The Future Of Retail: It’s All In The Kiosk
With an eye toward enticing retail consumers back into stores and saving retailers a bit in operating expenses, Intel headed to the National Retail Federation Convention this winter with an innovative in-store concept. Keen to demonstrate how technology can enhance rather than detract from the retail shopping experience, Intel revealed its sleek, futuristic digital signage and point-ofsale kiosk (see Figure 1).
As consumer shopping preferences shift to a self-service model—driven in large part by the e-commerce experience—the Intel kiosk includes many of the advantages of Internet shopping, such as real-time inventory access, promotional offers, expanded product details, and community reviews (see Figure 2).
Interactive Digital Display Kiosk by Intel
Figure 1: Intel’s sleek, futuristic digital signage and point-of-sale kiosk demonstrate how technology can enhance rather than detract from the retail shopping experience.
Interactive Digital Display Kiosk by Intel
Figure 2: The kiosk includes many of the advantages of Internet shopping including real-time inventory access, promotional offers, expanded product details, and community reviews.
The kiosk demo is based on Intel’s high-performance, energy-efficient, 45-nm Intel® Core™2 Duo mobile processor, which is currently powering millions of laptops and PCs. The chipset marks an upgrade from previous point-of-service platforms, as the Intel Core2 Duo processor reduces power consumption by 70% over older systems. At the same time, it vows to provide double the raw processing power. Lowering power consumption is just another way to save money while going green.
The platform also features Intel® vPro™ technology with Intel® Active Management Technology, which helps lower maintenance costs, improve power management, and provide retailers with security options like system diagnosis. Additionally, Intel vPro technology lets system administrators manage the kiosks remotely, making it possible to power down systems overnight to increase energy savings and reduce the need for technicians to go on-site for system maintenance.
The concept system supports a modular design that facilitates easy upgrades to a next-generation CPU. The kiosk includes a customizable, removable PC board and individual modules that can be added, removed, interchanged, or replaced to meet evolving business needs (see Figure 3).
- Posted originally by Nicole Freeman .
