KIOSK Information Systems Brand Guidelines: Rick Malone’s 1993 Colorado Kiosk Maker

A point-of-sale veteran’s 1993 start-up.

KIOSK Information Systems — styled KIOSK on its website, and often shortened to KIS — is a Colorado maker of self-service kiosks. It was founded in 1993 by Rick Malone, Kiosk Marketplace reported in a 2004 profile. Malone, an engineering graduate from Southern California, had been transferred to Colorado by his employer in the 1980s and stayed, working mostly in the point-of-sale industry for about a decade. When the point-of-sale company he worked for changed hands, he left to start a business in what he saw as an emerging technology. “As an entrepreneur I wanted to go into a developing business,” he told the magazine.

It was a slow build. Malone said he had expected to be “in and out” of the business within five years, but kiosks did not take off as quickly as he had thought, which, he said, let the company grow more gradually. By 2004 Kiosk Marketplace described the privately owned firm as designing and manufacturing kiosks, public internet stations and other electronic terminals, and as an emerging fast-growth leader in its state and its industry.

For most of its history the company was based in Louisville, Colorado, near Boulder. Its website opens with the line “Self Service, Simplified,” and says that since 1993 KIOSK “has led the industry in design and manufacturing of self-service solutions” — its own claim. It says that its project teams work together on a single campus, and the biography of its software chief describes teams in Colorado and Taiwan.

Retail returns, bitcoin and border control.

KIOSK builds standard, custom and outdoor kiosks, and it works both for equipment makers that sell kiosks under their own names and for end customers. Its website describes projects ranging from retail returns, bitcoin exchange, bill payment and storage rentals to government work in border security and mass transit. Its market pages add hotel check-in, restaurant order entry, patient check-in and telehealth kiosks, sports-betting and ticketing terminals, airline check-in and payment terminals for electric-vehicle charging.

The company presents itself as a single source for the whole job. It lists software and hardware enclosure design, hardware integration, licensable module APIs, volume manufacturing, safety-agency certifications such as UL and FCC, and managed deployment, monitoring and field services. It says its quality systems are certified to ISO 9001:2015 and its environmental systems to ISO 14001:2015, and it promotes remote monitoring of the machines it has deployed.

Its own figures for the installed base vary by page: the homepage and the “Who We Are” page say more than 250,000 kiosks deployed, while its October 2025 headquarters announcement says more than 300,000. In August 2016, when Posiflex agreed to buy the company, the Taiwanese firm’s press release described KIOSK as offering custom design engineering, manufacturing, software development, field services and highly secure managed services, with standard and custom designs used by Top 100 retailers and Fortune 500 clients.

How kiosk makers present themselves.

Self-service kiosk makers sell machines that most people meet without ever learning who built them. The tall touchscreen totem in a fast-food restaurant, the check-in unit in a hotel lobby or an airport hall, the ticket machine at a station and the self-checkout lane in a shop usually carry the name of the restaurant, hotel or retailer, not the maker. Acrelec’s own range, for example, is named by screen size and use, from a 22-inch counter-top unit to 27-inch floor-standing and outdoor kiosks.

So the makers present themselves to buyers rather than to the public. Their websites lead with markets — restaurants, retail, hospitality, healthcare, transport, government — and with the parts of a job they can take on: enclosure design, payment terminals and receipt printers, cash handling, software, installation, remote monitoring and field service. Counts of installed machines and the quality and environmental standards they say they are certified to are common, and are given here only as each company states them.

Trade fairs are where the products are shown. Retail-technology shows such as the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in New York and EuroShop in Düsseldorf draw kiosk and self-checkout makers alongside point-of-sale suppliers, and the trade title Kiosk Marketplace promotes an automated-retail and kiosk show of its own in Miami Beach. Trade titles such as Kiosk Marketplace and QSR Web also report the makers’ acquisitions and moves.

The companies in this group range from founder-built firms in France, Portugal, Germany and the United States to subsidiaries of larger Asian technology groups. This guide sets out what can be checked about each — who founded it, who owns it now and what it says about where its kiosks are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A Taiwanese parent and a new Thornton campus.

The ownership story runs through private equity to Taiwan. The trade site Kiosk Industry, in an editor’s note on the 2016 deal, wrote that KIOSK had been bought by Alerion Capital about three years earlier. On 12 August 2016 Posiflex Technology, a point-of-sale terminal maker of New Taipei City founded in 1984, announced an agreement to buy all of KIOSK’s outstanding shares for cash. Its release said the management team, led by chief executive Tom Weaver, would stay in place, with Weaver joining the boards of both companies, and that the deal was expected to close in the third quarter of 2016. Posiflex said KIOSK would gain access to its sales channels in Greater China, other Asian countries, Russia, India and Europe, as well as to upgraded components and peripheral modules; Posiflex’s own products, the release said, were made in two certified factories in Taiwan.

Today KIOSK describes itself as a Posiflex Group company. In its October 2025 announcement the group named three brands — Posiflex, the embedded-computing maker Portwell, and KIOSK Information Systems. The same announcement said KIOSK would move its headquarters from Louisville to Thornton, north of Denver, bringing design, engineering, manufacturing and support teams under one roof; chief executive Kim Kenney said the company’s roots had been in Colorado “for more than 30 years.” In October 2026 Kiosk Marketplace reported that the 107,460-square-foot headquarters had opened in a Thornton business park, completing the move from the company’s longtime Louisville facility. The company had said the larger building would let it increase production capacity and take on new customer programs.

For a design guide, KIOSK Information Systems shows how a hardware maker can take the name of its whole category — the word kiosk, set in capitals — and build a brand on custom enclosures for other companies’ services. Compare Acrelec, the French kiosk maker now owned by Japan’s GLORY, and Meridian Kiosks, another American kiosk maker in this series. For this guide we use a deep pine green, granite and brushed-steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep KIOSK Information Systems’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.