The Digital Signage Insider

At WireSpring Technolofgies, one of the projects that we had been working on and eagerly anticipating the completion of has finally come to fruition. Late last week we announced the successful installation of the first iFuel gas station with our partners, iFuel, LLC and White Mountain Solutions. As anybody who knows WireSpring will tell you, we dont take on integrated customer solutions in a haphazard fashion. We focus 99.9% of our efforts and resources on the development and management of our FireCast kiosk and digital signage software. When customers come to us for application development, we typically refer them to one of our software partners for that side of things (note, if you are an application developer, contact us... were always looking for additional help). However, the iFuel project was unique in three ways: first, it required the development of some new device drivers for some fairly exotic hardware. Second, it required the development and tight integration of a significant number of petroleum distribution and monitoring tools into our ClientCenter remote management software. And third, the combined software and hardware platform had to guarantee high levels of availability, fault tolerance, and facilities for future upgrades, since nobody has really made significant changes to self-service stations in the last decade or so.

After a year of development, the first station has been deployed, and already iFuel is feeling the advantages of being able to remotely manage the station, change prices and monitor customer accounts. With gas prices continuing to climb, Ill welcome any changes that can exploit efficiency to lower costs.