RedPost

I visited Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, today to check out their RedPost installation. They have 4 RedPost/Boxes driving 4 37″ LCDs with plans to install 4 more at the 2 cafes located in their brand new Fieldhouse sports facility. The LCDs display menus with prices.

It’s an incredible facility — 50 meter pool, indoor tennis courts and track, 5,000 seat main arena, 2 really big workout rooms…quite impressive. They did a lot of research on font sizes and placement for the first 2 LCDs installed at each cafe. We also developed a couple API calls for their foodservice staff to be able to change the content on each Sign when the menus change.

A couple pics:

While we were there, we were chatting over lunch about why they ended up going with RedPost. Here’s what they said:

1. Cost: Other solutions they were evaluating were going to require $50k or more for the 8 signs they wanted. RedPost cost them less than $10k (my estimate).
2. Future-proofness: There’s risk buying into any technology solution, especially that of a startup, in that, they might not be around in a year to support their product, however awesome it is. This is true even of the big software guys — they’ll kill a product and pretend it never existed. With RedPost, however, Calvin wasn’t buying into anything that they couldn’t repurpose in the future, if they had to. No proprietary hardware, OS or software. Because everything’s built on off-the-shelf hardware and open source technologies, if the worst happens and RedPost goes away, they’re fine.

Thanks Gary and Matt for hosting us. Let me know when you have all 8 Signs installed!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 @ 7:35 pm on the category Installations, Out and About, RedPost Platform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.