Malden Adds More Innovative Kiosk Digital Signage for Pedestrians Downtown

The City of Malden is installing Soofa Signs in Malden Center that will improve public communication, enhance wayfinding for visitors, and empower the local business community to advertise to passersby. 

The thin profile sidewalk units use e-ink to show a combination of community-generated content, government updates, and local business offerings, displayed above an always-updating local events calendar or MBTA arrival information. Both residents and visitors to Malden can come back to the sign every day for new information about what’s happening in their community. Local businesses are also able to use Soofa’s customized local business offering to promote special products or deals and, more generally, build greater brand awareness for their businesses. 

"The Soofa Sign pilot in Malden Center is an important tool to enhance our outdoor communication,” said Mayor Gary Christenson.

“The City of Malden will now be able to communicate on the street-level a mixture of things including upcoming public meetings and other relevant updates. People can also use the Soofa Signs for real-time information on mobility options, such as MBTA arrival times."

“The introduction of Soofa Signs is another example of Malden’s place on the cutting edge of technological advancement. We are posed to learn a lot about pedestrian counts in Malden Center, which will help us market our main commercial area to prospective retail and commercial businesses.” explains Ryan O’Malley, Ward 4 City Councillor.

“We are thrilled to be working with the City of Malden and the residents that call Malden home,” said Sandra Richter, Soofa’s co founder and CEO. “Our vision is to make neighborhoods more social and connected by giving everyone a place to communicate in the real world.”

The Soofa Sign is the neighborhood news feed, seen by everyone and accessible for anyone to use through an online, self-service platform called Soofa Talk. The Soofa Sign was featured by Engadget as a finalist for Best Vision for the Future at CES and was described by Curbed as the Facebook wall for the real world. Based in Cambridge, Soofa originally comes out of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and builds the first of its kind, solar-powered digital sign with an e-ink display.