January 2015 - The KioskSimple Blog

How to Dramatically Increase Your Kiosk Applications Performance with Local Caching – Part 2

If your kiosk regularly synchronizes data with a remote server then you may have the opportunity to dramatically improve your kiosks performance by making use of your kiosks local storage. By caching data locally it allows your kiosk to respond more quickly to user input by reducing the amount of time your kiosk spends waiting on a response from the server.

In the second part of this 2-part series I’ll cover a couple cool options for persistent local storage in the web browser. In part one I covered the benefits of caching data locally on your kiosk, the sort of data you’ll want to cache and some helpful tips for caching.

The three main advantages of caching data locally on your kiosk

Increases the responsiveness of your kiosk
Reduces the load on your server
Lowers bandwidth requirements

Continue reading “How to Dramatically Increase Your Kiosk Applications Performance with Local Caching – Part 2”

How to Dramatically Increase Your Kiosk Applications Performance with Local Caching – Part 1

In the first part of this 2-part series I’m going to cover the benefits of caching data locally on your kiosk, the sort of data you’ll want to cache and some helpful tips for caching. In part two I’ll cover a couple cool options for persistent local storage in the web browser. Continue reading “How to Dramatically Increase Your Kiosk Applications Performance with Local Caching – Part 1”

5 Tips for Staying Motivated and Doing Big Things in Your Small Business

If you’re anything like me, you’ve had rough moments when you want to give up on running your small business and go get a desk job.

The stresses of finding new clients and running the business begin to pile up and the idea of someone else telling you what to do doesn’t sound so bad.

Let’s be honest, if you have that entrepreneurial spirit there’s no way you’ll ever be happy working for someone else. At least I can’t imagine it.

The key to staying motived in your business is hope and vision for the future. Here are a few strategies you can use…

Continue reading “5 Tips for Staying Motivated and Doing Big Things in Your Small Business”

5 Pitfalls to Avoid When Dispensing Cash from Your Kiosks

Now that you’ve decided to dispense cash from your kiosk with a bill recycler I want to make you aware of the pitfalls to avoid. Dispensing cash can be invaluable for making change to your customers like a human cashier, but also introduces several new challenges which we’ll address in this article.

Most people familiar with bill acceptors think of a bill recycler as simply an add-on component which dispenses cash, but this is far from the case.

Dispensing bills greatly increases the complexity of the device and the logic required by your kiosk application in order to gracefully complete a cash transaction.

Don’t worry, all of these challenges can be overcome with careful planning and the reduced cashier expenses will be well worth the investment. Continue reading “5 Pitfalls to Avoid When Dispensing Cash from Your Kiosks”

5 Design Tips for Creating Massively Scalable Kiosk Applications

Creating a kiosk application capable of scaling from a handful of kiosks at a single location, up to thousands of kiosks spread across multiple regions requires that you design for scalability from day one. As a kiosk application developer, I’ve witnessed too many startup companies become so focused on getting to market in the shortest possible timeframe that they completely neglect designing for scalability. As their customer base grows they begin deploying kiosks at multiple locations and their server load increases. Then they’re surprised to find out that their kiosks don’t perform well on a larger scale. This is because a scalable design doesn’t happen by accident, it requires careful planning and a time investment upfront or else you’ll end up needing a major overhaul of your kiosk application as your customer base grows.

My goal for this article is to help you design your kiosk applications to be capable of handling massive growth by outlining the major principles of a scalable kiosk application. Continue reading “5 Design Tips for Creating Massively Scalable Kiosk Applications”

Serving the Self-Service Kiosk Niche – How We Do It

I wanted to outline the three major ways our company serves the self-service kiosk niche for those who aren’t familiar with our small software company.

Most of the value we generate comes from one of the following activities:

Creating free instructional and thought provoking content
Developing innovative kiosk software solutions
Delivering unparalleled customer and developer support

Our small, but passionate development team

Continue reading “Serving the Self-Service Kiosk Niche – How We Do It”