IW Technologies

10/19/2026

Before the Store Becomes a Shipping Dock.

Funny thing about that title: Jim Musco started his career on the dock. The college kid punching in at 4:45 PM, driving the day’s orders out to customers’ doors. Decades later he’s Industry Principal for Retail at Zebra Technologies, and he’ll tell you the dock never left. It just moved to the front of the store. Every lane, every handheld, every back-room folding table is the dock now and the holidays are about to prove it.

Our Matthew Bielak sat down with Jim for the most “oh no, that’s my store” conversation you’ll hear before peak and the freeze set in. A few that’ll land:

The handheld in the back cabinet with a sticky note on it. Jim can name every month it’s sat there. “April, May, June, July, August, September, October.”

Ten lanes across the front, and the team only trusts three. Everyone knows which scanner’s bad, so they just avoid it. As Jim puts it: “It’s not a problem when you only need two devices out of 10. It’s a problem when you need 10 out of 10 and you don’t have time to react.”

FedEx calling a store for the fourth time about a label it can’t scan. Worn printhead, the kind nobody catches until it’s quietly costing orders.

Jim’s rule: be done deploying by the end of September. Already into October? He’s got a triage list for that too.

No deck. No pitch. Just two people who’ve stood in a store in December.

Watch it:

Holiday peak turns stores into fulfillment hubs, and store technolo...

10/08/2026

Quick question before you swipe:

How much cable do you think is hiding behind the walls of the stores and restaurants you walk into every day?

Make a guess. Drop it in the comments.

Slide 2 will probably beat it.
Slide 3 is one customer. Just one.
Slide 4 is a closet you've walked past a hundred times and never wanted to open.

Click through the carousel below to see the answer.

We spend our days making our best work disappear. Today, we're leaving the closet door open.

10/01/2026

Your new kiosk shouldn't come with a new job for the manager: rebooting it.

12:15 pm on a Friday. The drive-thru is wrapped around the building. Kiosks, KDS, delivery tablets and payment terminals are all hitting the same network. At the same time.

That's when orders lag, a kiosk freezes mid-order, and your manager is in the back restarting an access point.

And "have you tried restarting it?" is a lousy lunch-rush strategy.

A store that ran about 20 connected devices now runs 35 to 45. The store didn't get bigger. The load did.

The tech got smarter. Did the infrastructure get the memo?

IW has run 5 million+ feet of cable across a thousand-plus rollouts. The rack in the back usually tells on a store first.

Add the kiosks. Add the AI. Cestone says just ask these first:

Is your network built for peak, or just for opening day?
Is POS traffic on its own lane, or sharing with guest Wi-Fi and delivery tablets?
Is every location built the same, or is each one its own setup?

Read Christian's take: https://weareiw.com/resources/blog/restaurant-network-infrastructure-automation

09/29/2026

Anyone can make a receipt printer look new. A can of paint and an afternoon will do it.

But, keeping it running through Saturday's rush means getting inside.

Bruno Pallan takes us onto our refurb floor to show the work your store team never sees. The printer comes apart and gets rebuilt, then prints one more receipt before it ever goes back to the counter.

"Refurbished" is one of the loosest words in our industry. Sometimes it means a wipe-down and a new sticker. At IW, it means enterprise-grade restoration: board-level diagnostics, replacing high-risk components before they fail, and stress testing under the heat and load of a real checkout lane.

It's why OEMs like NCR, Toshiba, Lenovo, and Epson rely on IW refurbished hardware to support their own customers, including some on platforms sunsetted more than 20 years ago.

For retailers, that means keeping the hardware your teams already know and skipping the forced refresh. You save money without trading it for help-desk tickets.

No failures at peak. No repeat calls. No paying twice.

Pride in the details. 50 years of it. See the IW difference for yourself.

09/25/2026

That's the final whistle on FS/TEC 2026.

Booth packed. Feet numb. Voices gone.

We'd do it all again tomorrow.

We had a bit of everything: familiar faces, first handshakes, big questions, and a "one quick hello" that turned into a whole conversation. Our favorite kind of busy.
And the tech. Wow, the tech.

AI forecasting what the kitchen needs before the rush hits. Loyalty programs that know their regulars by name. Cloud systems running whole fleets of stores from one screen. And cybersecurity on everyone's mind, as it should be.

It's an incredible time to be in QSR and hospitality. And every one of those big ideas eventually needs the same thing: someone to get it out of the box, onto the counter, into hundreds of locations, and keep it running through the Friday night rush.

That's the part we love. Fifty years in, we still do.
Next year, the tech on this floor will look a lot different. The people are why we'll be back.

To our customers: so good to see you outside an inbox. Thank you for trusting us with the stuff that has to work.

To our partners: always good being in your corner, and having you in ours.
To everyone we met for the first time: we're glad you pulled up. Here's to what comes next.

And to our IW crew: two straight days on your feet, and you never stopped smiling. You made us proud.

Until next time, FS/TEC.

We've got some follow-ups to make.

09/24/2026

About last night…

We called it Halftime. It turned into the best part of the whole game.

Picture it: the FS/TEC crowd spilling into the Texan Station b**r garden. Cold drinks. A spread worth a second plate (fine, a third). And a table of very serious tech leaders, the people who keep restaurants running on their busiest nights, staring at their own closed fists as one little ball turned into two, then three, right in their hands.

We smiled a little. Laughed a lot. Swapped stories that will never make it onto a slide.

And somewhere between the last trick and the last round, it hit us.

We've been doing this for 50 years. The hardware has changed more times than we can count. The reason we keep showing up hasn't.

It's you.

So, a few thank-yous:

StickyPOS, Kitchen Armor and Epson: four logos on the invite, one team in the room. Best huddle we could have asked for.

To our customers, our favorite people in any room: you had a packed day and a dozen places to be, and you chose to spend your night with us. We don't take that lightly. Thank you.

To our IW crew: you worked the booth all day and still showed up grinning at night, making every guest feel like family. That's the IW we're proud of.

And the Ga***rd Texan Resort & Convention Center, take a bow. You didn't just host us. You suited up for our team, took care of every guest (and us!).

Same time next year? We're already saving you a seat.

09/23/2026

Nobody expects the POS people to be the fun booth.

But this is what "ready for FS/TEC" looks like:
Matchy IW sweatshirts? Check.
Coffee intake? Dangerous.
Fifty years of POS know-how in one booth? Check.
A house brand to push? Never had one.
That last one's the difference at Booth 616.

Every other booth is selling you their box. We don't have one. So we spec what actually fits your floor, install it, keep it running through the rush, and cut you a check for the old gear when you refresh.

Bring your questions. Bring your equipment list (we'll tell you what it's worth). Bring nothing at all. We're good company either way.

Bonus: you'll meet some of the nicest humans in restaurant tech. Great to work with. The good-looking bunch part? Just gravy. You've been told!

Come find us at Booth 616.

09/22/2026

On the show floor, it has to look good.
On your floor, it has to survive your busiest night.
FS/TEC starts tomorrow, and that new kiosk or POS will look great on display. But who gets it ready before the doors open? Who answers when it goes down mid-rush? And who cuts you a check for the gear it's replacing?

Buying the box is the easy part.

For 50 years, IW has handled the rest: buy it, install it, keep it running, and buy it back when you refresh. One partner accountable, not three phone numbers when something breaks.

And we don't have a house brand to push. So bring your buildout or your equipment list to Booth 616. We'll tell you what fits your floor, and what your old gear is worth.

Over a decade in restaurant and hospitality tech, managing accounts across 8,000+ locations, Bobby Majus breaks down what operators should ask before they sign.

Read his take https://weareiw.com/resources/blog/qsr-pos-lifecycle-fs-tec-2026
Booth 616 · Sept 23–25.

09/18/2026

You’ve heard Justin’s voice on nearly every video we’ve ever made. Today, we put the camera on him.

For 24 years, Justin Lockefeer has helped build IW.

When he started, we had about 30 employees. He still works with plenty of them and all these years in, that's one of his favorite parts of the job.

Today he's our VP of Domestic and International Sales and a member of our executive team. He's seen the business grow and change, but when we asked what's kept him here, the conversation kept coming back to the people.

The familiar faces around the building. Coworkers who started on the warehouse floor and now run teams. People he's trained who've stayed long enough to train the next ones. Watching careers get built and families get supported, going on two decades now.

He’s got a few good stories, too. Including how our founder, Al, used to keep track of inventory. (Harvey deserves some credit here.)

Hear Justin on the early days and what he enjoys most about working here, in our latest IW: 50 Years interview series.

09/14/2026

“We handled Windows 10 last year.” This fall, “handled” comes with a bigger invoice.

Security updates for those registers now cost more. And once stores lock down systems for the holidays, “we’ll revisit it” can become “we’re renewing it.”

The registers still work. Does the plan?

Matt Bielak breaks down the rising cost of waiting and what retailers should revisit before paying for another year of Windows 10 security updates.

Read Matt’s take. Link in the comments.