Article

2002: A Year in Review

Self-Service emerged as a hot-button topic for those who follow kiosks in 2002, and more of the same is expected next year.

January 12, 2003

The kiosk industry, still feeling its youth and finding its way through a troubled economy, latched on to a new theme in 2002 that could fuel its growth. By adopting the term "self-service" as its own, kiosk-ers began focusing their efforts more on customer convenience in 2002.

Whether the application brings bandwidth to a bookstore, eases the hiring process or helps the hungry order hamburgers, kiosk applications that made life easier for individuals were the ones that made news during the year.

Industry leaders took notice of the trend. Kiosks.org Association, though still in its infancy, formally moved toward a self-service emphasis at its fall meeting. Membership in the organization grew to more than 200, and the KOA board expanded to include more user-members.

Craig Keefner

Craig Keefner, executive director of KOA, said he believes simply being known as a self-service-focused group will help his organization's reputation.

"The kiosk industry will be better served under the banner of self-service, because that's something corporations understand internally," he said in an October interview (Link: see story "Surge in Self-Service".)

"The word has a technology connotation to it," he said. "It's a public-service device. `Kiosk' doesn't apply as well inside the circle of decision of whether to deploy and how. As a word it is gaining, however, in its use as a term in messages from business to its customers. We can better talk to potential deployers about customers and improving relations with those customers with the name self-service."

In a more recent discussion, Keefner talked about the steps he's already taken toward a self-service mindset. At the Web site, www.selfservice.org, owned by Association parent NetWorld Alliance, Keefner has posted a mission statement for "Self-Service Association." It reads, in part:

"The mission of the Association, the self-service association is to identify and promote the interests of companies engaged in the self-service industry. The Association provides self-service news and kiosk news, Research and Statistics as well as forums for discussing industry issues and best practices."

Keefner exhibits a sense of excitement about the industry's future focus. "Self-service better reflects the current fears and business priorities of members," he said. "As opposed to unique kiosks, self-service should be an integrated philosophy, a component of doing business by enabling the customer."

Of course it wasn't just Keefner who jumped aboard the Self-Service bandwagon in 2002. Here's some other notable news items from the KioskMarketplace archives:

Those are some of the highlights covered by KioskMarketplace in 2002, culled from more than 600 unique news and feature items produced on the site. In January, we undertook a risky assignment - predicting the future of the industry for 2002.

Our view was that there were two alternatives for 2002 - strong growth vs. sluggish disappointment.

We wrote, "If the economy regains its health and the kiosk industry continues finding dynamic applications, then the future is bright. But if the economy continues to struggle, what is beyond the brink could be very dark indeed."

The final tally for 2002 fell somewhere between those two extremes. Certainly the economy didn't bounce totally back to the boom of 2000, but it didn't totally flounder either. Signs of optimism abound, including the sheer number of rollouts in various stages of deployment and the successes touted by deployers of current projects.

The focus on self-service brings additional excitement for anyone forecasting the industry's fortunes in 2003. Consumer demand makes the move to self-service devices an inevitability in some retail environments, as individuals increasingly come to expect self-service devices in many retail environments. 

Keefner, who has followed kiosk developments since starting Kiosks.org in 1993, said the shift to corporatization in the industry was the most significant development in 2002.

"The supply chain is altered, becoming more corporate," he said. "There's a new partner in the supply chain, and that is corporations like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Gateway. Historically, people just called in to kiosk companies, but now they're also calling corporations and asking for ideas on kiosks."

Keefner said that means that more kiosk projects are coming to traditional kiosk companies through corporations that already have relationships with the customers, such as retailers. That means that instead of dealing directly with customers, many traditional kiosk companies have become vendors or suppliers to those corporations. And, it could mean more significant projects and kiosk deployments.

As for 2003, Keefner said it should be a big year for the industry, especially as it embraces self-service.

"The self-service angle will increase," he said. "It will become the inflection point at which projects originate. It will be the driver for corporations."

[Editor's note: Info Touch Technologies became Tio Networks in April 2006.]