Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Imagine my disappointment when a rudimentary runway model demo was all that this experience amounted to. Barely two-dozen short videos of models walking. And yet, just down the E-Commerce corridor sit the ghosts of what J.C. Penney might have done had the company truly wanted to show E-Commerce leadership and innovation. Had it chosen to move from mediocre to meritorious, think of the customization potential in a runway show.Read more...

In a proof-of-concept experiment in Bangalore, Intel India is marrying RFID tags and POS with a CRM database where “frequent customers would have their preferences and favorites recorded.” Such a system could tout related products and flag new versions of that consumer’s preferred brands.

“This system is designed to replace the current simplistic computer or other system that only provides billing and basic services,” said Sanat Rao, Marketing Director (Emerging Markets), Embedded and Communications Group, at Intel. “Our system, once implemented, allows the possibility of being operated as a kiosk and provides the information on inventory.”…

It’s been clear for a few weeks now that there has been another major credit card processor breach—above and beyond Heartland–lurking in the retail financial shadows. But the processor (along with co-conspirators Visa and MasterCard) has remained silent and, for the moment, unidentified. One report said that the breach appeared to be limited to “card not present” transactions, which certainly suggests an E-Commerce-only aspect.

StorefrontBacktalk has been in a quandary on this one for weeks, as it seemed pointless to run a story in which we couldn’t say who the processor was, how the breach happened, what the breach accessed or, well, pretty much anything else. But as more media outlets report that there has been another processor breach of some sort, staying silent started to seem ridiculous.…

To interpret motivation and real intent, sometimes a look at history can be useful. Do you remember another Facebook privacy incident back in December 2007? In that case, Facebook tried sharing—without permission—customers' purchases with people on their friends list. Is this a pattern? Is Facebook trying things, and if it's caught and there's a loud enough protest, the site pulls back? In short, is Facebook trying the permission versus forgiveness approach? Indeed, it seems to have tried both options. For a company that is trying to solidify a brand and build as much trust as possible, these tactical approaches seem odd.Read more...

Wal-Mart has historically had a strong fondness for its own homegrown apps, given the $401 billion chain’s rather absurdly large size. The company has liberalized that policy recently, allowing a few shrink-wrapped enterprise apps to slip in. Now there’s a report in Economic Times that Bentonville is seriously considering an Indian business process outsourcing contract that could include “non-core processes of procurement, merchandising, finance, accounting and payroll” and be valued at as much as $500 million.

The story quoted from a Wal-Mart document that said “Wal-Mart will expand staffing of certain elements of IT application maintenance and development with some of India’s leading information technology firms. India is one of several countries that the company is targeting as part of its remote sourcing model for IT activities.” Vendors in the running, the story said, include IBM, TCS, WNS and Wipro.…

No stunning revelation here, but the facial recognition included with several vendors’ laptops laptop vendors doesn’t work very well. Yes, it can be fooled by a photograph or other digital images. The latest details were revealed at the Black Hat security conference—tagline: Yes, You’re Every Bit As Doomed As You Thought—by a researcher at Bach Khoa Internetwork Security Centre, a Hanoi-based security firm.

To be fair, most vendors have marketed the face-recognition feature as a convenience, and they suggest using more robust security (such as almost anything else) to protect sensitive files. Also, the research said that it sometimes was a bit more complicated than showing an ordinary photo. For example, Toshiba systems forced the researcher “to move the images a bit to fool the technology because it looks for facial movement.” But if any retail IT folk are thinking of using this method as even a first-level security defense, they should probably rethink it.…

The orders between the chain, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Department of Human Services followed a probe that found workers at the company's pharmacies tossed into open garbage dumpsters many items containing highly sensitive consumer medical information.Read more...

Overall, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) climbed 0.9 percent to 75.7 on the 100-point scale during the quarter, compared with the same period in 2007. "Very few economic indicators show positive signs these days," said Claes Fornell, who heads the ACSI. "The American Customer Satisfaction (for in-store) is one of them."Read more...

It was the second regulation imposition delay by the state Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation (OCABR) in three months. The tough new rules, announced in September 2008, were originally scheduled to take effect Jan. 1, 2009. Read more...

FTC Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbourn's comment was in the context of a new FTC staff report that says E-tailers need to start taking privacy much more seriously if they do not want the government to start imposing new rules.Read more...

The payment application data security standards (PA-DSS) are actually tougher in some respects than PCI DSS. As a result, some ERP vendors and users of packaged enterprise applications are considering tokenization as a strategy to modularize and centralize all payment processing by these applications. It's either that or partner with payment processing specialists (which provide payment processing functionality) to remove the overall ERP software from PCI scope.Read more...

Even though no retailers were involved in that particular incident, the implications of this attack technique must be thought through. What the thieves did was to take the fundamental security of time and flip it around.Read more...

What made this case interesting is that the suspects are accused of having tried a new twist to credit card fraud. Typically, fraudsters take stolen credit card numbers and create bogus documents by stamping out the cards from plastic. In this case, the suspects didn't have to create bogus credit cards at all. It also meant that they weren't required to show any identification when using the gift cards.Read more...

The statement said the "attacker methodology" was to identify sites that seem vulnerable to SQL injection and that the attackers "appear to target MSSQL only." (How nice. The cyber thieves run Microsoft-only shops. Redmond would be proud.)Read more...

But GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor says that the rules can be different for "targets" and "non-targets." And he clues us in on what those differences are.Read more...

The researchers found that 57 percent of the retailers they categorize as "laggards" in terms of adopting price localization cited their technology infrastructures as being a "gating factor" preventing them from delivering differentiated pricing. Forty-seven percent of the companies RSR labels "winners," those with average sales growth of three percent, told RSR that technology was impeding their localized pricing desires. "It's the entire technology infrastructure, particularly the integration bus," said RSR Managing Partner Paula Rosenblum.Read more...

Some 13.3 percent of respondents say 18 to 24 months, and only 6.7 percent assume it will take "more than 24 months." The respondents who "do not know" account for the remaining 18.3 percent. Those are some very sobering numbers. Do IT managers truly believe these goals, or have they convinced themselves to believe? Or were they forced to say what they really need to get their CFOs' spending authorization and now need to be consistent?Read more...

Regardless of what Best Buy ends up doing, in today's rock-bottom economy, with its mergers and bankruptcies, the retail concept of data ownership is getting quite a workout. For example, CompUSA closed its doors but has now reemerged in a very different form in Florida. And there's no telling where the petabytes (exabytes?) of customer information now controlled by Circuit City will wind up. From a privacy perspective, there are even scarier possibilities than someone's music or computer purchases falling into the wrong hands.Read more...

Earlier this month, CSPI published an "Open Letter to Food Retailers" in which it praises retailers such as Costco and Wegman's that mined their loyalty card data to find out, and make phone calls to, customers who bought recalled peanut-based products. Read more...

Some of these increases were substantial: The "value" of a CompTIA security certification increased 46.7 percent during the period and Cisco Certified Design Associates were worth 40 percent more, according the "2009 IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index" released by the Foote Partners research group. "Clearly, an urgent demand for talent in these areas is eclipsing broad, knee-jerk reactions to reducing budgets and cutting people, projects and purchases that have been characteristic of IT management decision behaviors in past recessions," the report says. "Those times were often marked by lack of careful forethought about the future consequences of budget decisions."Read more...

Peter Alguacil, an analyst at site monitoring company Pingdom, noted even large, global enterprises sometimes fail to renew their sites' SSL certificates. When they do, visitors are often presented with notices from their Web browsers telling them the sites are not verifiably secure for online transactions. Those customers take their credit cards and go elsewhere, Alguacil said.Read more...

The change in heart, driven by new CEO Ron Marshall, will almost immediately force Border's E-Commerce team to halt additional investments. Although the move certainly reflects a new top management strategy that does not see E-Commerce making much money for the company anytime soon—a regrettably realistic assessment—it also is part of a pragmatic strategy of pouring every possible resource into the brick-and-mortars while simultaneously implementing chain-wide—and very deep--budget cuts.Read more...

These systems illustrate the advances being made in face recognition for retail applications as the technology evolves from the realm of discussion to the reality of the store, sidewalk and mall corridor. For retailers, the goal is targeting advertising to those consumers most likely to be engaged. But the effort is running headlong into some sticky ethical questions involving personal privacy. What will happen if face-recognition-powered digital signs and kiosks are able to learn the identities of shoppers merely by scanning their faces and matching those images against known consumer images? Read more...

Kasbe, who spent more than 10 years in a retail practice at IBM before becoming the CIO at Reliance, is replacing former Sears CIO Karen Austin, who has been named to the newly created position of president of home electronics at Sears. Read more...