Craig Keefner homepage

2008

• Apr: Industry Loss: Don England of Livewire passed away. Don served as Livewire’s Vice President of Sales and Business Development since joining the company in early 2006.

  Don served as Livewire’s Vice President of Sales and Business Development since joining the company in early 2006. He spent the prior 25 years in a variety of roles beginning his career as a systems analyst with NCR. Don’s largest contributions were in the Point of Sale industry, serving as Vice President of Sales and International Operations with ParTech Incorporated and General Manager of Triversity Corporation.

  Don will be missed.

• Apr: KioskCom in Vegas seemed just a bit smaller than the 2007 show and it is sporting the new "Self Service Expo" tag. I checked with Lawrence. He said 2008 was most definitely larger than 2007 and here are the numbers...

  28% more registrants (3,941), 20% more attendees (2,880) and 12% more pre-qualified buyers (1,598). And should also factor in that over 800 requests for admission were denied b/c the people were non-exhibitng sellers.

• Apr: HP enters the kiosk and self-service market and teams with KIOSK Information Systems.
  

2007

• May: Slabb rises from the ashes and becomes Phoenix systems?
• Apr: Annual KioskCom in Vegas. This year it used the "self-service" mantra and also pointed to its coverage of digital signage (which isn't interactive if its digital signage right?).
• Feb: Touchvision goes under
• Flextronics buy WebRaiser and Dave G. goes to work for Flex
• Major Projects: Amtrak, ARMP, Fujitsu, Dave & Busters, AT&T, Speedway

2006

I'd almost see 2006 as the year that a lot of people left the industry for one reason or another.

A couple of the smaller niche players saw changes. Compar went the route of bankruptcy. They had a quite a few things going so it a significant disruption within the business partner arena.

Protech has always been a small producer of outdoor kiosks. That line is a spinoff from their main business. In 2006 their leader Peter K. left the company. Protech is noted of late for Subway and I heard numbers as high as in the hundreds of installed units. The truth is closer to 50 I think. The new owners probably looked at the business and decided to build on that and move into kiosks in general. We all know tough that can be.

That story is not far off of Meridian who no longer has David P. and is also looking to build a brand.

Another repositioner is/was Slabb. Cy Birg apparently got some significant funding and expanded in many directions, Europe out of Amsterdam being one of the more often noted. Slabb is now competing in many markets but time will tell if it meets expectations. It's an unusual situation. Now its April 2007 and they are restructuring.

Ceroview -- gone after many years.

King -- another restructuring in 2006.

Compar -- another fatality

WebRaiser -- folded into Flextronics and not sure for how much. Hasn't been much heard from WebRaiser since then (or flextronics).

Esprida formed -- Shamira Jaffer and Co. spun off the remote monitoring ala Catapult. Hard to keep track of the changes Touchpoint has gone thru over the year.