Smaller kiosk rollouts, the new wave or new mistake?

The ION kiosk in front of the Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vt., doesn't look much like a typical kiosk — mostly because it isn't.

In a curving, retro-futuristic looking shape, the ION kiosk integrates what amounts to a small art gallery with a more kiosk-like touchscreen information display, providing remotely updatable information about local events, historic sites and services.

But the prototype kiosk from Williamstown, Mass.-based ION Kiosks LLC also seems to be a kind of prototype for another development in the kiosk marketplace: the one-off or a la carte kiosk deployment.

The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., has installed a one-off kiosk as a way to unobtrusively solicit donations from visitors; the Indian Navy recently installed a one-off kiosk at its controller's offices in Mumbai; an East Coast healthcare supply company recently installed two informational kiosks in a New Jersey hospital; and another company provides kiosks to individual churches for self-service donations.

And even some larger companies are starting to consider smaller rollouts, says kiosk industry analyst Francie Mendelsohn, president of Summit Research Associates Inc.

Mendelsohn said she recently worked with a large multinational corporation on a rental kiosk project, with initial planning for a minimum 50 kiosk rollout in six to eight different locations. But because of the economic slowdown, the rollout plan was reduced to two kiosks in one location, she said.

"I said to them, ‘You shouldn't do it at all,'" Mendelsohn said.

Mendelsohn told the project planners that the small rollout would likely have one of two results: the project would perform poorly and get scrapped even though it might simply have been a bad location; or conversely, the project might seem to work well and get greenlit, even though it might have worked just in that one location.

"Both assumptions are wrong, because the size of your pilot is just ridiculous," she said. "If you can't do 50 kiosks then you've got to do at least 20, and you've got to have four or five locations, spread out geographically."

Amber Alert Systems founder Wayne Merry, who also has plenty of previous experience in the kiosk space, says smaller deployments can make sense, though, because they reduce risk and allow for greater flexibility in adapting rollouts.

Merry recalled a Brazililan installation he'd done with a black-and-gold colored kiosk, only to find out black and gold were the traditional colors for coffins, and another domestic installation in which customers clearly would respond better to a touchscreen-enabled kiosk than the non-touchscreen kiosk he'd installed — which prompted him to yank the first one and replace it with a touchscreen kiosk.

"With smaller deployments, you see you would much rather have 50 right than 200 wrong…You make a mistake at 200 locations, and it can be devastating," he said. "Sometimes it's important to do these things in these small stages so you're able to adapt."

Smaller entrepreneurs also are starting to get into the kiosk space now, either deploying or creating kiosks for deployers, Merry says, and they can't always afford or get credit for larger rollouts.

ION Kiosks LLC is starting small, both because the economy and investments are still sluggish and because it's still in the proof-of-concept stage, said ION co-founder Donald Sanders.

In addition to providing a public gallery space for local artists, the ION kiosk is intended to function as a kind of hyper-local community bulletin board that features local news, local activities and local businesses, all in an eye-catching design.

The "strange, spaceship-y thing" appearance of the kiosk — about 8 feet across by 7 feet high by 5 feet deep — is by design, Sanders says, to make the kiosk stand out from most of the "fairly nondescript" and "easily missed" kiosks out there. (There's also a smaller indoor/outdoor kiosk prototype that could be used to replace the traditional brochure racks common to motel lobbies, Sanders says.)

"It is an, if not unique, certainly specialized take on the information kiosk concept that does include this rather large art gallery," he said. "The idea was to make something that was radically different that would stand out in the landscape."

And while Sanders and partner Michael Horwitz have high expectations for the concept, because it potentially provides a service to a high number of neighborhood entities in any community, they are by necessity starting out small, for several reasons. They are seeing a great deal of interest, he says, but "nobody really wants to be the first one yet to jump in."

"We do intend to start fairly small, primarily because these are custom-built units. It's not something you can crank out on an assembly line yet," although they do have manufacturers gearing up to be ready to do just that, Sanders said. "We're starting small and we want to start local to prove the concept of the network locally first, before we go into other markets.

"But we know that the ION kiosk that is out there right now at the Bennington Museum is doing exactly what it is supposed to do, in that it is pulling people off the street who otherwise would not necessarily stop in at the museum."

In addition to the difficulties facing smaller entrepreneurs, Merry says two factors also are playing primary roles in the increasing number of smaller rollouts — the economy and the marketplace.

No. 1 is the still-sluggish economy, he says, and No. 2 is the market and the players who are going to be building kiosks for the market. It's not uncommon to hear about companies overextending themselves and then not being able to pay their debts — something he had a close-call experience with a little more than 10 years ago, he said.

"We're living in a scary time when you can figure that you're going to deploy kiosks for someone and then you find out they might not have the money to pay you," he said. "So the risk in producing smaller runs is a lot less than the risk for deploying a larger amount."

But when you get out of the retail kiosk space, like in the cases of the Bennington Museum and the National Cathedral, or like the recent upswing in the deployment of self-checkout kiosks in public libraries, smaller deployments or one-off deployments for government or non-profit organizations can be the way to go, Mendelsohn says.

"There are places where one or two do make sense," she said. "Depending on the type of kiosk application, deploying a very few could make perfect sense. In retail, no, it's just a total waste."