New Product Archive
June 16th, 2011 Christine
If you’re attending conference we’d love to have you stop by our booth – #2239. Trust us, you can’t handle our booth! It’s going to have a lot of exciting features! Wait…what? It’s “you can’t handle the truth”? Well, the truth you can handle, but our booth is going to be pretty great!
What you’ll see at Booth #2239:
- Learn more
about our acquisition by DEMCO, Inc.
- Ask product questions and watch a product demo
- Interact with the FireSign touchscreen by Anode and learn about their EventConnector – a great way to bring Events into vibrant digital signage
- Check out Peek-A-Book Total Access, give us your opinion and tell us about features you’d like in this potential product
- Find out about our new WebDesign service
- See the newest iteration of BranchAnywhere
And in the Mobile App Pavilion, meet Vesone, our intern, and learn about Summer Reader Mobile.
Not attending conference? Don’t worry – we’ll be blogging, tweeting, and posting on Facebook to share our booth content and other conference happenings.
February 9th, 2010 evanced
So as I alluded to yesterday we are officially announcing the coming release of our new U.S. designed and U.S. built BranchAnywhere library materials vending solution. The prototype of which we will unveil at PLA 2010 in Portland, OR next month.
We are leading the design in conjunction with an Indiana based machine builder that we have a long history with, and a local developer and provider of Library Self Check systems (so that we have good and proven SIP2 communications for most ILS systems at launch). The units will be built here in Indiana and will be optimized to the needs of North American Libraries.
A few highlights:
(More details to come, including some BIG ideas that will really differentiate our system from other options on the market)
- Machine will be optimized to support multi-collection types, meaning it will support MOST common library materials of various sizes: bigger/thicker fiction/non-fiction, DVDs, paperbacks, books on CD, Playaways, and even children’s picture books.
- Capacity will vary depending on collection desires:
- We are planning at least a Std Unit which will have a mix of 4 sizes/types and have a total collection limit of about 325-350 items.
- A DVD “heavy” unit which will be over 500 items and will heavily lean towards DVDs
- A “Book Only” version which won’t have DVD slots but could have other Audio/Visual and capacity will be under 300 items
- Because of the nature of the design of the machine MUCH LARGER capacities will be possible but will require a larger footprint
- Standard footprint will be about 4.75′ deep by 6.5′ wide by 7’ tall
(though our prototype machine is a little wider than this)
- The software and User Interface are being developed to focus on ease of use and “ATM like” usability. Since the total collection size will typically be under 500 items the feedback we’ve gotten is a fully catalog search approach is overkill. We looked at a lot of the commercial vending solutions user interfaces for inspiration about how to keep it simple. We are also working in conjunction with a User Interface Design Expert to help make this the best interface possible.
We’ll be unveiling our working prototype at PLA next month. Our approach is that we have the great basis for the machine but we want lots of input and feedback from librarians around the country to help us really make this the best product to meet the real needs of the libraries we serve.
More exciting details to come…
February 8th, 2010 evanced
I’m going to build up to this one as it is a really big deal for us here at Evanced. Later this week I will be officially announcing our latest new product offering (BranchAnywhere). It’s a Library Materials Vending solution (something we initially explored approaching just as a reseller earlier in the year). We’ve been working on our own solution now, and it’s a huge venture and investment in terms of time and money but I think our approach to it will be welcomed by Libraries particularly in North America.
Though we’ll be announcing this exciting new product, we are NOT finished with it. We won’t be until we find out from all of you how it really should work and be designed. What we’ll be announcing and then later showing at PLA 2010 in Portland (OR) is merely our initial working prototype. Call it rather polished starting point for discussion about how these systems should be designed and built. Even though our personal experience has deep roots in automation and specialty machines we know we can’t design this in a vacuum and get it exactly right. Therefore, we are actively seeking everyone’s input into the best ideas and approaches. We are all very excited to start hearing what everyone thinks.
I’m planning to post something every day this week about BranchAnywhere so stay tuned.
Thanks
Rob Cullin
CSO / Co-Founder