Riviera Players Club Kiosk Las Vegas, Nevada -- September 2001 -- Apunix and the Riviera Hotel and Casino announce the deployment of the first self-comping, user-configurable, multimedia touch screen casino kiosk. While congestion is reduced at redemption check-out desks, members of Riviera's Players' Club using the kiosk are given secure access to their accounts. The kiosk allows them to quickly and easily look up and redeem their comp points, print receipts, see casino and hotel interactive maps, and review gaming instructions, and restaurant and entertainment information. Features include: JavaTM technology; reboot-free reliability; database connectivity; easily modifiable, user configurable, graphically rich content; user-friendly interfaces; remote management; and platform independence. Account access is provided with the swipe of a Riviera Players' Club card, followed by the use of an on-screen keypad to enter a PIN number. For comp redemption, eight category choices are provided: Members can redeem comp points for show tickets, cash, 40% off Riviera Gift and Logo Shop purchases, Riviera Health Club spa and exercise facility services, hotel rooms, special slot promotions (Riviera's "$40 for $20"), and Riviera's World Fare Buffet. Items for redemption are pulled from a database and are selected within a scroll box; amounts desired are also selected. Point balance is immediately updated and shown. After selections and redemptions are completed, the kiosk prints a receipt. Instructions for 10 casino games are shown, including craps, roulette, mini baccarat, Pai Gow, and blackjack. Restaurant as well as show guides include promotional videos. Upcoming events allows the choice and use between three search methods: calendar, category, and keyword (with the provision of an on-screen keyboard). Riviera's self-comping kiosk runs on a Sun Ultra 10, with the Solaris 7 operating system, and 1 Gig of RAM and a Creator 3D Graphics card. Currently, three kiosks are available to Riviera visitors: one is by the front desk, and two are by the entrance to Nickel Town. The kiosks produce a log file that is checked several times per day. Software checks these files for errors in case the kiosk is having a problem; the same software is able to clean up and correct problems and reload the kiosk. All updates and content changes are done remotely by Apunix in San Diego, in such a way that kiosk use remains uninterrupted for users. Since the kiosks' deployment September 17, there have been over 1200 uninterrupted user interactions. Primary among the advantages of Apunix's kiosk solutions are robustness and reliability with JavaTM Technology, allowing choices of stable operating systems that do not require reboots, such as Linux and Solaris. Scalability and open architecture allows the use of any platform and existing hardware, from servers, to thin clients, to internet appliances, to hand-held, portable Personal Digital Assistants, such as Palm Pilots. Furthermore, Apunix has been successfully creating kiosk content extracted from databases for several years, including and combining images/graphics, text, audio, and video. Our graphical builder tool, which is based on JavaTM Technology, allows the kiosk developer to easily connect to almost any back-end database (Informix, Oracle, Sybase, DB2, MySQL, etc.). Database connectivity permits quick drawing of text and image content from existing, easily modifiable databases. Touch-friendly and graphically rich kiosk pages, based on the database content, provide the kiosk user with up-to-date information. And since Apunix's kiosk is not just a web browser, it offers graphically rich application-speed rendering of content to the kiosk user.