Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

This week’s audiocast panel discussion of the StorefrontBacktalk retail technology week that was …. was decidedly global in topics. This week’s group of retail technology analysts that sat down late Thursday was Patti Freeman Evans from Jupiter Research, Sucharita Mulpuru from Forrester Research and Paula Rosenblum from the Retail Systems Alert Group. StorefrontBacktalk’s Editor Evan Schuman moderated.

The group opened with a hard look at the German Metro Group’s Item-Level RFID plans and whether Wal-Mart can survive as a retailer outside (and, as one panelist argued, inside) the U.S.

The group also discussed retail attempts at mobile marketing, focusing on the Subway chain’s experimentations with cellphones, which raised issues of how far ahead of the U.S. much of Asia and Europe are and how that should impact retailer’s global IT strategy.

The panel also jumped into a report expected next week from Jupiter Research that looked at how e-tailers—including Netflix–are making some surprising decisions about incorporating user-generated product reviews.