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From...
Suds while you surf
A Las Vegas company is betting that Internet kiosks will be popular at car washes, convenience stores, casinos, and coffee shops.
November 11, 1998
Web posted at: 4:20 PM EDT
by James A. Martin
(IDG) -- Do you want to surf the Web while your car's getting soaped? Pick up a bag of chips -- and your e-mail -- at the convenience store? Send a video greeting to your family from the road? A small Las Vegas company is gambling that you will.
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Mirage Link recently announced an agreement that will put its Internet kiosks in up to 35,000 Korean American Grocers Foundation (KAGRO)-member convenience stores throughout the U.S., following the installation of kiosks in 300 Las Vegas-area KAGRO stores in the coming months. Mirage Link Internet Kiosks are also scheduled to be installed at a 24-hour, upscale car wash due to open in Vegas this month, as well as in Sunset Station, a Vegas hotel-casino. A coffee-shop chain, Jitters, has already installed the kiosks in five Vegas locations.
Internet kiosks -- in which you can check e-mail and surf the Web for a small fee that's charged to a credit card -- are nothing new. But Mirage Link's models offer a few advantages not often found elsewhere, including simplified e-mail access, automatic blocking of offensive Web pages, and video e-mail, according to Jason Tarnutzer, president of Mirage Computers, of which Mirage Link is a division.
At a Mirage Link kiosk, for instance, you don't have to know your Internet service provider's POP3 server information to check e-mail; the kiosk software can usually figure it out for you, Tarnutzer said. With kiosks that include video cameras, you can easily e-mail a video greeting in the VDO format, he added. If the recipient doesn't have a VDO Web browser plug-in, they can follow the appropriate URL, included in the e-mail message, to download it. The company plans to offer video conferencing as well, though the standard to be supported hasn't been decided on, Tarnutzer said.
The charge to use a Mirage Link Internet Kiosk is 30 cents a minute; the cost to buy a kiosk of your very own starts around $4000.
Minimum Internet connections are at ISDN speeds, though a few kiosk owners are planning to use cable-modem access. The kiosks use Mirage-built PCs with Pentium II MMX-233 processors, 64MB of memory, a 4GB hard drive, and a 14-inch flat-panel touch-screen display.