Blockbuster, once the world’s largest chain of home video stores, plans to close upwards of 500 locations across the United States. A necessity due to lowered profits and pressure from net-based video rental services, the once-successful company plans to lower their operating size and focus on high quality store placements and retail outlets.

Alongside their decision, American DVD rental kiosk company NCR plans to capitalize on the wide open rental spaces. Their ‘Blockbuster Express’ DVD kiosk chain – a highly profitable business which licenses Blockbuster’s name directly – plans to operate in areas left without a Blockbuster rental outlet.

The DVD kiosk chain claims that business would resume as normal if Blockbuster were to go bankrupt. Citing their licensed brand name, the kiosk chain noted that their business is operated independently from Blockbuster, sharing only their marketing materials in order to receive greater levels of customer interest.

Los Angeles rental chain Movie Gallery

filed for Chapter-11 bankruptcy earlier this year. With a range of independent and franchised rental outlets struggling to remain profitable, the expansion of kiosk-based rental services could be good for studios, and

of course, for consumers.

Image:             http://www.flickr.com/photos/digiart2001/3951170293/

Hollywood’s major revenue generator – the DVD retail market – is under attack from a range of DVD rental kiosks, primarily the Redbox line of rental kiosks across North America. With film revenues dwindling and long-term rental rates, particularly from retail outlets, falling quite dramatically, Hollywood have begun an all-out offensive against the kiosk-based businesses.

Online rental company Netflix recently signed a 28-day delay contract with Hollywood’s largest studios, ensuring that films have a fair run on DVD before being brought online as a streaming product. With Redbox and other kiosk-based rental services facing the same delay, it appears that Hollywood’s cartel-style release strategies could result in lost earnings for kiosk companies.

However, Redbox is keen to fight back. With growing revenues and a potentially revolutionary business model, the ever-growing kiosk DVD rental company plans to offer a video streaming service to complement their kiosk-based rental outlets. Available as a paid monthly service, Redbox believe that the online service could potentially beat out rival Netflix and DVD rental outlets such as Blockbuster.

Whether the strategy will succeed or not is unknown. However, with Redbox’s recent success disrupting Hollywood’s retail strategy, it appears that almost anything is possible in the exciting kiosk industry.

Excuse us for name-dropping but it’s always nice to get a bit of national TV exposure, and it doesn’t come much better than a slot on BBC’s Working Lunch! 

The popular business, consumer and personal finance show that airs every lunchtime decided to feature our very own kiosks, focussing on how they are being used to help people get online. There are currently40 kiosks in Lisburn, N.Ireland, in public places such as colleges and supermarkets with plans to roll-out another 100 kiosks.

With the US release of Apple’s iPad pushing hundreds of thousands of technology fans to pick up the device, a greater number of companies are approaching touch screens as a serious alternative to traditional keyboard-based PC input.

A sea of competitors appears to have emerged after Apple’s tablet release, including a significantly more technically powerful offering from rival HP. Whether the devices aim to compete with the iPad directly is difficult to tell – the wave of recent releases could simply be the result of touch screen technology becoming more accessible and affordable.

The gaming industry has also jumped aboard the touch screen crusade. Nintendo’s DS system has long been a top-seller and favourite amongst gamers, and the device’s up-sized makeover – the DSi XL – continues to make touch screen input a focus amongst gamers.

Meanwhile, away from portable devices and gaming consoles, the home computing industry appears to be investing heavily in touch screen technology. Dell and HP’s recent line of touch-enabled home computers offer touch-based input at a price point that’s certainly attractive to consumers, allowing technology once reserved for touch screen kiosks to find its way into the hands – and homes – of consumers.

Beyond control options and design aesthetics, touch screens can be divided into three common types of technology: resistive touch screens, optical touch screens, and SAW touch screens. The materials and technology typically differ between touch screen manufacturers, with some favoring certain materials and designs above others. There’s also capacitive, multi-touch and Infrared touch-screens but we’ll focus on the widespread types…

Resistive touch screens

operate similarly to a two-axis effects screen, a common accessory for musicians and audio editors. User actions and inputs are detected by two separate electronically conductive layers, each pressed together when pressure is applied to the screen. The screen’s spacer-style construction pinpoints the location of each touch, and sends the information onwards to the computer unit.

These touch screen units are the most common variety, appearing in a range of touch screen kiosks and display units. While image quality can occasionally be compromised, their versatility – resistive screens can be used with fingers, styluses, materials, and other pointing devices – makes them an ideal option for retail displays and commercial touch interfaces.

Beyond resistive touch, two other types of touch screen are widely used. The second is an optical touch screen

. Rather than operate on touch command, optical touch screens detect user action shortly before pressure is applied. This allows them to operate effectively without pressure being applied, giving users the ability to operate the PC with relatively light touches and a wide variety of pointing devices.

Finally, SAW (surface acoustic wave) touch screens

operate by detecting motion through sound waves. As users move their finger across the screen and apply pressure, a constant audio presence monitors for disrupted signals. Due to the complete lack of touch-based detection, these screens retain higher image quality than their resistive counterparts. However, a lack of durability makes them inappropriate for public use, especially use in retail and industrial locations.

Church kiosks are starting to see more and more deployments within the UK with churches looking at new ways to provide help to their congregation and extended community.

Church kiosks can provide information such as:

• Information about the work of the church
• Links to local charities
• Information about local events and social clubs
• Support for the Elderly
• Health and healthy living
• Bereavement help
• Fundraising and volunteering opportunities

Touch-screen kiosks for churches can be designed to fit in with their location using subtle lines and even incorporating wooden features and bezels.

If you would like more information in using a kiosk for your Church, contact Protouch today.

Acer is working on a frameless laptop with touchscreen keyboard that uses the back of the panel’s glass substrate as the cover – with potential release in the second half of 2010.

Coupled with a touchscreen keyboard, the rumored device should be impossibly thin by traditional laptop comparisons. Keep in mind that we’ve already seen this Frame Zero concept from Fujitsu and Acer’s arch-rival ASUS has been showing off its dual-display laptop prototype with touchscreen keyboard for months. Even the OLPC XO-3 plans to eschew the clickity keyboard in favor of a touchscreen version.

The design will help reduce the thickness of the ultra-thin notebook and can also reduce material costs.

Acer will also adopt a touch keyboard to allow the notebook to be even thinner.

Apple’s touch-screen iPad tablet will go on sale in the UK in “late April”, the company has revealed. The late April launch date applies to both models of iPad – the wi-fi only and wi-fi plus 3G – in the UK.

Apple’s UK website still gives a March launch date for the wi-fi only iPad with the 3G iPad stated to arrive in the UK in April. However, according to a press release from the company today, both devices will now arrive at the same, albeit slightly later, time.

CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad back in January. The touch-screen tablet device resembles a giant iPod Touch and is designed for web browsing, playing games and reading e-books.

The news coincides with Apple’s first iPad advert, which featured during the Oscars. You see the airbrushed hands of a man at home picking up the iPad to check out videos, read the New York Times, flip through book pages, check his private mail, and that sort of thing… See for yourself.

With the proliferation of kiosks, especially in retail outlets, businesses now have a new weapon in their branding arsenal.

According to the latest version of Summit Research Associate Inc.’s annual report, “Kiosks and Interactive Technology — Global Statistics and Trends,” 1.85 million kiosks were projected to be in use by the end of 2009, with each seeing an average of 94 users per day. Summit forecasts that number to grow to 1.9 million by the end of 2010 and to 2 million in 2011.

Branding is a powerful tool that can be integrated into almost any kiosk, and when done well can significantly increase its effectiveness and value. The branding of today’s retail kiosks carries a tremendous amount of influence when it comes to a customer’s purchasing decision.

Kiosks deliver a range of services 24 hours a day, and what customers experience while using the machine can shape their perception of the product or service offered by the kiosk and the environment in which it is located.

“When it comes to a retail self-service kiosk, 70 percent of the buying decision is made at the point of purchase,” said Ronald Bowers, senior vice president of business development with Grafton, Wis.-based Frank Mayer & Associates. “Media advertising, the identity influence and out-of-store promotion account for 30 percent of the consumers’ decisions.

Those who find the touchscreens on their ever shrinking gadgets too fiddly to handle, will be glad to hear scientists are developing a new touch surface… your own arm.

Developers at Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University are working together to create an armband that projects an interface directly onto your skin.

They have combined a mini projector which creates a changing display with a sophisticated sensor that can tell which part of your arm is being tapped.

The researchers showed Skinput can be used to control audio devices, play simple games like Tetris, make phone calls and navigate simple browsing systems.

The gadget effectively turns your arm into a touchscreen surface by picking up various ultra-low sounds produced when you tap different areas.

Different skin locations are acoustically distinct because of bone density and the filtering effect from soft tissues and joints. The team then used software that matched sound frequencies to specific skin locations. The prototype then uses wireless technology like Bluetooth to transmit the commands to the device being controlled, such as a phone, iPod, or computer.

In April, the researchers plan to present their work at the Computer-Human Interaction meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.