by TRC_Admin | Dec 29, 2021 | Kiosk, Technology, Vending
Photo: PizzaForno via Thrillist
“For years there’s been buzz about a robot revolution, and it looks like it’s here. PizzaForno Partners Les Tomlin and Will Moyer are leaning into the future and appeasing both the robot overlords and people who like good pizza fast by rolling out fully automated pizza kiosks across North America.
QSR Magazine reported that the pair plans to place 20,000 fully automated PizzaForno kiosks across the country by 2026. That number includes 1,000 kiosks in the United States by the end of 2022, with locations between Southern California, Louisiana, and Florida first.
‘I think North America has been very late to the game on robotic food,’ Tomlin told the outlet. ‘I mean, look at PizzaForna—the technology has been around France for the better part of 10 years. COVID, the labor shortage, people don’t want to spend 10 minutes waiting for anything. All those things add up to super fast, super convenient, super quick serve. That’s where I think everybody’s got to go.’
Customers who step up to a PizzaForno kiosk will be met with a 32-inch touch screen on which they can choose their pizza and how they plan to pay. The machine builds each pizza, and then a robotic arm removes it from the cold section, opens the lid, and puts it into a proprietary convection oven where it bakes. That takes between 90 and 120 seconds. The pizza is then dropped into a slot where customers can reach it. The entire process takes about three minutes. Customers can also take their pizza home cold and cook it themselves…”
— Caitlyn Hitt, Thrillist
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by TRC_Admin | Oct 5, 2021 | Billboards, Technology
Photo: Featured in Campaign
“Out-of-home campaign tells people to ‘Just ask an Aussie’
Developed by VCCP, the campaign places a real-life Aussie (and Caramilk mega fan) on billboards across the UK, where passers-by can ask why the chocolate bar became such a hit Down Under…
Those who can’t make it to the billboards can post questions via an Instagram Q&A.
Beatrice Berutti, senior brand manager at Cadbury-owner Mondelez, said: “We wanted to do something which naturally channelled the Cadbury Caramilk character, whilst standing out from other new product launches.
‘We were committed to doing something a little bit different, albeit whacky, to welcome Caramilk to British shelves, and we’re super excited that our mad plan of pinning a real, live Aussie was pulled off.'”
— Shauna Lewis, Campaign
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by TRC_Admin | Dec 1, 2020 | Billboards, Technology
Photo: In WEHOville.com
“With a unanimous vote on Thursday night, West Hollywood’s Planning Commission approved a new cutting-edge digital billboard on the Sunset Strip that will appear to float in the air.
Using the latest LED technology, the ‘Floating Billboard’ at 8743 Sunset Blvd. at Sherbourne Drive, will have an opaque frame that seems to disappear when viewed from certain angles. This ‘invisible frame’ will make the digital advertising image on the 14-foot-tall and 48-foot-wide LED billboard appear to float above the historic building beneath it.
The secret to the three-foot ‘invisible frame’ surrounding the billboard’s advertising area is that it too will be made of LED digital surface. Cameras at the rear of the billboard will continually take images of the sky conditions to the east and transmit those live images onto the LED frame facing west.
‘It will reflect the sky behind to the front edge of the billboard and then create the illusion of an invisible billboard,’ explained billboard architect Benjamin Anderson.
This new digital billboard will replace the existing static billboard atop the Constance Bennett building, which dates back to 1936. The Georgian Revival style building was named after the famous movie actress who commissioned it. Sunset Sherbourne Holdings, LLC, headed by Chris Bonbright, currently owns the building…”
— James F. Mills, WEHOville.com
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by TRC_Admin | Oct 28, 2020 | Controversial, Technology, Windfarms
Photo: Newsday via Getty Images – View of wind turbines off Block Island, Rhode Island in 2017
“Building large energy projects is hard business. Among the greatest challenges renewable power plant developers face is the question of where to build a new facility. This process, known as ‘siting,’ is much more complicated than finding land with strong wind speeds or solar irradiation. A tangled web of interrelated factors such as access to electric transmission, conflicts over competing land use, and environmental degradation must be navigated through multiple federal, state, and local regulatory permitting processes. It is exceedingly rare for a major project to sail through the siting process smoothly…
Fully decarbonizing the U.S. economy is a massive task. A recent study found that to reach 90% clean energy by 2035, the United States would need to build approximately 75 gigawatts of new solar, wind and storage capacity a year for the next 15 years. According to the study’s companion memorandum, renewable growth at this scale would require approximately 5,100 square miles of land for ground-mounted solar and 58,000 square miles for wind power plants. That’s a huge amount of land: most of the State of Connecticut for solar generation and the entire State of Illinois for wind—with still a larger geographic footprint for energy storage and other enabling technologies.
Of course, there are ways to moderate such a massive need for land, as solar and wind generation can co-exist with other productive uses of land. Solar generation can be built on top of existing infrastructure. For example, rooftop solar and parking lot solar canopies can certainly offset some utility scale solar development on undisturbed land. Similarly, agricultural use, such as cattle grazing, can occur between wind turbines. To the extent the nation seeks to secure a decarbonized economy, multi-use strategies will be necessary. However, a huge amount of land will still need to be devoted to renewable generation.
That fact will likely lead to more siting challenges. ‘Solar and wind generation require at least 10 times as much land per unit of power produced compared to coal or natural gas-fired power plants,’ a recent Brookings Institution report points out. ‘Most people say that they are in favor of renewable energy, in the abstract. But we are beginning to see a backlash against the land use implications of renewable energy in the United States, especially in wealthy, politically-active communities.’ While the political winds are currently tilting us towards a cleaner energy future, it seems inevitable there will be many conflicts over siting new renewable plants, even with streamlined permitting…”
— David Cherney, Forbes
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by TRC_Admin | Sep 30, 2020 | Advertising Industry, Controversial, Sky, Technology
Photo: UT Austin
“Want to leave a message on the moon’s surface?
A group of University of Texas students have a vision that could — at least in theory — make that a possibility someday.
The 10 UT engineering students devised a business plan to turn the idea into a moneymaker — and won awards for it at a NASA competition.
They pitched and provided the plan for building a rover that would carve messages or images onto the moon and capture pictures of those etchings, which in turn could be used for merchandising. While not visible from Earth, the etchings are intended to be permanent, the students said.
The idea for the project came when Brianna Caughron, the student team leader, was walking back to her apartment from class and noticed carvings on a sidewalk, she said.
‘I was like, oh my gosh, that could easily be done on the lunar surface. There’s the famous Apollo footprint from the Apollo 11 mission,’ she said…The business would charge about $10 per second for the time spent carving each image, an amount they settled on after polling other students informally and to make up for the upfront cost of launching the rover into space.
Overall, the entire process, including development of the rover, would cost $275 million to $300 million, according to Ali Babool, who was on the business and analytics side of the team.
The students expect to make up those costs and turn a profit by the end of the first year of lunar operations, said Caughron said.
If development started next year, the team has forecast that it could bring in about $610 million in annual revenue by 2026, with $450 million in profit. It used the tattoo market here on Earth as a model to come up with the financial projection…
Project LEGACI won in its category of commercial space development at NASA’s Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage design competition, and it also received the Excellence in Commercial Innovation award…”
— Titus Wu, Austin American-Statesman
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by TRC_Admin | Dec 7, 2019 | Advertising Industry, Billboards, Interactive Advertising, Technology
Photo: Consumer Reports
“How the most intrusive parts of the web are expanding into the real world, complete with data collection and targeted ads.
On a bright Friday morning, Frank O’Brien is giving me a tour through Times Square in New York City. Thousands of strangers are milling around us on the sidewalk, and in the crowd, it’s easy to feel anonymous. But according to O’Brien, many of the billboards and screens towering over our heads in every direction know a lot about who we are.
‘As we stand here, there are devices behind that screen that are picking ID numbers from our cell phones,’ O’Brien tells me, gesturing toward a billboard at 42nd Street and 7th Avenue. Using those devices and other technology, he says, ‘We know who is in Times Square at a given moment.’
O’Brien, the CEO of a high-tech advertising platform called Five Tier, launches an app on his phone. He taps a few buttons and in an instant, the billboard changes to display a picture of me I’d sent him the day before. Suddenly, I’m famous, with a 20-foot-high photo of me gazing out over the tourists. ‘It still amazes me sometimes,’ he says…
Data including your gender, age, race, income, interests, and purchasing habits can be used by a company such as Five Tier to trigger an advertisement right away. Or, more often, it will be used for planning where and when to show ads in the future—maybe parents of school-age children tend to pass a particular screen at 3 p.m. on weekdays, while 20-something singles usually congregate nearby on Saturday nights.
Then the tracking continues. Once your phone is detected near a screen showing a particular ad, an advertising company may follow up by showing you related ads in your social media feed, and in some cases these ads may be timed to coordinate with the commercials you see on your smart TV at night.
It doesn’t stop there. Advertisers are keenly interested in ‘attribution,’ judging how well a marketing campaign influences consumer behavior. For instance, is it better to target people like you with online ads for fast food right after you see a restaurant’s new TV commercial, or to wait until after you drive by a new billboard the next day? The advertising industry looks for the answers by watching where you go in person, what you do online, and what you buy with your credit card.
Charts: Example shown in Consumer reports
These aren’t futuristic scenarios. They are a recent but growing trend, according to executives in the advertising business. ‘The industry has really started to wake up to this within the last year,’ says Ian Dallimore, the director of digital growth for Lamar Advertising, a leader in out-of-home advertising. ‘If you’re not using data to better plan and buy ads, then you’re probably not doing out-of-home the right way.’
Researchers say that as tracking and ad targeting spill over from the web into the real world, our collective privacy and sense of control are eroding. If you don’t want to see ads at home, you can close your browser or turn off your phone, but you can’t avoid the ads you see in public. And there’s no practical way to completely block the location tracking used to place those ads…
Photo: Consumer Reports
Lawmakers and regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission are paying more attention to data privacy, but it’s not clear how the measures being put in place will affect the way individuals are tracked through their phones, and how the data is used by data brokers and their clients. Several out-of-home advertising companies I spoke with said they already comply with GDPR, Europe’s sweeping privacy regulation that was implemented in 2018. The companies also say they are prepared for the most stringent privacy legislation in the U.S., the California Consumer Privacy Act, which is supported by Consumer Reports and goes into effect in January 2020.
Five Tier’s Frank O’Brien says that, just like every other industry, the out-of-home advertising business should be regulated. But for now, if you’re not comfortable with how out-of-home advertising uses your information, you don’t have much recourse. ‘I don’t think there’s anything you can do about it,’ he says. ”
— Thomas Germain, Consumer Reports
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