Digital signage offers a product vendor or manufacturer the ability to place dynamic, changeable, multimedia displays in a classic brick and mortar retail environment. But developments in the kiosk industry are giving executives a new choice.
Interactive self-service devices have become very affordable, and have made tremendous gains in robustness and reliability. In addition, kiosk programming is increasingly updateable. The result is that for nearly the same cost as a digital signage system, the retailer can offer customers a fully interactive kiosk with more functionality than a digital sign, without sacrificing security or flexibility.
An example of the paradigm shift can be found in Home Depot stores. There, numerous vendors have deployed interactive kiosks to provide help and information on everything from paint to sealants. One such unit is the Ask Henry kiosk, developed by Apunix and Olea for the Henry Company, which markets products that solve many asphalt and roofing problems.
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The advantage for the vendor or manufacturer is that now an expert sales assistant is stationed permanently alongside its product display and available at all times. No longer does the customer have to hunt down an available store sales person, potentially to find that his or her knowledge of the problem or products is less than optimal.
The deployment presented a hurdle: Because of cost and other considerations in the retail environment, networking the devices was impractical, which meant there would be no centralized way to update or monitor them. If one was down or hung-up, the issue might go unreported.
The Henry Company, with extensive experience in both the digital signage and interactive kiosk market, chose Apunix to overcome the challenge. The California-based kiosk company applied its Kiosk-on-Chip, a solution that turns a kiosk from a fat PC into a diskless appliance with a solid state, read-only operating system.
Apunix used its Update-on-a-Chip solution, which in this case allows a Henry regional sales manager to visit Home Depot stores and update the kiosk simply by plugging a digital media device into the USB slot. The software automatically senses the presence of the update device and, after verifying that the media is a proper and legitimate update, takes over the installation process.
