Digital screens are not just taking over our children’s attention spans and personal interactions. They are also a rising force in business. From retail to restaurants, hospitals to hotels, events to education, the digital signage industry is booming. In retail alone, global sales of digital signs are worth upwards of $6bn a year and growing. [...]
It’s notoriously hard to track lines of cause and effect in the evolution of technology. For example, in the field of payments, NFC-based ‘contactless’ or ‘tap-and-pay’ cards first appeared at roughly the same time as chip-and-pin cards around the turn of the Millennium. And yet, for close to the next two decades, it seemed that [...]
Flexibility is a much sought-after quality in modern business. Companies look for recruits with flexible skillsets (and mindsets) that will enable them to adapt to different roles and challenges. Those with an interest in systems, processes and operational organisation talk up the need for ‘agility’ in an increasingly dynamic and changeable world. And, of course, [...]
Regular readers of this blog will know that one of our favourite things to eulogise kiosks about is their flexibility. Just looking through the posts we’ve made in recent months, that agility leaps out in the different use cases we’ve covered in 2025 alone. We’ve written about kiosks in hotels and restaurants, in airports and [...]
Everyone has probably heard of Amazon Go stores by now. Back when they were first launched in 2016, they were billed as trailblazers for a new era of ‘cashierless’ retail, utilising ‘just-walk-out’ technology that scans what customers take off a shelf, and charges them for it automatically via a mobile app. The concept has never [...]
Even our progressively tech-savvy world might not yet be ready for self-service justice. But given the backlog crisis hampering the UK court system right now, there’s a strong argument for giving self-service technology more of a role in legal administration. The backlog of court cases has been an issue since the COVID-19 pandemic. But despite [...]
We’ve written previously about the transformational impact kiosks have had in the QSR sector. But for dine-in restaurants, the love affair with self-service has been much more of a slow burn. There are some very good and obvious reasons for this, of course. Dine-in and QSR operate in very different ways. Fast food is all [...]
Regular readers will know we enjoy a story about innovative and inspiring uses of kiosks and related self-service technology. This month, this story caught our attention about the growing trend for book vending machines in the USA. The inspiring part is how many of these machines are supporting efforts to improve literacy rates. They’re being [...]
Remember DVDs? A recent story that caught our attention is the sad but hardly surprising demise of DVD rental company Redbox in the US. Back in the day, Redbox was a true pioneer of self-service kiosks. Its business model was based on placing vending machine-type kiosks where customers could rent DVDs from in and around [...]
The first time most people heard of biometric technology was when they got their first biometric passport. These futuristic-sounding travel documents have been the norm in the UK for close to 20 years, and the government issues some five million of them every year. ‘E-passports’ are still the most visible example of biometric technology in [...]
