I work for Intersection, a company behind LinkNYC kiosks deployed in New York City: http://link.nyc
The basic idea is that we have ~2000 kiosks deployed across all 5 boroughs. Each screen has 2 displays so that's ~4000 displays playing various ads. Kiosks also provide free Wi-Fi for the public, free phone service since they replaced the payphones, and there is an Android tablet that can be used for various online services such as applying for food stamps.
We have some kind of partnership setup with the city, and we also get money from ad plays. The business structure is a lot more complicated than that but I don't want to go into details because it's highly likely I'll say something wrong.
Like most things, it's a mixed bag. Working with hardware that's deployed in public changes the game in interesting ways. Things can break for so many different reasons since they interact with the physical world all the time.
There was a funny moment when we noticed one of the kiosks being down. It wasn't responding, we couldn't reach it over the network at all so we decided to take a look at it in the street and....it wasn't there. A 7-8 ft kiosk just disappeared off the street. We later found out that a truck smashed into it in the early morning and it was all cleaned up by the time we realized something was wrong.
Hot weather, cold weather, car traffic, people smashing kiosks with a baseball bat because they think wifi spreads covid, there are a lot of things that can break physical devices on the street and it's been fairly interesting dealing with it.
Bad stuff: Ad tech. I hate the whole advertising industry with a passion of a thousand suns. I have moral issues with it and every ad tech thing I touched is horrible from a technological standpoint.
Good stuff: It's interesting. I work on a ton of different stuff. I could be doing a lot of operations work for a while, then go develop a new service next week, then design a bunch of analytics so we can get more insight the following week. Engineering team is not huge and we all have to do everything. We are all remote and the company made sure to ship us all the hardware we need, which is nice.
Nice stuff: Free wifi covering most of the city is a useful thing for people. I'm happy we provide it and it's what makes me feel good about this. Kiosk tablets are also used by the poor and homeless to apply for various programs such as food stamps.
Tech: Nothing very surprising. Various single board computers, Linux, Python, Go, js, SQL, Ansible.
The basic idea is that we have ~2000 kiosks deployed across all 5 boroughs. Each screen has 2 displays so that's ~4000 displays playing various ads. Kiosks also provide free Wi-Fi for the public, free phone service since they replaced the payphones, and there is an Android tablet that can be used for various online services such as applying for food stamps.
We have some kind of partnership setup with the city, and we also get money from ad plays. The business structure is a lot more complicated than that but I don't want to go into details because it's highly likely I'll say something wrong.
Like most things, it's a mixed bag. Working with hardware that's deployed in public changes the game in interesting ways. Things can break for so many different reasons since they interact with the physical world all the time.
There was a funny moment when we noticed one of the kiosks being down. It wasn't responding, we couldn't reach it over the network at all so we decided to take a look at it in the street and....it wasn't there. A 7-8 ft kiosk just disappeared off the street. We later found out that a truck smashed into it in the early morning and it was all cleaned up by the time we realized something was wrong.
Hot weather, cold weather, car traffic, people smashing kiosks with a baseball bat because they think wifi spreads covid, there are a lot of things that can break physical devices on the street and it's been fairly interesting dealing with it.
Bad stuff: Ad tech. I hate the whole advertising industry with a passion of a thousand suns. I have moral issues with it and every ad tech thing I touched is horrible from a technological standpoint.
Good stuff: It's interesting. I work on a ton of different stuff. I could be doing a lot of operations work for a while, then go develop a new service next week, then design a bunch of analytics so we can get more insight the following week. Engineering team is not huge and we all have to do everything. We are all remote and the company made sure to ship us all the hardware we need, which is nice.
Nice stuff: Free wifi covering most of the city is a useful thing for people. I'm happy we provide it and it's what makes me feel good about this. Kiosk tablets are also used by the poor and homeless to apply for various programs such as food stamps.
Tech: Nothing very surprising. Various single board computers, Linux, Python, Go, js, SQL, Ansible.