- Retailers will embrace tablets and kiosks.
- Greater acceptance of kiosks in consumer experience mix.
- Healthcare deployments on the rise
- Vending machines meet kiosks
- New technologies such as eye-tracking
All of those make a lot of sense. Some of the driving factors are:
- Declining cost & rising functionality of tablets
- Consumers are in fact driving business technology finally and the level of consumer competence is only rising.
- Between government mandates, new competitive choices, the sheer cost of drugs and medicine coupled with an Eldercare segment that is about to explode,
- Efficiency drives automation. And employees are major factor.
Here are some more thoughts I have on what I expect.
- The conventional desktop and 4:3 interactive display running Windows will continue to be marginalized by cheap native Android devices (with Ice Cream Sandwich) married to 22" inch 16:9 touch and multi-touch displays. Native iPad apps will push this paradigm shift as well.
- With a strong Christmas season in the pocket and an improving economy, major retailers will invest more heavily than ever before in technology including emerging mobile transaction protocols and widgets.
- Retail automation and next generation vending will become a major segment
- Mobiles & handhelds will find new purpose as companion remote controls for large format "interactive" displays
- Tablet usage will accelerate and MS may surprise everyone and find a new showcase platform for Win8 and Win9 (after retiring Ballmer).
- Plethora of IDEs such as Eclipse will enable companies to do even more in house application development.
- Analytics and metrics chant will be even louder than before, but the eventual silence (non-execution) will still be pervasive. That last data mile is the hardest to traverse (despite being easier than ever).
- Big surprise prediction -- with all the talk of wallets (Google & Verizon being the big one), has anyone noticed how many units Amazon with its Kindle (and built in purchasing) sold this Christmas. See next point...
- Putting technology in someones hand is 30% of the equation. Converting them to a transaction (the quicker the better) is the other 70%.
Down the road (2 years) I wonder what the impact will be when China finally breaks free from Western technology & its CPUs and O/S, and builds/engineers it's own cpus and own operating systems (likely to resemble iOS and Android if the past is any indicator).
A couple of opportunities to see all of these iterations are coming up quickly with CES in Las Vegas, and then NRF in New York. Rumors are that Apple is going to make a big announcement in January in New York (why not NRF...).
Meanwhile back at Ranch Conversion -- KIOSK Information Systems will be at NRF (#3129) and will be unveiling a brand new product family consisting of never before seen state-of-the-art retail dispensing machines. Bring your camera and see things you've never seen (but always wanted to). Send me an email to [email protected] and I'll help schedule a demo (and not behind closed doors as Charlie Rich would sing). Reminds me of the good old days of Room 504...
Happy New Year and thanks again to Cherryh at Kioskmarketplace!
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