Digital signage offers a product vendor or manufacturer the chance to have dynamic, changable, multimedia displays in a classic bricks'n'mortar retail environment. However, kiosks are now becoming affordable enough, robust and reliable enough, and updatable enough that instead of a one-way digital sign, a full interactive and informational kiosk can deployed for near the same cost. This offers the vendor or manufacturer a whole new dimension that is starting to prove itself in conventional retail outlets. If you want to find examples of this, just go to any Home Depot store. There you will find numerous vendors providing interactive kiosks offering help and information on everything from paint to sealants. One example of this is the "Ask Henry" kiosk created by Apunix for the Henry Company. The Henry Company produces products that solve many asphalt and roofing problems. The challenge is that many people are unaware that the Henry products can solve their pressing needs. One example of this is a product that Henry produces that allows you to permanently repair a leaking roof even in the midst of a pouring rain storm. However, now by going to the kiosk, the Home Depot shopper can look up their problem and watch a short, informative How-To video clip on what is the right product to buy and how to apply it. The advantage for the vendor or manufacturer is that now an expert sales assistant is stationed permanently alongside their product display and available at all times. No longer does the customer have to hunt down an available store sales person to potentially only find that their knowledge of the problem or products is less than optimal. However, the problems associated with this type of kiosk deployment are that these kiosks must typically operate stand alone due to both the costs and politics involved for a vendor to install a network in a retailers store. This means that there is no way to monitor the kiosks to determine if they are up, down, or hung up and keeping them up to date can be a challenge. The Henry company, who has had extensive experience in both the digital signage and interactive kiosk market, chose Apunix as its new kiosk partner for its unique ability to address these two problems. First, was the proven robustness and reliability of the Apunix Kiosk-on-a-Chip™ solution which achieves this feat by turning a kiosk from a fat PC into a diskless kiosk appliance with a solid state, read-only operating system. Second was Apunix's ability to provide its Update-on-a-Chip™ solution that allows their regional sales manager to visit each Home Depot store and update the kiosk by simply plugging in a digital media device in the USB slot. The Apunix software automatically senses the presence of the update device and, after verifying that the media is a proper and legitimate update, takes over from there informing the sales person when the update is complete and when to remove the media. The success of this deployment is best summarized by David Villafana of the Henry Company who says: "We knew from our previous kiosk deployments with other companies that we needed a solid-state based operating system for our next generation of kiosk deployments. Since these are non-networked kiosks we need a solution that would service years in the field without corrupting itself even after thousands of power up and power down cycles. Our search for kiosk providers found that Apunix was the only kiosk company with who could actually deliver this kiosk appliance technology."