#virtual-queue

#virtual-queue

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.

With just a single tap, subway and bus customers now have access to real-time arrivals at the stops closest to them, along with live positioning of the nearest trains and buses, clearer station layouts, and better transfer information.

Modern platforms use advanced graphics, realistic animations, and carefully designed interfaces that echo the layout and feel of physical gaming floors, enhancing the online casino experience.

If you use WhatsApp for your personal and professional messaging, it can quickly become pretty busy. It also means that any professional contacts can see your photos, status updates, and where you are. To keep things separate its a good idea to use a different phone number for each, but having two numbers doesn't mean you'll need two phones.

With brands increasingly looking to mixed reality (AR, VR, contextual) technology to create engaging event experiences, the inaugural ExM Live Forum brings together industry thought-leaders to share insights in an events sector ripe for digital transformation.

Restaurant owners like Panjwani are caught in the middle of a growing battle of new and established reservation platforms vying for their business. The two dominant players for more than a decade, OpenTable and Resy, are now facing a wave of fresh competition from high-end services and even delivery apps all trying to win lucrative bookings at exclusive establishments.

Threads is moving to drive more messaging use with a streamlined option to guide users towards messaging in-stream. The new process allows users to type DM me or message me in a post, which will then activate that term as a quick link into the Threads DM flow. Users can still control who can message them in their settings, so this won't open people up to unwanted outreach.

The new documentation breaks down how UCP and its UCP-powered checkout enable a native Buy button that keeps the entire transaction on Google properties. The merchant remains the seller of record, but the checkout experience happens natively within Google. To activate the feature, merchants must implement the native_commerce attribute in Merchant Center.

The UK's Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is recruiting a chief digital and information officer, partly to help sort out its bot-ridden practical driving test booking system. "You will lead a critical portfolio that supports DVSA's plan (launched in December 2024) to reduce driving test waiting times, protect learner drivers from exploitation, and improve the customer booking system," stated chief executive Beverley Warmington, who joined the agency at the end of last year.

It isn't a universal truth, but a vast number of goods and services have their own full-circle moments. While there are still plenty of travel agencies in the U.S., the overall number is still down considerably from a peak in the 1980s. For some industry forecasters, though, the future looks a lot like the recent past, except that instead of travelers trusting human agents with making their travel plans a reality, they'll use AI agents for the same purpose.

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.

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.

Do you remember when 2007 was dubbed "The year of mobile"? That was when Apple launched the iPhone and firmly established mobile as the secondary channel for online engagement, after the desktop. The company's approach was so revolutionary that, in today's world, the mobile experience has become the primary experience for brand and customer interaction. More people search for products and services on their phones than on any other platform.

They said it would never happen, but of course it was always going to - ads are coming to ChatGPT. Shirley Marschall takes a look at this little bit of history repeating... Guys, honestly, there won't be ads... Jeff Bezos: "Advertising is the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service." Elon Musk: "I hate advertising." Sergey Brin and Larry Page: "We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards advertisers and away from the needs of consumers."

The technology underpinning retail operations is under scrutiny in 2026 as fashion executives look to streamline systems with the aim to unlock efficiency, cut costs and meet consumer expectations for speed and personalisation in the shopping journey. At the retail event Lightspeed Edge on 12 January, Lightspeed - the unified point-of-sale (POS) and payments platform for SMEs such as Apricot Lane Boutique and Neal's Yard Remedies - convened industry leaders to explore the strategic imperative for integrated technology ecosystems over siloed systems.