John Curran of mCosm
This week we have a guest blogger: John Curran, CEO of mCosm, our affiliate company.
PCs today are commodities with little differences between brands except for logos and prices. When it comes to interactive kiosks, however, product selection is both complicated and critical to project success. For a good example of how to choose the right kiosk, check outside the meeting rooms at a large New England university. (I can’t name it here, but you know the school.)
Unattended kiosks should be sturdy, easy to install, and have consistent BIOS for the life of a project. For this project, a software company supplied the university with an event-management system. This involved installing small custom kiosks to serve as automated “room card” displays outside each of the meeting rooms in a conference area of the university’s student center. Thanks to the EMS, students walking down the hallways could tell at a glance what meetings were in progress.
Micro Industries Touch&Go Pricechecker used as Conference Room Digital Signage
The original kiosks were the only units available with the application programming interface (API) needed to integrate with the EMS. But they also had a drawback—they used 5V DC power and had to be within eight feet of an electrical outlet. The prohibitively high cost of installing additional outlets meant that most of the kiosks were situated beyond eight feet. Not surprisingly, this led to continual hard-drive failures. Worse, performance was very slow and the kiosks were prone to overheating. The kiosk vendor didn’t offer repair services, either.
Looking around for an alternative to these troubled room-card kiosks, the university settled on the Pricechecker unit from Micro Industries. Our retail kiosk might sound like an odd solution for an academic setting, but it worked extremely well. The Pricechecker is a hardened kiosk with a patented passive cooling system to keep it from overheating. Power Over Ethernet Plus means it can be placed as much as 300 feet away from an outlet. The Pricechecker also has consistent BIOS to ensure that the applications won’t be affected when new units are added.
The university developed a simple graphical user interface (GUI) to replace the first application. (It helped that the EMS had a well-documented API.) Today, the university says, its Pricechecker kiosks not only provide rock-solid performance, they’re also less expensive and have larger, brighter displays than the original units.
Clearly, not all kiosks are created equal. A kiosk that combines ruggedness, performance, style and price come only from a company that designs, manufactures and sells it directly to the user—a company like Micro Industries. Give us a call sometime.
