Userful Multiplies and Manages Touch Screens with Innovative 10 to 1 Linux Software
Apr 25th, 15:03 UTC
Userful offers radical cost savings to kiosk deployers
with its recent announcement of Touch Screen support.
April 21, 2006 - Userful Corporation is proud to announce the
general availability of multi-station touch screen software and
solutions to its customers and channel partners. Userful's managed
kiosk platform, DiscoverStation, now enables one computer to drive up
to ten independent touch screens. DiscoverStation® is perfect for
touch-enabled applications where customer capacity and throughput are
important.
"Touch-enabled applications can be deployed on Userful's
multi-station platform at a much lower cost than traditional kiosks
and offer the perfect solution wherever you would like to have
multiple kiosks in a single location," says Userful President
Tim Griffin. "DiscoverStation's multi-station support gives
touch-application developers, integrators and customers the
flexibility of an interactive desktop environment with 1/10th the
hardware, software and onsite service burden. Userful's optional
public computer security and management suite further enables central
control and monitoring."
Applications such as ticketing, voting, HR, surveys and Internet
access kiosks will benefit from Userful's multi-station touch
screens. This unique software multiplies the capacity of kiosk
deployments simply by connecting additional USB touch screen monitors
to a single computer, enabling innovative new high-capacity kiosk
enclosure form factors. Multi-station touch screens offer a simple
and compelling new paradigm for interacting with computers,
information and services. In an industry where the upfront and
ongoing costs have traditionally been an obstacle to adoption,
Userful anticipates this announcement will enable many new
applications for kiosks.
Single user kiosks typically cost thousands of dollars to purchase
and thousands more to maintain and support. In addition to selling
the software, Userful offers kiosks as a managed service including
hardware, software and support for as little as $99 per kiosk per
month.
Touch screen kiosks have traditionally been deployed using an
individual dedicated computer to drive each screen, with the computer
costing as much as $1,000. This traditional approach wastes computer
processing resources and energy by underutilizing the computer's
processing capacity. Userful's multi-station touch-screen kiosk
solution eliminates this waste and allows Userful's partners and
customers to reduce computer hardware costs by up to $900 per kiosk
by driving multiple screens from a single computer.
"To date, many companies have shied away from self-service
kiosks due to startup complexity and cost. By enabling kiosks to be
deployed at a fraction of the cost of current single station
solutions, Userful's multi-station software kiosk now become feasible
in many areas where they were formerly out of reach," adds
Griffin. "This price point will open up the world to touch
screen applications. Userful's platform makes kiosks easy and
affordable."
Userful supports both 3M Microtouch and Elo Touch USB touch
screens. Now in version 4, DiscoverStation is a mature platform for
providing and managing kiosks and is able to run applications in
environments such as AJAX, Java, Flash, .net and C#. Userful's
multi-station kiosk solutions are currently in use as ticket vending
machines, registration systems, Internet access stations, and patron
self service stations in venues world wide. Touch screens support is
also now available in Userful's other multi-station products: Desktop
Multiplier and Desktop Server.
For more information, visit: http://userful.com/products/kiosk
(Submitted by M. Brian Palmer of Userful Corporation)
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