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The buzz at KioskCom

KIOSKmarketplace Editor Michael Jackman has been walking the floor every day for you. Here are some issues and impressions from this year's gathering.

April 1, 2002 by

ORLANDO, Fla. - KioskCom 2001 is a sensuous place. Curvaceous designs and rich media screens are parts of these enticing, state-of-the-art kiosks. They do everything, it seems, but shine your shoes.

Today's technology makes almost anything seem possible. Superfast gigabit networks can stream television to kiosks, commuters can get the real-time location of public transportation from Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) data on a kiosk map and gigahertz processors can display rich media in an eyeblink. Despite the technological maturity available to kiosk makers, they must still contend with basic human issues. At KioskCom 2001, attendees had opportunities to delve into these key issues. Here are a few of them:

Remote management

Remote management boils down to an essential truism: you can't be in more than one place at a time. Yet businesses may find that they've left out a key factor when budgeting for large kiosk deployments: accounting for many machines crying for attention at once, like babies in a nursery. Remote management software should enable many of the features already familiar to office network administrators. Robust software ought to allow kiosk administrators to perform the following tasks from the office or from a laptop on the road:

·Make software upgrades

·Install new software

·Restart the machine

·Manage advertising displays

·Control the kiosk from a distance

·Configure the kiosk's computer hardware

·Control each separate kiosk screen

·View reports of the kiosk's status

·Apply changes to one machine, or any combination of machines

These and many more features of strong remote management solutions will conserve staff resources and make for better use of kiosk networks, especially when these networks are scattered over a wide geographic area. For more information on remote management, check out the KIOSKmarketplace feature, "The chances are remote."

ADA compliance

The future of kiosk deployment will certainly be influenced by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Chris Law, a researcher with Trace Research and Development Center, filled me in on details of the ADA requirements. The new Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which goes into effect this summer, requires federal agencies to make their information technology accessible to people with disabilities. According to Law, Section 508 makes compliance an issue for many government-supported kiosk deployments.

The regulation, in essence, requires government agencies to favor products with disability features built-in over equivalent products with less ADA compliance. For kiosk makers vying for government contracts, this allows marketplace competition to drive adherence to ADA guidelines.

Are there other compelling arguments for ADA compliance other than on federal projects? Yes. Ten to 15 percent of the population has some difficulty interacting with kiosks, Law said. This includes those who have difficulty hearing, seeing and manipulating the screen. Literacy issues are also an important concern, Law said.

Kiosk makers should take some comfort in the fact that disability features can be added for less than one percent of the cost of the kiosk, Law said. You can read Law's KioskCom 2001 presentation, "Kiosks and disability access," online.

The buzz about the bottom line

Off the record conversations with conference attendees often bring up the subject of return on investment (ROI) and the difficulty of calculating that return. It's a tricky subject with few clear solutions.

There is more than one way to look at ROI. On the one hand, there's the value of transactions compared to the cost of the machine. On the other hand, there's the idea that the very presence of the kiosk itself can drive sales.

For instance, a record store kiosk that lets customers search for artists and titles may drive sales by stimulating the kiosk user to purchase more records. As Mike Mayer, president of kiosk maker Frank Mayer and Associates remarked, "The ability for kiosks to drive sales is there."

Calculating precisely how kiosks do that is going to be increasingly important. Future studies will turn that art into a science. NCR, for example, is commissioning a study to measure some effects kiosks have on consumer choices, according to Kimberly Buell of NCR's retail solutions group.

One variable in ROI calculations is the quality of the kiosk itself. Have you ever bought a car that's a lemon? Robert Needham, president of Global Access Alliance Inc., has made a high quality kiosk standard one of his company's priorities. But a walk around the exhibit floor shows great variety. GAA is also promoting innovative ways to improve the ROI, such as  attaching lenticular displays to kiosks to increase advertising revenue.