, Gucci and many more expressed their best wishes in their trademark style.

Guest DJs Fab Moretti and Binki Shapiro of Little Joy provided the music, their rock theme adding to the event’s vitality. Jenny Lewis’ live performance was outstanding. It was a fabulous night that left our little Micro Industries contingent feeling energized and a long way from home. Toto, we aren’t in Ohio anymore!

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Apr 27

Report from Delaware: A New Angle on Digital Signage

By Michael Curran Creative Content for Digital Signage and Kiosks, DOOH Trends, Digital Signage, Digital Signage Content Management, Interactive Digital Signage, Kiosk Software No Comments »

Craig Johnson, Executive Director, and Victoria Prizzia, Exhibit and Interpretive Planning Director, of Interpret Green, Philadelphia, stand beside the Interactive Nature Now Table at DEEC.

Visit the sprawling new DuPont Environmental Education Center (DEEC) at the Russell W. Peterson Urban Wildlife Refuge along the Riverwalk at Wilmington, DE, and you’ll see much more than just water, sky and wildlife. Interactive exhibits and multimedia presentations there highlight the history of the marsh and focus on three of its natural residents—the osprey, snapping turtle and raccoon.

Designing the exhibits that encourage observation, exploration and investigation of the plants and wildlife fell to an interesting, green-savvy bunch from nearby Philadelphia. Interpret Green is a team of educators, artists, media developers and exhibition professionals. The group’s website states that the challenge at DEEC was to design a visitor-centric environment that “cultivates curiosity, inspires interaction, enhances personal meaning, and encourages learning and deeper questioning.”

That’s a big job, certainly. But Interpret Green accomplished it in part by using an all-in-one Touch&Go Messenger 65L from Micro Industries in a novel way. They turned it into a tabletop display, one big enough to provide a full-color, high-definition, interactive aerial view of the marsh and surrounding areas.

I admit, nobody here at Micro had thought about flipping a 65-inch Touch&Go unit onto its back like a turtle. We figured retailers would use the displays for interactive consumer kiosks, digital signage, store maps, advertising, messaging, product information, demos and television. Our friends at Intel were just as surprised as we were by how they use the 65L at DEEC. Seeing the Messenger 65L there became an “aha” moment for one of Intel’s Roving Reporter bloggers.

“It’s really a simple concept,” he wrote. “You take a large touchscreen digital sign/computer and lay it flat on a stand. Suddenly, the world changes.”
It just goes to show that even the manufacturer doesn’t always know how a good product will be used. We’re glad Interpret Green and DEEC showed us something new. When you think about it, a 212-acre wildlife refuge with a $10.9 million, four-story, 13,500-square-foot facility and extensive trail system has a very big story to tell. Naturally, they needed a big, handsome digital display to help tell it. And since the story is continually updating, Interpret Green chose mCosm to remotely manage and monitor the computers to make sure they are always current, operational and performing up to speed.

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Apr 05

What’s “HOT” ?

By Michael Curran Digital Signage, Fanless Computers, Retail Kiosks, Technology Comments Off

When it comes to computers “HOT” isn’t necessarily a good thing. Heat is the major contributor to computer system failures whether it’s from a power supply, a CPU fan or hard drive. Prolonged exposure to high temperatures will cause these devices to fail and take down your system. In a retail environment computer systems are subjected to conditions that significantly increase the probability of failures due to heat, therefore when selecting a computer system for an interactive digital signage application there are a few things to consider.

Today’s retail computers, digital signs and retail kiosks are designed to run under a very specific set of conditions. They’re expected to be in operation about 8 hours a day in an office or home environment (with typical temperatures ranging from about 60 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit) without a significant amount of dust or debris in the air. If you deviate much from these conditions, you can significantly reduce the life of a computer.

In a retail environment computers are expected to run as much as 24 hours a day reducing the life expectancy of a typical retail computer to about 1/3 of its normal life expectancy. Most in-store computer systems are hidden away in cabinetry or fixturing or are hung from ceilings where the temperature could be as much as 20 to 30 degrees above ambient conditions. Retailers are also very susceptible to the impact of dust, from exposure to the outside, from cardboard boxes and even generated from receipt printers. This dust is drawn into the computers by fans and can significantly reduce the efficiency of the computers cooling systems eventually causing critical components to overheat.

To compensate for these issues computer component manufactures like Intel have designed thermal failsafe mechanisms into their chips like the Intel® Core™ i7 processor to protect the CPU in the event that the chip is subjected to temperatures outside its normal operating range. This minimizes the damage to one of the more expensive components in the system but it doesn’t prevent damage to other key components like the power supply, processor fan or even the disk drive where all of the systems application programs and data are stored.

When evaluating computer systems for a retail application the primary criteria for selecting a system should be the ability of the system to deal with the environmental stresses in a store.  A number of vendors like Micro Industries have developed “Retail Hardened” or “Ruggedized” computer systems that can survive in typical store environments. This typically involves using more expensive passive cooling technology, industrial grade components and mobile or solid state disk drives. All of these factors increase the cost of the system compared to standard retail computer systems but it will minimize the amount of downtime that a retailer will experience and downtime in retail translates into lost sales opportunities.

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