Greg and I installed the first 3 of 4 RedPost/Touches (that name is weird in the plural) in the town of Shipshewana today. The Shipshewana Retail Merchants’ Association is going to be collecting visitor surveys, advertising for upcoming events and providing a town map to help people get around using the kiosks. A nice, simple, focused use of touchscreen technology in a town that gets 50,000 (or so, don’t quote me on that) tourists a week at the peak of the season.

Inside the Blue Gate Restaurant:

At Jo Jo’s Pretzels inside the amazing Davis Mercantile complex:

Inside the Visitors Center:

In a startup, you get to do a lot. Like helping to assemble our first 5 RedPost/Touch units. Here’s their progress:

First the bases:

Then the stands:

Then the touchscreen PCs:

Of course, Greg (pictured in the first photo) did all the hard work of putting the actual touchscreens together. But still, I did help. And it is one of the reasons that RedPost is so much fun for me — doing actual, physical labor instead of just sitting at a desk and typing all day. I’ll post photos of the RedPost/Touch devices installed tomorrow.

I’m sure Amazon.com has a rhyme and reason to this, namely that they’re all coming from different warehouses, but receiving 4 separate packages, each with 1 or 2 or 3 or 14 tiny items in it, seems highly inefficient:

We’re revamping our website a bit, once again, to try to talk about what RedPost is much more clearly. For starters, what do you think of the new home page?

For our next generation RedPost devices, we’re upgrading to the latest embedded mainboards, one of which is pictured below. It’s an Intel board, fanless, low-power, can have more memory and overall performs much better. We’re also working on a smaller device, which I can’t discuss to much yet at this point.

The only map that matters anymore, Google Maps:

And BetterWorld Books isn’t listed, until you zoom in further, and then it’s listed at a different location (RedPost’s World HQ is inside the bookstore). Weird. I’d imagine there are more Google searches for them then for us…

Here it is, fresh from the metal fab shop. Doesn’t it look pretty? We’re making a couple tweaks here and there, but overall, I’m really happy with it. And it ships flat, IKEA-style.

The first batch are destined for Shipshewana, Indiana, where they’ll collect visitor surveys from the 10′s of thousands of visitors that go through the town of 500 every week throughout the summer and fall.

Here’s a screenshot of an IM conversation I had with Missy, one of the employees at BetterWorld Books’ retail store in Goshen, discussing their RedPost/Sign which we just recently moved to a more visible location right by the cash register:

Missy’s been working on making new, simple posters to attract attention to their new bargain basement. Like this one:

Good work Missy! Few words, simple message, decent contrast between the words and the image, and a nice, compelling visual.

From this IEDC press release:

Earlier this month the Wall Street Journal reported that Indiana has the largest percentage increase in jobs of any state in 2010 at 1.9 percent. The state’s private sector employment has grown by 2.1 percent this year, with a total gain of 47,900 jobs according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The next closest states reported private sector employment growth of 1.5 percent while national private sector job growth was .5 percent.  Indiana accounts for 10 percent of total U.S. private sector employment growth during the five-month period (Indiana has 2 percent of the country’s population).

Impressive! As I wrote earlier, we’re going to be fine.

We had a massive storm (and tornados! yikes) here in the Midwest last night, apparently a tornado actually touched down just east of Goshen. I was in Chicago and biked around after the storm under an eery-green, rainbow-clad sky. And apparently, this happened:

Lighting strikes three of the tallest buildings in Chicago at the same time! from Craig Shimala on Vimeo.