Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

This year, some 1.3 billion RFID tags will be sold, a number that will top 2.2 billion next year, according to figures released Wednesday by European market analyst firm IDTechEx. Those figures are noteworthy in the sense that they show particularly steep growth in the immediate future.

But the most interesting detail in the new figures is an estimate that 200 million of those tags to be sold this year will be used for item-level tagging, which is the same problem the firm is projecting will be sold this year for contactless smart cards. Let's put those figures into startling context: the 400 million for item-level and smart cards is merely 20 percent less than the 500 million IDTechEx expects to be purchased for the traditional pallets and cases of supply chain drudgery. Read more...

Shortly after the media began reporting this weekend on its data loss from a car thief, Expedia hired a PR firm to call reporters and stress that the incident was not in reality exposing its customers to identity thieves, but merely to credit card thieves.

Now there's a comforting distinction. First, what does it say about Expedia that it not only felt that exposing customers to credit-card theft was a lot nicer than exposing them to identity thieves, but it was willing to pay money to try and make that difference clear? Even better, one could make the argument that if you give a clever con artist sufficient access to a consumer's credit card data, they will easily be able to extract enough personal data to try for an identity theft. Read more...

More than a quarter-of-a-million Hotels.com customers are now at high risk for credit card theft after a password-protected laptop computer containing their credit card information was stolen from an Ernst & Young auditor's locked car in what appears to be a "randon petty theft," a Hotels.com spokesperson was quoted as telling the Associated Press. The Seattle incident at Hotels.com, a subsidiary of Expedia.com, is just the latest in a series of data-identity cases recently centering not around criminal hackers but around the garden-variety thug breaking into locked places. Read more...

Some of the largest Web retailers—including including CircuitCity, CompUSA and RitzCamera--use the same product-comparison database. But a comparison of those sites with each other—and with the full database—show what they're choosing to keep from their customers. Read more...

The vision of convergence circa 2000 was a remote control influencing live network broadcast action. That never happened, but BET has gotten close, But BET's executives found the profit rested in knowing the particulars of its large niche audience. What will this mean for E-Commerce? Will broadcast, cable, cellphones and PCs finally learn to play together, with smart advertisers along for the ride?Read more...

The world's largest retailer wants to attract more customers and it sees selling computer parts as one way. That includes PCs with no operating system and spare parts to create your own desktop. But it shows a lack of understanding of how people buy technology. Read more...

Although the market for content for cell phones and PDAs is still in its infancy, the two applications that are expected to seize major market-share the fastest are reservations for airplane seats and hotel rooms. Read more...

The report of a 5 percent increase in North American Point of Sale purchases in 2005 was much lower than had been expected, and was a sign of delayed retail IT purchases during a year of substantial retail software consolidation, according to IHL Consulting Group. Read more...

Analysts gave Microsoft credit for doing better than expected in the retail POS (point of sale) space as it announced a new version that adds native support for several common peripherals. Read more...

At Todd Pacific Shipyards in Seattle, management knows that accurately tracking employees, including the hours and projects they've worked, and assessing daily staffing needs is often the difference between running a tight ship or sinking it. Read more...

Wal-Mart isn't the only major early RFID backer to have cooled its RFID enthusiasm lately. One of the most anticipated RFID trials was at the Department of Homeland Security, which last year made a move to use super-beefed-up RFID devices track all U.S. ports of entry. Read more...

RFID was supposed to revolutionize the supply chain and—by mid-2006—dominate most aspects of product handling within retail and manufacturing. Today, even the most ardent RFID advocates are conceding that hasn't happened and it's quite frankly not even close. Read more...

The IT director at bath products retailer Crabtree & Evelyn wants to move away from the homegrown applications that run point-of-sale and back-office systems, but he says he's trapped.

The multimillion-dollar cost of moving to off-the-shelf apps would easily outweigh the cost of sticking with apps that work quite adequately. Read more...

Catching misleading statements and half-truths in vendor news releases takes me back to my old days of covering New Jersey politics.

It was never news to say that a particular New Jersey politician was a crook. The news was when they slipped up enough to let you prove it.Read more...

The conventional IT thinking has been that, all else being equal, consolidated and centralized is the most efficient way to run a business. All of the data is analyzed globally and purchasing trends can be quickly spotted and acted on. Read more...

Joe Chiavetta was facing a potentially huge hardware purchase to keep his always-on-the-road sales force current with pricing, orders and customer backgrounds. It's not what a food distribution company's chief financial officer likes to think about. It then struck Chiavetta that the device the reps were already using to check voicemail—their cell phones—could also include small customer databases for the 200 or so prospects that each rep works. Read more...

Retailers who have tried selling wines next to the canned plums and the greeting cards have grown frustrated. The high-margin beverage is bathed in its own language, leaving non-wine-schooled consumers drunk with confusion.

One retail software company tried to deal with this situation by introducing a kiosk that uses a sophisticated form of 20 Questions to establish the consumer's wine preferences by asking about everything from their coffee, soda and salt preferences to the nature of the occasion. Read more...

The National Security Agency, whose NSA initials are typically preceded by "super secret" or a similar cool-sounding phrase, is known as the home for code-breakers extraordinaire.

After 9/11, the NSA was given even more freedom to do whatever it takes to track terrorists and identify their plots. The New York Times recently reported about their efforts to conduct more domestic surveillance without warrants or any court authorization. Read more...

When two major food companies—select H.J. Heinz food operations and Del Monte—merged a few years ago under the Del Monte umbrella, it forced Del Monte CIO Marc Brown to do some radical consolidation. Almost 100 systems were eliminated and the combined company standardized on ERP, data warehouse and a very different approach to supply chain. Even telecom advanced, with a huge push for voice over IP. Read more...

Major retailers were given a teaspoon of good news that their sites fared well during what was expected to be a super-intense traffic day. But the real wave of intense traffic was expected to hit in late December, so the strong Black Monday performance might have proven to be a brief-lived cause for celebration. Read more...

As retailers and manufacturers start bridging the gap between passive and active RFID chips, one RFID consortium is cautioning vendors to watch their mouths when talking about sensors.

The self-appointed sensor censor is the nonprofit SAL-C (Smart Active Label Consortium), which has about 20 members from the RFID manufacturing community.Read more...

E-mail is a wonderfully flexible and powerful application, but have corporate users bent it so far that it's about to break? More to the point, have users forced e-mail to do so many things that it's no longer any good at its core function? This is not an academic discussion. In 2006, e-commerce sites that use e-mail extensively are going to have to evaluate alternative communication and distribution methods.Read more...

When the CIO of a $3 billion unit of Johnson & Johnson decided to make knowledge management a priority, he knew he was in for a classic corporate battle of the old ways versus the new. In Ethicon CIO Zackarie Lemelle's case, the old ways won.

While managing the IT needs of some 8,300 employees with a barely $90 million technology budget, Lemelle knew that his having a 118-year-old $47 billion corporate parent in J&J was both a blessing and a curse. Read more...