Dana Paul was listening to sports radio when he got an idea to integrate a Web camera into an entertainment kiosk to let fans at sports events record themselves doing what they love most: talking sports.
“I was listening to sports radio, and you hear these guys on hold for 45 minutes just to have 30 seconds to say how much the Yankees suck. And I’m literally, like, laughing to myself, saying, ‘There’s got to be a better venue,’” said Paul, the founder and CEO of Shazamm Global Interactive Agency, a multimedia production firm in Providence.
Paul pitched his kiosk plan to a marketing executive at Major League Baseball, who loved the idea. Last season, Major League Baseball piloted Shazamm’s entertainment kiosks as a marketing promotion in seven stadiums across the country.
Hundreds of fans recorded 20-second clips of themselves – material that Major League Baseball has broadcast in part on digital screens during games, and can now push to the Internet, to television or even to cell-phone subscribers.
Shazamm is among a handful of firms in Rhode Island on the ground floor of the self-serve market, a fast-growing segment in technology that encompasses kiosks, digital signs and any other interactive digital media that enable consumers to conduct their own transactions.
The market segment has existed for years – ATMs were perhaps the first self-serve technology to be massively adopted, followed by self-checkout queues at supermarkets – but it is taking off as technological advances have lowered costs and widened the possibilities for commercial application, said Paul.
Kiosks and other self-serve devices are turning up in an increasing number of places. Retailers such as Target, Wal-Mart and Crate & Barrel now use kiosks to let customers access bridal registries and scan prices on products right from the shelf. Municipalities are adopting them to enable residents to pay bills and motorists to pay tolls. More and more kiosks are being used for self-ticketing at airports and sports stadiums.
Some firms that have manufactured and marketed kiosks for a narrow number of users are refocusing their energies to build the self-serve market, which they now see as having unlimited potential.
Last week, MontegoNet, a full-service interactive kiosk solutions provider that has operated in Portsmouth since 1996, changed its name to Self-Service Networks as part of its new business focus on helping clients such as Fidelity Investments, PepsiCo, the U.S. Air Force, and the Washington Redskins increase their utilization of self-serve technologies, said Thomas Smith, founder and president of Self-Service Networks.
“Everything that we do is focused on getting our client’s customers to enjoy the self-service experience, to get them to try it for the first time, and then keep them using it,” said Self-Serve Networks spokesman Rick Wessels, speaking last week from the 11th annual Self Service Expo in Las Vegas.
“The research that we’ve done is demonstrating that customers want to be in control of a transaction or an activity,” he added. “They often really would rather do this themselves than have to wait for a human employee to help them with whatever it is they’re trying to do.”
Last July, the city of Atlanta introduced Self-Service Networks’ bill payment kiosks, which now provide residents with a convenient way to pay their monthly water and sewer bills. The new kiosks were the first part of a citywide initiative to bring self-service payment and information options to Atlanta residents, Mayor Shirley Franklin told reporters.
In 2005, Self-Serve Networks partnered with TLContact Inc., a Chicago-based company that owns CarePages, a Web site service for hospital patients, to bring interactive kiosks to more than 300 health care facilities across the nation. Among other functions, the kiosks enable patients to access the CarePages Web site even without the ability to browse the rest of the Web or launch other applications.
In recent months, programmers at Shazamm have been fine-tuning Z-Media, the company’s asset platform management tool, which clients such as ESPN, Disney and the Pawtucket Red Sox already use to manage their Web data, for use in the self-serve market.
The new self-serve software product, which Shazamm is aggressively marketing, enables clients to remotely send, receive and manage digital content and data on thousands of kiosks at once or on each individually, Paul said.
Shazamm developed its content management software system in 1999, but in subsequent years focused more on Web site development and digital design as a strategy for growing the business. But the explosion of the self-serve market has put the company’s content management software back in the driver’s seat, he said.
“We always thought of ourselves as a creative agency, so the software always came second,” Paul said. “Well, really in the past year I would say, we’ve started rethinking it and saying, ‘Let’s put the software first.’ This is such a fast-growing segment – the kiosk and self-serve thing – that it just makes sense to really exploit it.”
