The way Costco's automated pay stations work is that members stand in line and a Costco employee scans the person's membership card and all of the items in their cart. When the member reaches the self-serve payment kiosk, they scan their membership card and pay. The system eliminates the conveyor belt and any interaction with a cashier.
"We want to make the Graham Norton of video games," says Kirsty Rigden, the chief executive of Brighton-based FuturLab, which makes PowerWash Simulator. Aspiring to emulate a talkshow host who has a reputation for being affable rather than for setting pulses racing is perhaps an unusual ambition for a gaming studio.
The new tracker features a simplified progress bar that shows just four stages of pizza creation. The new design was rolled out to all platforms, and there's also new Lock Screen widgets for iOS that bring the pizza chain's most famous tech feature to the Liquid Glass age.
The Windows Boot Manager has blamed a recent hardware or software change, which, frankly, could be pretty much anything. The code 0xc0000428 is a clue that something might be awry with the digital signature of a file (perhaps ntoskrnl.exe) and, to be honest, we'd suggest nuking the whole thing from orbit.
Upload any picture or video, and Musubi uses artificial intelligence to extract the most important part and hover it in space as a 3D image within the frame. That could be a video of a child's first steps or a snapshot of a birthday party. The image will be displayed in 3D form, viewable in all its holographic glory across nearly 170 degrees.
There's a real convenience to being able to print a lease agreement, a medical form, or a tax document without having to run to a copy shop or library. When you need something signed and returned quickly, having a printer at home means you don't have to rearrange your schedule around a trip across town. That kind of on-demand access saves both time and stress, especially during situations that are already a little chaotic.
Demand for OOH advertising continues to hold strong, but for the OOH market to seize new growth opportunities, rapid evolution is key. The acquisition of Place Exchange will allow Broadsign to deliver the most comprehensive OOH advertising solution in the market. We see the future of OOH as smarter, more efficient, dynamic, and measurable.
Retail point-of-sale systems today offer a wide range of options for peripherals and hardware. Their technical specifications play a major role in selection, and big retailers often choose multiple vendors to reduce a single point of failure. This gives them an advantage to negotiate price or support as well. Technically, these peripherals also require updating with new models and may have new feature sets. This necessitates the redevelopment of point-of-sale applications, increasing development costs.
The reason is a lack of user research to understand how people think and act when shopping, and how they navigate their way through the experience to get it done. It's the user experience concept of a mental model, if you want to get fancy, or the application of a system matching the real-world heuristic they teach you about in college.
Claude - or "Claudius," as its vending persona was known, but we'll stick to the former for the sake of clarity - had pretty much free reign to accomplish its goal. It was allowed to research products, set prices, and even contact outside distributors, with a team of humans at the AI safety firm Andon Labs handling the physical tasks like restocking. Meanwhile, it also fielded requests from employees in a Slack channel, who asked for everything from chocolate drinks to the street drug methamphetamine to broadswords.
All of the appliances and systems are brand-new: the HVAC, the lighting, the entertainment. Touch screens of various shapes and sizes control this, that, and the other. Rows of programmable buttons sit where traditional light switches would normally be. The kitchen even has outlets designed to rise up from the countertop when you need them, and slide away when you don't.
Windows 2000 Professional seems to be a popular choice for ticket machine operators: a small footprint, bombproof reliability, and content to sit in the background while the customer's software takes center stage. Unfortunately, that reliability was not on display in this ticket machine, spotted in Bangkok by an eagle-eyed Register reader. A reboot has brought Windows 2000 Professional out of the shadows, and the loading screen is visible.
Retail is no longer just about buying and selling products; it is about the experience. In a world where online shopping offers instant gratification, physical stores face the challenge of providing something the internet cannot: a personal, tactile, and efficient service. The checkout counter has traditionally been a point of friction, with long queues, slow card machines, and impersonal interactions. However, the modern Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) system has completely reshaped this dynamic.
Perusing the grocery aisle in the Westside Market on 23rd Street in Manhattan, you might not even notice the screens. They look just like paper price labels and, alongside a bar code, use a handwriting-style font we've come to associate with a certain merchant folksiness. They're not particularly bright or showy. The only clues that they're not ordinary sticky shelf labels are a barely distinguishable light bulb and, on some, a small QR code.
Folks have griped on Reddit that their locations do not offer self-checkout options (though many report that their locations haven't undergone any recent remodels). Others have shared frustration with Publix's existing self-checkout system, which they claim only offers a small bagging area, and when they move their full bags off the scale, it flags the employee - effectively wasting both the customer's and the employee's time.
Statistics from the 2025 holiday shopping season clearly show that AI is playing a huge role in how people shop. But new research from retail payment platform Adyen found that many consumers are ready for AI to become their personal shopper. Just over half-51%-said they're open to letting AI take over the entire shopping process, including making final purchases. Millennials are the most willing to let agents do their shopping, with nearly three in five saying they are ready for such a shift.
At some point, the industry stopped arguing about whether content drives commerce and started living in the reality where the two are indistinguishable. "Content, commerce and technology are really coming forward in a special way and recognition that there aren't disparate separate systems any longer," says Cara Pratt, president of global retail and media at Circana. "There really is one connected, cohesive, intelligent ecosystem that is fueling discovery, fueling conversion and purchase."
