New Solar-Powered Kiosks Added Downtown
Digital Installations are First-Ever in Connecticut
STAMFORD — The Stamford Downtown Special Services District has installed four digital kiosks to help pedestrians easily access helpful information and provide better connectivity to local destinations. On Thursday, March 6, officials and community members gathered to celebrate the new digital resources placed across downtown.
“It’s a very important time to promote wayfinding, connectivity, and the pedestrian level environment. [The kiosks are] meant to be an asset for our cultural destinations in downtown,” Michael Moore, president of Stamford Downtown, said. “This is the first step in this process. We’re super excited for all the support from the city and from Soofa.”
Soofa, the company behind the eight-foot-tall kiosks, was founded in 2014 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their product is now in fifty municipalities.
Different visual elements can be programmed on the kiosk display. Some of them include local transportation updates, polls with a QR code to respond, bike-sharing information, social media content, newsfeeds, and more.
“We are thrilled to showcase the very first kiosk in our city downtown. There are so many things that I am personally excited about like bringing cutting edge digital technology with real-time updates for residents so that we can showcase all the great things we love about downtown destinations,” Stamford Mayor Caroline Simmons said. “The coolest part is that it’s solar-powered, helping fulfill our sustainability goals. We hope this will be a model for bringing this across our city.”
The new kiosks, the first of their kind in the entire state, are part of a pilot project and were installed at the following locations.
Bedford Street (next to the Ferguson Library)
Kiwanis Park (69 Atlantic Street)
Heritage Park (Intersection of Main Street and Bank Street)
One Greyrock Place
A fifth one will be located at 677 Washington Boulevard near the Stamford Transportation Center at a later date.
“[O]ur mission at the time [Soofa started] was to bring smart, urban technology into the city that is user-focused where it’s not some kind of anonymous lamppost or signage, but leveraging smart technology to bring real-time hyperlocal content on to the sidewalk,” Soofa Co-founder and Vice President Jutta Friedrichs said. “We want to be agile. We want to be adaptive to the life that changes the city every day.”
The Soofa team in collaboration with Stamford Downtown are also seeking advertisers for the kiosks with details available upon request.
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