KIOSK SHOW: Record number of attendees come to Orlando

ORLANDO, Fla.--More than 425 people had registered at the start of The Kiosk Show, organizers announced today, making the Orlando event the best-attended yet of the end-market-oriented show.

Attendees represented such companies as Walt Disney, L.L. Bean, and Speedway SuperAmerica. Speakers from Dell, Cisco Systems and Apunix Computer Services were on the docket.

NetWorld Alliance, which owns the show (and publishes this site), purchased The Kiosk Show last summer and held the show's annual fall event in Boston. The Florida show marks the first time The Kiosk Show has been held as a spring event.

Greg Swistak, a senior vice-president for NetWorld, said that the number of paid attendees was "three times" that of the Boston show, which itself set a record.

The two-day exhibition kicked off with a series of pre-conference workshops, with speakers including Swistak, Alex Richardson (managing director, Selling Machine Partners), Sylvia Berens (vice-president, Apunix) and Francie Mendelsohn (president, Summit Research Associates).

Topics included kiosk basics, various formulas for calculating deployment return-on-investment, and systems integration.

In her workshop, Berens had words of encouragement for the end-market attendees who might be considering a deployment of their own.

"The kiosk industry has been around for the last 10, 15, 20 years," she said. "But only within the last five years has the industry grown, and many expect it to become a billion dollar industry as time moves out."

Swistak, giving a "Kiosks 101"-type workshop, introduced the audience to the basic types of kiosk applications and discussed the components of self-service devices generally.

In the afternoon, two tracks of seminars covered topics such as the characteristics of successful deployments, how to write RFPs and the impact of placement on kiosk expectations.

In his look at the top kiosk deployments, Joseph Grove, editor of Kiosk magazine, said that one of the most important elements was to look at the kiosk as a serious business decision-not as a lark with technology.

"When we were in the Internet years in the late '90s, many people thought that the nature of business had changed and that you could make money by losing it," he said. "Just because you have a new tool doesn't mean the nature of the job has changed."

Bob Fincher, executive vice-president for NetWorld Alliance, conducted a general session entitled, "The State of the Art in Kiosk and Self-Service Solutions."

"Customers want to use self-service. They are fed up with poor customer service. They want to have it their own way," he said, talking about the growth of the technology in the retail environments. "I predict that doing sales with self-service devices will continue to grow. It's not realistic today to have an employee that can do all that a self-service device can do."

Exacerbating the consumer frustrations driving the self-service growth is a whopping 78-percent annual turnover among retail workers. By they are trained, Fincher said, they leave, and consumers are thus virtually always confronted by uninformed-or worse, apathetic-store representatives.

The afternoon concluded with an exhibit-floor reception for attendees and guests.