Zivelo Brand Guidelines: The Indiana-Built Kiosk Maker That Verifone Bought in 2019

A kiosk maker that began in Indiana.

Zivelo was founded in 2008 in Marion, Indiana, according to Digital Signage Today, which reported in March 2014 that the company still made its terminals there, in a 250,000-square-foot facility. Its founder was Ziver Birg, who told the Phoenix business magazine In Business in May 2014 that the company’s systems were meant to “change the way humans interact with machines.” The same article said the terminals were hand-crafted at the Marion plant.

Arizona came later. Birg moved the corporate headquarters from Indiana to Scottsdale, and in March 2014 the company opened a 13,000-square-foot space at Scottsdale Fashion Square, the shopping mall, as its operations headquarters, design studio and showroom, open to visitors by appointment. In Business described a glass-fronted, ground-floor unit where passers-by could watch staff at work; Birg called it an “experience center” and said the idea was to “put ourselves in a glass box” so that people would be curious about the company. He told the magazine he had chosen the area because its technology footprint was growing, and he credited the City of Scottsdale, the Arizona Commerce Authority and the Greater Phoenix Economic Council with helping during the site search.

At the same time Zivelo hired Phil Vaney, formerly of DAP Technologies and Intel, as chief operating officer. Digital Signage Today reported that the company then had showroom locations in Los Angeles, Denver and Philadelphia and more than 100 certified resellers and distributors worldwide.

A chassis, a platform and a lot of parts.

Zivelo made two kinds of product: self-service kiosks and digital signage. Birg described the kiosk as a platform rather than a single machine. In the 2014 In Business article he said it could take components from more than 500 suppliers, such as receipt printers, card readers and touchscreens, built into one of about 50 chassis that ranged from desktop units to wall-mounted and floor-standing models, with screens from 19 to 90 inches. He put the number of possible configurations above 100,000, covering more than 40 market sectors; those figures are the company’s own.

Zivelo also named its customers. Digital Signage Today reported in 2014 that the company said its clients included Coca-Cola, Cisco, Hilton, CVS, NASA and the U.S. Army, and the same report said Zivelo had been listed by Inc. in 2013 among the three fastest-growing computer-hardware companies and by Forbes in 2012 among six fast-growing technology firms.

By the end of the decade the company was concentrating on restaurants. In a January 2019 podcast with the trade publisher MarketScale, Kris Bartel, Zivelo’s chief business-development officer and a former McDonald’s executive, talked about ordering kiosks in quick-service chains and about check-in kiosks in sit-down restaurants, where diners waiting for a table could sign in and order a drink. A May 2019 press release issued with the payments firm FreedomPay said Zivelo had deployed tens of thousands of kiosks to large retail and fast-food chains in North America; that is the company’s own description.

Software arrived through a purchase. The same release says that in 2018 Zivelo acquired Oak Labs, the maker of OakOS, which Zivelo called an operating system for public computing, so that it could offer hardware, software, services and financing together. The release named Healey Cypher as Zivelo’s chief executive and gave the company’s offices as Scottsdale, San Francisco and Seattle. The FreedomPay partnership itself added card-payment processing to Zivelo’s kiosks, so that a self-service unit could take card payments as well as orders.

Self-service hardware.

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.

From independent maker to part of Verifone.

Zivelo’s independent life ended in 2019. On 2 September 2019 the trade publication Kiosk Marketplace reported that Verifone, which it described as a provider of self-service devices, point-of-sale terminals and modular payment components, had acquired Zivelo, and that both companies had confirmed the deal; no details of the transaction were released.

Verifone is much older than Zivelo. English Wikipedia says it was founded in Hawaii in 1981, is now headquartered in New York City, and was itself acquired by the investment firm Francisco Partners in April 2018. Today the old Zivelo web address forwards to Verifone’s page for kiosks and unattended payment devices, which lists Verifone’s own card readers and payment terminals under the Verifone name. Zivelo no longer trades as a separate company.

What the brand left behind is a clear idea of how a kiosk maker presented itself in the 2010s. Instead of hiding in an industrial park, Zivelo put its headquarters in a shopping mall, behind glass, and talked about design studios and showrooms as much as factories. It sold the kiosk as a modular frame that could carry other makers’ printers, readers and screens, and later tried to add its own software and payment links so that a restaurant or retailer could buy everything from one supplier.

For a design guide, Zivelo shows how a hardware start-up can use showroom architecture and a modular product story to look bigger than its age, and how quickly such a brand can be folded into a larger payments group. Compare KIOSK Information Systems, another American kiosk maker, and Olea Kiosks. For this guide we use graphite, a deep teal and a glass grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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