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Polaroid Fotobar powers kiosks with Chrome

August 2, 2013

In the heyday of slide film, the word "chrome" was used to describe slide film. As film trails off into the sunset, Polaroid Fotobar executives are hoping Chrome will be a winner in the digital age. According to CITEWorld, the CIO of the Polaroid Fotobar retail imaging chain has settled on the Samsung Chromebox on which to build its kiosk platform. It's an interesting choice, considering the number of mature platforms already in existence.

In a post on the Google Enterprise blog, Polaroid Fotobar's George Garcia describes the choice: "For our photo kiosks, we wanted technology that delivers both a great customer experience and was simple to manage, so we could grow quickly," he wrote. "Customers like using Chromebox kiosks — they resume instantly, are lightning-fast at handling Web apps and basically crash-free. Our business colleagues are happy because the Chromebox is a fraction of the cost of other options we considered. And, as the tech team that has to make everything work, we're thrilled with how the Chromebox is performing."

Garcia says the simplicity of the device and low maintenance requirements mean the Fotobar staff — dubbed "phototenders" — can focus on customers, not IT issues. There are seven Chromeboxes in the Delray Beach, Fla., store and another 14 in a Washington, D.C., location. According to the CITEWorld post, Garcia reviewed Apple iPads and Windows tablets as alternatives, but chose the Chromebox to keep the cost per kiosk below $1,000. (Each station is comprised of a 22-inch Dell LED monitor and a mouse.) He can monitor each kiosk, regardless of location, with an administrative control panel.

The choice is certainly an interesting one. Photo kiosk hardware vendors are struggling to keep pace with the demands imposed by larger and larger digital images and greater capacity memory cards. It's not unusual today to have a 32 GB card with 1,000 images brought into a retailer. The Chromebox has relatively modest hardware specs — just 4GB of RAM and only 16GB of local storage — which means the kiosk will rely heavily on cloud connections. Garcia acknowledges this, in the CITEWorld article: "The only issue I'm seeing now is when someone comes in with a lot of photos on a flash drive. ChromeOS has a little bit of a problem getting the images that way and is a little slow."