September 27, 2007

Movie DVDs at Kiosks

Opening doors for DVD-burning kiosks. One of the earliest licensing programs will come from Sonic Solutions Inc., of Novato, Calif., which is offering a copy-protection program called Qflix designed for burn-to-order DVDs. They are working to license it to...



Primera and Sonic Partner on Disc on Demand

Primera signs on with Sonic and CSS/Qflix. Impact of this is that major studios are not going to let their content be inappropriated transcribed and the CSS/Qflix ensures that the quality of the content is 100% consistent. It's an important...



September 26, 2007

Tradeshows - Prepaid Card Summit

October 24 and 25th in London is the Prepaid Cards Summit 2007. Banking group includes, Alliance & Leicester, JP Morgan, Western Union, Visa Europe. Retail has Sainsbury. Nice speaker set....



New Panel PC from IBM Released

The retail group at IBM announced their new Anyplace terminal (ie panel pc). This is their response to NCR and their new Advantage pane lpc series. Notable is the panel pc/terminal now comes in 19". Also the Intel cpu and...



September 25, 2007

Music download - Amazon selling music now without DRM

Matter of time and it finally happened: Amazon is selling music and to sweeten the deal all of the music (2.3 million with UMG and EMI signed on) is unprotected (no DRM). And to cap it off, it;s cheaper than...



September 21, 2007

KIOSK Case Study - Hotel Concierge

TTI Brings ‘Concierge on Demand’ Services to Hotels as Guest-Service, Revenue Tool Portland Square Hotel in NYC is first to use the self-service entertainment ticketing system; Ideal for independent hotels with fewer than 200 guestrooms...



Prepaid Card Dispensing ATMs Debut

Interesting solution where ATM utilizes cash dispenser in order to dispense prepaid cards. If so, it's a ready made "additional function" that ATMs could use maybe use to benefit....



September 13, 2007

Gaming market - MMORPGs revenues to explode

The estimate for total gaming revenue for 2011 is $48.88 billion, and Strategy Analytics expects MMO revenues in that year to equal $5.728 billion, which would put MMO titles at 11.7 percent of the market. If the numbers are accurate,...



Gaming Console Market -- Nintendo Passes Microsoft

Financial Times reported today a new leader in the next-generation consoles and it's Nintendo with its Wii. I can't remember the last time that Microsoft entered a market as new entrant, then took over and led the market, and then...



September 11, 2007

Music kiosks - Starbucks goes wireless with iTunes iPod

Next test iteration for Starbucks is now the wireless iPods, iPhones, etc. Announcement on Wednesday was made of new agreement. Starbucks had been one of the pioneers trying music burning to CDs in the past....



Net Neutrality Ruling By Justice Department

Interesting development where Justice Department comes down on side against net neutrality citing need for infrastructure and innovation. It's worth noting that the Internet was overbuilt in last phase and 90% of fiber is still unused. Great exchange between McCurry...



Gaming Market - HP Makes Foray into Game PC Hardware

A year after Dell bought Alienware and started getting into higher end multimedia desktop and laptops for gaming, here comes HP with its purchase of Voodoo. They have new $2500 system named Blackbird (which is or was coolest spy...



September 10, 2007

Sports Wagering Kiosk

Nice reference story "blast from the past" with 2004 story on Wagering stations for Vegas. The latest iteration is the Hooters iteration....



September 06, 2007

Airline Check-In Kiosks

Didn't take long for the acquisition of RTE for their scanners to show up in 3M passport line....With more than 6,000 kiosk readers already installed, 3M and 3M Rochford Thompson are the leading providers of travel and identity document readers...