thecages

One of the major stresses at Catalyst was the all-singing, all-dancing Diebold ATM which was meant to wow S1 customers with it's business-card depositing, channel integrating, coolness.
It was meant to be connected to our Postilion system to be used by the conference attendees to draw S1 Bucks (fake money). Each attendee was issued with a debit card and could draw x Bucks from their accounts.
The idea was that they would then go to the Postilion booth and use our (on-demo) internet banking and service center systems to go and look at their account, transactions etc.

In the end it turned out to be a disaster to get going (set up started on Saturday morning - the Diebold was finally running on Monday nite).
This involved the Diebold tech support guy standing around a lot and saying things like 'They checked it before it shipped.' and 'I'll call back to the service center again'.


In contrast to this the conference also showed a Triton ATM which plugged in and ran within an hour[1].
Triton ATMs are the small(read cheap) stand-alone ones that you typically find in convencience stores and generally piss people off with their painfully slow printers[3].
In this case it easily outperformed the industrial-strength, build-into-the-wall Diebold.


The non-functioning of the Diebold was made even more painfully evident by the fact that Diebold(one of the Gold sponsors[4]) hosted the first of the evening social events(i.e. open-bar slosh-fests) on Sunday nite and due to the fact that they did not have an actual stand at the expo[5] couldn't actually point anyone to any of their products. ouch.

To the point of this entry - Diebold have been contracted for some years to supply electronic voting machines to US states. So far it's a project that has been plagued by distrust(among voters and candidates/contestants), bugs and regulatory hassles.
All that is about to change, apparently.
I wouldn't hold my breath[6].


[1] After we broke open the cash boxes for which no key was shipped[2]
[2] It turns out that ATM cash boxes are all plastic and can be rendered asunder with nothing more than one of those Leatherman type tools
[3] Tritons also run MS Windows 2000(and probably still NT4 as well) whereas Diebolds run a proprietary OS.
[4] Sponsors are rated as Bronze, Silver or Gold based on how much ca$h they dropped. It seems that no-one wrote a cheque that made them worthy of Platinum status.
[5] Choosing rather to ship all their eggs(balls?) in that build-into-the-wall basket
[6] I should be fair, Diebold ATMs are generally known as some of the most robust, bullet-proof(literally) ATMs out there. I just recently had an experience laughing my ass off at a clueless display of Make-it-go!-make-it-go!.