Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

At a glance, Best Buy's efforts sound similar to the social networking site widget efforts pushed recently by rival national pizza chains Pizza Hut and Papa John's. But Best Buy's plans are far more adventurous; the retailer envisions pushing its content out to mobile, blogs and video sites in addition to social networking sites. But the company also plans to create wiki-like rich content by leveraging what one Best Buy exec dubbed "150,000 tech-savvy employees, some 65 percent of whom are 16 to 25" years old. Read more...

The defendant pleaded guilty to heading a conspiracy that netted more than $1million by using phony UPC labels to obtain products and then sell them on eBay, according to this story in The Register.

Tommy Joe Tidwell, 35, of Dayton, Ohio, pleaded guilty to three felony counts, including conspiracy to use unauthorized access devices, use of unauthorized access devices, and mail and wire fraud. The best part of the story, though, is that it shows the ineffectiveness of using ratings to sort out legit from non-legit sellers. “As was the case with an airport baggage handler charged with stealing passengers’ stuff, Tidwell’s eBay account enjoyed a stellar reputation. Out of 522 comments left, only four were negative, giving him a positive feedback rating of 99.2.”…

Federal prosecutors have apparently accused a New York man of providing a sniffer program to help the TJX cyberthieves steal payment data. The fact that 25-year-old Stephen Watt has been charged with unlawful access to computers, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering is not in dispute, nor is the fact that he has been accused of delivering a sniffer program to accused TJX mastermind Albert Gonzalez.

But the feds have been vague about whether Watt was involved in the TJX data heist, even though the timing of the accusations would seem to place him in the middle of the largest payment card data breach ever, according to this Computerworld story. Watt allegedly provided a sniffer program that allowed Gonzalez and other gang members to identify and capture credit and debit card data traveling over the networks they had broken into. In January, Watt edited and modified a sniffer program dubbed “blabla” that was used by the gang and stored in a server with a Latvian IP address, according to the story.…

MasterCard’s PayPass is ramping up its mobile program with an over-the-air provisioning service to supposedly make it easier for consumers to personalize their payment data on their mobile devices.

As long as a consumer has a phone using Near Field Communications (NFC), MasterCard says the program should work. “First, the PayPass application is securely transferred onto a secure area of the consumer’s mobile phone via the mobile network. Next, the PayPass application is personalized with the consumer’s individual payment account details,” a MasterCard statement said.…

RFID sales globally will be more than $5.3 billion this year, with supply chain management, ID documents, ticketing and contactless payment drive shipments leading the way, according to a report released Monday (Nov. 3) by ABI Research.

If you take automobile immobilization out of the picture, RFID is slated to grow at a 15 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2008 through 2013, and ABI projects the market will be worth about $9.8 billion in 2013. Said Research Director Michael Liard: “To a casual observer, the five-year CAGR for the RFID market as a whole may not seem impressive at face value. In this case, however, traditional applications with single-digit and low-double digit five-year compound annual growth rates continue to dominate current and near-term RFID market revenue share. If these traditional applications—access control, automatic vehicle identification, automobile immobilization and ID documents—are removed from the equation, the 2008-2013 CAGR for total RFID systems revenue exceeds 20 percent.”…

Costco's deployment of Costco Reviews went out of its way to avoid anything controversial or, for that matter, innovative or creative. Almost all of the functionality has been outsourced to an Austin-based social commerce vendor called Bazaarvoice, which will review all comments and post them within 24 hours, once any profanity or "completely inappropriate" comments are removed, said Ginnie Roeglin, Costco's Senior VP for E-Commerce. Read more...

Let's not get too optimistic here. "Mostly unharmed" doesn't mean escaping untouched. But it does mean that when large companies—especially retailers—have to suddenly make do with a lot fewer people, they need that good ole IT magic more than ever. They need the efficiencies that IT promises and the employee-replacing devices that IT enables. Read more...

Pet product maker Normerica opted for an unorthodox combo of smart boxes with embedded RFID tags and a mobile reader to comply with Wal-Mart’s RFID requirement. The application, described in wonderful detail in this RFID Update story, was attractive because it reportedly involved “no significant retooling of its packing or shipping lines.”

“If you compare the print-and-apply process at consumer goods manufacturing with eight packaging lines, you’d have to have eight applicators and printers,” said Paul de Blois, HIDE-Pack vice president and general manager. “We can produce the boxes on flexo-folder-gluer at a speed of 300 per minute, which is much faster than the throughput of a typical print-apply system.” A story worth checking out.…

A Hong Kong RFID vendor is boasting about a new $1,950-$2,500 handheld UHF reader “with a read range exceeding 25 feet with standard dipole passive tags and a throughput reaching 400 tags per second.” That claim is usually reserved for fixed readers, a very sharp claimed performance boost.

Convergence Systems Limited has dubbed it the CS101, and it eked out an endorsement from the normally publicity-shy folk at Boeing. Boeing Research Engineer Steve Villa praised Geiger counter mode. “In this mode, the reader’s ability to singulate and locate tags, even in a highly reflective environment, is excellent.”…

Simply put, retailers selling very high-priced items to a decidedly well-to-do clientele often invest much more heavily in creating a comfortable environment with an abundance of personal attention. There's a reason retailers such as Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Armani, Coach and high-end jewelers tend to be the last to embrace kiosks, mobile-commerce and online promotions. Read more...

The trial features three retailers: a small technology café; a midsize, regional Tokyo-area chain; and one of Japan's largest retailers--Bic Camera, whose revenue last year was roughly equivalent to $6 billion. The trial's goal is to show that the consumer phones can hold the loyalty card data of more than 100 retailers, depending on how much data each retailer wants to store. Read more...

Australia’s Woolworths, which runs the country’s largest supermarket chain, has given thumbs up to one RFID trial and thumbs down to another, according to a wonderfully detailed story in RFID Journal.

“The retail giant tested UHF EPC Gen 2 tags at selected supermarkets and supplier distribution centers to determine the economic viability of a wider rollout,” the story said, quoting Wayne Ellison, Woolworths’ RFID project manager, and pointing out that Woolworths “intends to extend its temperature-sensing pilot but has abandoned plans to roll out RFID to track and trace produce crates for now because it still sees the technology as being too expensive. The current economic viability is also a challenge, with the overall cost of the solution—including tags, casings and infrastructure—still quite high. The overall cost for a company the size of Woolworths is still too high, and the return on investment for track and trace is just not enough for us to race ahead.” …

Two of the nation's largest pizza chains—Pizza Hut and Papa John's—have jumped into this trend this month, but they're far from alone. Read more...

A DPA attack, as described in the report, takes advantage of the electrical impulses inherent in any smart card. "The silicon chips embedded in smart cards consume power whenever they process payment data and it is possible for criminals to measure these power fluctuations surreptitiously and then analyze them to decode the secret keys that secure the data," the report said.Read more...

The non-traditional Home Depot kiosk trial is based more on the units themselves—small mobile units, some as tiny as 5-inches tall—and the size of the chain's planned kiosk commitment: Well north of $100 million for full deployment, according to the technology consultant handling one of the trials.Read more...

Yes, it's a wacky juxtaposition, but stay with me for a moment. There has been a steady noise coming from retail franchisees who are trying to drive more of their stores' IT strategy. Why now? This IT manager said it's another impact from the economic freefall. When the dollars were flowing freely, having sophisticated reporting wasn't seen as a priority. "Some didn't care about their labor or inventory. A third of our franchisees couldn't have told me what their product costs were," the exec said. Read more...

RFID tracking firm IDTechEx sees the demand for RFID slowing down sharply, but even those reduced increases will still deliver more than 20 percent annual growth. “It is old news now that orders for UHF for retail mandates have been limp due to technical and infrastructure issues. These applications will eventually prevail, but probably not fast enough to create a profitable business for tag makers in the short term,” the report said, before adding that 2008 will still see “approximately 1 billion UHF chips” manufactured.

“The largest single order is by Marks & Spencer for 150 million tags for apparel, but the number two behind that is much less. Indeed, it is still rare to hear of orders of more than 1 million UHF tags. In other words, the applications of UHF RFID are many and small, reaching a wide range of different markets. Almost all are closed loop applications,” the report said. It projected that some 2.16 billion tags will be sold in 2008 versus 1.74 billion in 2007 and 1.02 billion in 2006, across all frequencies, passive and active. “By value, we forecast that in 2009 the value of the RFID market will grow by 23 percent over 2008, and in 2010 it will grow by 25 percent over 2009, which is not exponential, but still very strong growth.” …

With the new Web site that $1 billion Papa John's launched this week, restaurant workers update the site with topping out-of-stocks by calling a headquarters' call center, which sends a message to have the site updated for that specific restaurant. But the chain is preparing for a much faster system, where employees at each store could tell its POS system about running out of pineapple as easily as ringing up a cheesesteak to go.Read more...

If you’re going to be in New York City on Wednesday (Oct. 15), you might want to drop by the StorefrontBacktalk panel on strategic kiosk use (yes, there is such a thing) at the Javits Center during the KioskCom/Self-Service Expo show.

We’re going to start things off by examining Home Depot’s kiosk approaches and concerns (one of our panelists has been working on it for months) and then debate the security risks of kiosks, the difficulties of POS (and back-office) integration and—for laughs—talk about some of the more futuristic robotic kiosks in the wings. It’s from 3:15 to 4:15 PM and we’d love to have you join us. Someone needs to ask probing questions. If you don’t, I’ll have to, and what fun would that be?…

Japan’s NTT and three large Japanese retail chains—Bic Camera, Nojima and Runsystem—confirmed Thursday (Oct. 9) a trial that the group says will “securely integrate the reward cards of more than 100 retailers into a single mobile phone.”

NTT will run the contactless card trial—called Gyazapo—from February to June 2009. “Once a dedicated application is downloaded into the phone, (the system) enables loyalty points, ID photos and other membership information of multiple retailers to be registered under a single platform,” according to an NTT statement.…

In an attempt to minimize fraudulent removals, the software has several rules. First, a button on the POS must be accessed to disassociate the tag from the item. Second, the tag cannot be disabled more than one foot from that POS unit without setting off an alarm. Read more...

In 2006, T-Mobile lost “a storage device with 17 million mobile telephone data records” that included “names, addresses and cell phone numbers, (and) the data, in some cases, also included the date of birth or E-mail addresses,” T-Mobile said in a statement this week. Why are we just hearing about this now? T-Mobile never bothered to announce it until the data started surfacing on the Web and German media started reporting it.

“We are very concerned by the fact that the incident from 2006 is relevant once again. Until now, we were under the assumption that the data in question had been recovered completely as part of the investigations of the public prosecutors’ office and were safe,” said Philipp Humm, Managing Director at T-Mobile Deutschland. Not to worry, though. T-Mobile said that it has now “intensified their security measures.” The first example the company cited: “complex passwords have in the meantime become a technical necessity.” Gosh, it was probably a necessity in 2006, too.…

Visa is running a mobile phone trial where consumers will be able to transfer money using their phones to any other Visa user. “The pilot, which is intended to begin by the end of 2008, is the first U.S.-based trial testing mobile money transfers between Visa accounts,” Visa said, but it has already been doing it in 13 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Visa also said it will be working with cell phone maker Nokia to create a contactless payment phone that will include discounts and other ads from retailers and that it will be working to create mobile payment services for Google’s Android platform. Not all observers are favorably impressed. …

"The files were inadvertently retained within other data files and this was not uncovered by the assessor," a statement from the chain said. This is proving to be a frightening trend, with retailers believing they are compliant and much later on discovering various pockets of forbidden data scattered through their networks. One of the problems in this case—and it could be argued it's a problem with PCI itself—is that it's up to the retailer's IT person to map out the networks for the assessor.Read more...