Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Just what retail IT execs need in the middle of a July heatwave: reminders that the holiday shopping season is waiting around the corner, like a heavily-armed drunk street gang. (Sorry. Heat waves in New Jersey have a way of souring a guy.)

What brings up this merry thought is a statement from Keynote Systems, the Web performance tracking people. Torturously reminding everyone that Black Friday is only 130 days away, Keynote said it was doubling the capacity of its main load testing service, LoadPro. They’ve added three new cities for testing: Seattle, Denver and Miami, for a total of ten locations across five Tier-1 backbones, as well as increasing network bandwidth capacity by almost 60 percent. What Keynote is doing is fine and necessary, but did they have to spoil a perfectly good summer and announce it now?

To listen to top industry analysts discuss the upcoming holiday season and what it will likely mean for multi-channel marketing efforts, please click here.…

A new report from industry analyst firm The Aberdeen Group does not bring a lot of optimistic news for RFID proponents, with predicted trouble for finding sufficiently-experienced RFID personnel, migrating to new data-collection methods such as mobile and biometrics as well as predicted major hiccups with efforts to scale RFID to the next level.

One bright note: the survey finds that users no longer see cost as the single most important factor. That’s significant because it’s the first time in the years that Aberdeen has conducted this study where interviewees did not choose cost as the most important issue when making RFID decisions.

Report author John Fontanella, Aberdeen’s Senior VP and service director for supply chain and retail research, said one of the most troubling findings in the survey of RFID users was that most companies were doing the absolute minimum to comply with mandates. In other words, they weren’t leveraging what they are required to do for a major customer and using it to improve their own operations. To read the full story, please click here.…

With high-turnover being as much a part of an industrial kitchen as cracked pepper, the Chief Financial Officer (and acting CIO) of the Fuddrucker chain of restaurants often looks for ways to get control of his training budget.

CFO Matt Pannek thinks he may have found a tasty answer in a couple of hundred multimedia kiosks, which will be churning out their multimedia informational entrees in the chain's kitchens and bakeries. The IBM Anyplace kiosks cost Fuddruckers $3.5 million "just for the hardware," but it's complicated because the chain also purchased from IBM about 130 POS units and they also upgraded the monitors in addition to purchasing the roughly 175 kiosks, Pannek said. Still, the CFO for the privately-held Austin, TX-headquartered chain with annual revenue of between $300 million and $500 million said that he expects the project to "pay for itself within 18 months."Read more...

Albertsons will give up its online shopping business as of next week after a 4-year effort. The decision to halt its online shopping and delivery service in the Bay Area, Sacramento, Dallas-Fort Worth and Phoenix markets on July 21 comes a month after ownership of the grocery chain changed, according to a report in Wednesday’s San Jose Mercury-News.

Albertsons began offering its online grocery shopping service in the Bay Area in March 2002. Customers who shopped online could either pay $4.95 to have their orders made ready for pickup at an Albertsons store in the online delivery area or pay $9.95 for home delivery. But, like many other online grocery ventures over the years, Albertsons.com was not profitable, an industry expert said. “I’d heard it’s been struggling for some time. I think online is not necessarily a viable way to sell groceries,” said George Whalin, president of Retail Management Consultants in San Marcos. To read the San Jos Mercury-News story, please click here.…

Being one of the world’s leading advocates for RFID hasn’t shielded Tesco—nor Wal-Mart, for that matter—from feeling RFID’s growing pains.

While Tesco has been playing the typical chicken-and-egg game with suppliers on who will initially fund tagging all products, it’s had to quietly cut back its RFID efforts as it is trying to work with European UHF regulations, said Raghu Das, CEO of European RFID consulting firm IDTechEx.

Tesco has been enjoying a strong four percent revenue boost from RFID-enabled inventory improvements, but it’s been applying the tags by hand, which is not a tactic that can be continued indefinitely. Tesco, which ordered 2,000 RFID readers just two years ago, is in the RFID game for the longterm and is begging suppliers to take a more aggressive position. To read the full story, please click here.…

The International Organization for Standards (ISO) on Wednesday officially embraced the UHF Gen2 efforts from EPCGlobal in what an EPC statement termed "a significant milestone." (Dare I ask what a trivial milestone would be? Perhaps they should have said that it was a very unique significant milestone.)

In other RFID standards news, Wednesday also saw an announcement from Brussels of a 3-year R&D and training RFID exercise dubbed the BRIDGE (Building Radio frequency IDentification solutions for the Global Environment) project. Bridge is being supported by the European Union's Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP6) with €7.5 million funding. Read more...

Wal-Mart Canada’s new RFID program will be entirely voluntary, which is the latest tealeaf suggesting that the chain’s new CIO is adopting a gentler tone.

This is all going on with the background that Wal-Mart is still quietly struggling with its RFID efforts. “Wal-Mart is having significant problems. There are problems inside of Wal-Mart,” such as distribution centers that “can’t handle” Gen2 communications, one observer said. “They’re looking to replace those readers. They can’t comply with the latest standards.” To read the full story, please click here.…

Grocery giant Supervalu has hired retail industry veteran Paul Singer as its chief information officer, to assist the company in digesting its recent $17.4 billion acquisition of the Albertsons grocery chain.

Minneapolis-based Supervalu last week named Singer, who served as CIO of retailer Target from 2000 to 2005, as its new CIO and senior vice president. He will report to executive vice president and chief financial officer Pamela Knous. Singer has 27 years of experience in the retail industry in information technology, merchandising and supply chain management. Prior to joining Target in 1984, he worked for Kmart.

Singer retired last year from Target to pursue personal interests, which included raising public awareness for adoption causes. He founded the Target Adoption Network in 2003, a networking group for Target employees interested in adoption, and is a board member of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. To read the full Baseline story, please click here.…

Giftcards are quickly becoming an extremely popular retail payment option, but the traditional analog cards suffer from a lack of security when used for E-Commerce. One company has a two-factor—and possibly three-factor—way of dealing with that.

Imx Solutions said the products are initially being used by Sears, Kmart and CompUSA along with television’s Ultimate Shopping Network (USN). The giftcard is a mini-CD that uses a company-issued–and hidden–password plus it takes a page from the one-time-password-issuing devices because it has a series of encrypted codes on it that needs to match up with a list of encrypted codes on an Imx server and the correct code “changes twice a minute.” To read the full story, please click here.…

Gentag is touting a way to add classic active-tag capabilities (including temperature sensors) to lower-cost passive RFID tags.

A statement from the Washington, D.C., IP development firm describes the patented offering as " an ultra-linear, low-power single-calibration temperature-sensor circuit that can be directly integrated on any chip for either the Gen 2 UHF or the 13.56 MHz global RFID markets."Read more...

Bob DeRodes, CIO for The Home Depot, has some non-traditional plans for the $81.5 billion home improvement chain, including routing calls to store personnel working in the aisles. “We are piloting a system now so that when a consumer calls in, rather than going to a store call center, the call gets transmitted to the right associate who is on the floor helping customers in between calls,” DeRodes was quoted as saying in RISNews magazine.

“We also now have carts in the aisles using .NET and wireless for an automated new process for shelf labels and inventory checks” and closed-circuit TV “has cut losses at the back door. Run with our POS system, it has slashed shrink at checkout. Play back of accidents has showed how to make safety changes and has helped to identify false claims.” The chain is also toying with using customers’ personal PDAs as a networking tool. “It’s not ready yet, but imagine the impact of customers using PDAs that they already own and know how to use to find what they want or to compare products.” To read the full story in RISNews, please click here.…

As contactless payment devices become more adopted by consumers, retailers need to be ready to handle them and, rightly or wrongly, take the blame for associated problems. Popgadget just did a fascinating look at Citibank’s latest RFID PayPass card. It references a Gearlog post about the pros and cons of such a device, along with a hacker’s take on contactless card security.

Little of this is new, as we reported a year ago Shell Canada’s experiments about contactess payment security. But as these cards start to come into common usage, it’s not a bad idea to look at the latest threats and be prepared to deal with the complaints. Trust me: they’ll come. It’s still worth doing, but the easier a system is to use, the more problematic its security profile will be.…

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On Friday, Stores Magazine–the monthly magazine of the National Retail Federation–published its list of the 100 largest retailers. The list is an industry favorite, with few major surprises. Target took an almost 25 percent hit while Lowe’s increased by almost as much (27.3 percent). Rite Aid soared almost 321 percent while Amazon.com dived 39 percent. The report also tracks the number of stores. Take a peek at the full chart.…

Considering the glacial pace that is the world of global standards bodies, it's not surprising that developers need to think far ahead. But as the politically-complicated RFID community has just started getting used to RFID's Gen2, some are already prepping for Gen3. That's making some in the industry feelings a little skittish--or perhaps nauseous.

"Some people are so committed to RFID Gen2" that talk of Gen3 "is like garlic to a vampire," said Kevin Ashton, a VP at ThingMagic and co-founder of MIT's Auto-ID Center. Read more...

Limitations with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology have delayed a nationwide rollout at supermarket giant Tesco by several years, according to a report in VNU’s Computing. Tesco had planned to install RFID tags and readers in 1,400 shops and 30 distribution centres by the middle of this year, but has so far completed just 40 stores and one depot.

Instead of tagging individual products, it will now permanently tag transport items such as cages and trolleys and install the technology over several years. The supermarket says it has struggled with radio frequency standards, a high concentration of readers in the warehouse that affect performance, slow read speeds and low tag quality. To read the full story in Computing, please click here.…

American consumers—especially frequent fliers—are becoming quite comfortable with self-checkout systems, to the tune of a projected $475 billion in self-checkout purchases this year, according to a new study from the IHL Consulting Group.

That's a 47 percent increase compared with what IHL recorded last year and IHL is predicting the sharp increases will continue, with a projected $1.2 trillion in self-checkout sales projected by 2009.Read more...

The CIO for billion-dollar clothing retailer Guess Inc. had a challenge. He knew their search engine was delivering terrible results and that he would take many months to replace. What should be done in the meantime?

Even CIOs at billion-dollar retailers have to put their jeans on one upgrade at a time. But Guess Inc. CIO Michael Relich found himself in an especially difficult position when web analytics told him that 60 percent of his E-commerce site's search results were delivering "not found" responses to prospects. Read more...

Warning consumers about anything presupposes that there is something bad with that item, something that should be avoided. This might be a self-fulfilling prophesy. The commissioner for Information and Privacy in Ontario unveiled on June 19 a series of tips and guidelines for using RFID within Ontario.

But the guidelines themselves certainly need to be examined seriously because North American products can ill-afford to accommodate two different standards and, besides, neither Mexico nor the U.S. have any material privacy RFID rules at the moment.Read more...

In theory, a smartphone can bring into the store the depth of data possible on the web, merged with enough site- and user-specific data to make even the stodgiest CRM system blush. But can it work in the real world? NeoMedia is arguing that it can. Read more...

FCC regs on RF exposure safety requires that at least 8.7 inches always exist between RFID antennae radiating elements and people. How many DCs bother to check?

One industry official—who asked that his name not be used—wondered whether the potential danger from RFID and related readers was being seriously explored. “Some backrooms have 14-30 antennas and all of these are clustered around doors,” the official said. “No one has started to address any of the OSHA safety issues, nor even ask any questions.”

It’s a fair question. In other industries, labor unions would sometimes push such questions, but the lack of unionization in many of these sites truly puts the onus back on management.…

A technology vendor called SmartTools thinks that customers should stop lollygagging around in the cashier checkout lanes. While waiting, they should be scanning their own items and saving the cashier's time. If you find this idea attractive, we need to chat. (Hint: This is not an especially good career-advancement purchase.) Read more...

When a Cincinnati man brought his hard-drive to Best Buy to be repaired, he was told that he couldn't have his old hard-drive back. But fear not, he was told: the drive would be made useless by having holes drilled in it. A few months later, the fully intact drive is purchased at a flea market in Chicago for $25.Read more...

When IEEE unveiled a major RFID alternative this week dubbed RuBee, it touted it as a way to avoid many technological problems with RFID. Mostly, though, it gave IT execs political cover to look at RFID alternatives without admitting failure.

For years, RFID proponents have pointed to item-level tagging as the Holy Grail, the ultimate payoff when all of the RFID pieces fell into place. That's when full ROI would happen, out-of-stocks would become an age-old memory and smartcarts would become what The Jetsons had always intended. Read more...

The IEEE has started work on a new protocol—a standard called IEEE 1902.1 also known as RuBee--that is expected to give retailers and manufacturers an attractive alternative to RFID for many applications, especially item-level efforts. Officials say they expect products based on the protocol to be available within 12-18 months.

The initial backers of RuBee being considered as a protocol include industry heavyweights from both the retail side—including the U.S.'s Best Buy, U.K.-based Tesco and Germany's Metro Group—plus technology vendors including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Sony, Panasonic, Motorola and NCR, said Pete Abell, a veteran RFID analyst now working for IDC's Manufacturing Insights. Paris-based CarreFour is also supporting the effort, Abell said. Read more...

In the ongoing saga of the Veterans Administration and how it’s been protecting confidential information, the VA Secretary will confirm today that the VA is about to recall all laptops, according to an eWEEK.com report today.

Perhaps an overreaction, given that employees could just as easily burn a CD or use a USB drive to bring work home and work on their home PCs. But at least it shows someone is trying to take some action, which is a good first step.…