In today’s digital world, the idea of receiving a printed catalogue the size and weight of a small paving slab through the post for the purposes of ordering goods for home delivery seems exotically quaint and old-fashioned. But in their prime, catalogue retailers were not just powerhouses of consumerism. In many respects, they laid the [...]
Here at Acante, we love a good story of kiosk innovation that showcases the endless potential of this wonderfully flexible technology. This month, our collective eye was caught (excuse the pun!) by news of Eyebot, a US-based start-up that has developed a self-service vision test kiosk. Currently being trialled in several shopping malls, the kiosks [...]
As digitisation continues with its global takeover, the list of ordinary day-to-day tasks we can complete virtually, remotely - whatever you want to call it - continues to grow and grow. You don’t have to be that old to remember a time when mailing someone meant pen, paper and a stamp, payments were mostly made [...]
In the hotel industry, the quality of the guest experience has long been closely associated with the quality of service provided by staff. We see that summed up in the word ‘concierge’, which in its modern usage is synonymous with the world of luxury hotels and attentive front-of-house staff who not only greet guests but [...]
Remember the days when you had to wait for a new bank, ID or membership card to arrive in the post? Ok, trick question - in a lot of cases, that’s still the world we live in. But it doesn’t have to be that way any more. Self-service kiosk technology has changed a lot of [...]
As visual creatures, human attention tends to focus on whatever draws the eye most. So with kiosks, functionality centres around the touchscreen interface. In fact, it’s no accident that the vast majority of computerised devices, from smartphones to PCs, are operated via a graphic user interface (GUI) of some sort. It fits with the way [...]
One of the classic errors businesses make with new technology is putting all their focus on the onboarding phase and expecting results to automatically follow. The underlying assumption here is that the simple act of adopting tech is sufficient to transform and improve operations. But it’s not technology per se that brings results. It’s how [...]
Kiosks are best known for providing self-service ordering and checkout options in retail and hospitality. But there’s an argument to say that the most common (or at least the most broadly applicable) use for kiosks is as information points. From airports to libraries, office complexes to hospitals, transport hubs to museums and other leisure attractions, [...]
It was Alan Turing, code-breaking war hero, computer science pioneer and all-around mathematical genius, who gave one of the earliest versions of the much-recycled “the machines are taking over” quote. It was during a pretty obscure lecture given in 1951 that Turing suggested that humanity would “at some stage… have to expect the machines to [...]
In our last blog, we tackled the issue of the high shrink rates being reported at supermarket self-checkout points, as customers supposedly take advantage of ‘weak’ security. Our perspective is that the weakness isn’t something inherent in the technology, but rather in the way it is being deployed, without the kind of checks appropriate to [...]
