Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

One of those retailers—Barnes & Noble—issued a vague statement suggesting that the chain might not have been aware of the incident before the Secret Service team started making those 11:30 AM calls.Read more...

But now, the security of the accused thieves' data loot is the least of their problems. Indictments and informations released Tuesday (Aug. 5) charge the 11 conspirators with stealing 41 million credit and debit card numbers from major retailers including TJX.Read more...

The more RFID-tagged items retailers place on Z-bars or shelves, or in boxes, the lower the read rate will be when those items are scanned, according to a study out of the University of Arkansas. By setting up store-like scenarios in a university lab, researchers conducted three feasibility test scenarios of RFID tagged apparel and shoes.

What they found was that when an associate scanned items, the number of items scanned affected the read rate. For example, researchers scanned RFID items hung on a rounder. When there were 97 items, they found a 99.38 percent read rate. Compare that to the 89.89 percent accuracy of 180 items scanned.…

Still, those technological trendsetters are found in pockets throughout Europe, Asia and Australia, with most overseas retailers still slow to embrace self-checkout, according to a new report from European retail tech analyst firm Planet Retail. That said, for those merchants who have deployed, they are often exceeding their U.S. counterpart. Read more...

As retailers struggle to figure out the proper role for PDAs and cellphones in their merged channel and marketing strategies, it’s good to know that there’s strength–well, comfort at least–in numbers. An ABI Research report released Friday (Aug. 1) projected that “location-based mobile social networking revenues will reach $3.3 billion by 2013.”

The service is defining that market as one that “allows users to share real-life experiences via geo-tagged user-generated multimedia content, exchange recommendations about places, identify nearby friends and set up ad hoc face to face meetings.” As marketers fund such deployments, opportunities for helping consumers find storefronts and turn those locations into desired meeting places soars. Privacy concerns and licensing/revenue-sharing issues aside, this is something few retailers can afford to not watch closely–and creatively. …

An EU undertaking called the SMART project—set to start widespread testing in October—is getting good support with some creative efforts. It’s looking at scenarios such as “if one product is selling well at store A but selling badly at store B, RFID-powered inventory systems could initiate the transfer of the product from one store to another,” according to this ComputerWeekly story.

The project Web site goes into some other interesting possible directions, such as smart-shelves that tell consumers “whether the product is available in the back-room or whether there is a joint/ personalized promotion” and “shelf replenishment practices that change based on real-time information about availability and product shortages.” One of the tests includes “automatic discounting system for products–specifically, meat–that is nearing its (expiration) date.”…

The data from several unrelated retail sensor projects—all of which track consumers electronically during their shopping experience—will be hitting IT desks soon, as no fewer than three such efforts are going to be announced by September.

Retail marketers are notorious for arranging for a ton of data to be collected, only to have the task of making sense of it fall on IT. In this case, marketers and their love of dollars and sensors have outdone themselves, with today’s CRM data of what consumers actually purchase becoming a rounding error when compared with the sensor data tracking every move and every potential move. Read more.…

As part of an extensive recent retail sensor trial, technicians noticed a strange phenomena, one where testing equipment seemed to make every grocery store examined appear to be a massive nursery.

The Nielsen-deployed aisle sensors were using thermal measuring, using a customer’s body heat to indicate a person, which was intended to count the number of people in an aisle at any one point. But the devices registered an awfully large numbers of babies sitting in the shopping cart seats, according to Peter Hoyt, executive director of In-Store Marketing, a company coordinating that trial. It turns out that they were interpreting fresh-roasted hot chickens—which were emitting significant body heat and were sitting in the baby seat—as newborns. The devices were then reprogrammed and the attack of the chicken babies was quickly halted. (We deserve brownie points for having resisted saying that the test results were foul.)…

A Dutch court has given the go-ahead for a university to publish research about security flaws in the RFID chips used in as many as 2 billion smart cards, despite resistance from a semiconductor company, according to a story in Computerworld.

NXP Semiconductors manufactures the MiFare Classic RFID chip, which is used in government buildings and to board public transportation systems. They had filed a lawsuit in Court Arnhem in The Netherlands against Radboud University Nijmegen in an attempt to stop the university from publishing a paper that reportedly reveals flaws in that chip. That paper is scheduled to be unveiled in October at the ESORICS security conference in Malaga, Spain.…

But the specific tactics being considered—and detailed in a Web site for the group officially dubbed the Information Grand Voyage Project—includes searching history of game programs, blog postings, surreptitiously captured video segments from TVs and computers, tracking Wi-Fi locations and using an RFID reader connected to a cell phone to identify a consumer's activities "based on data captured by mobile device camera." Read more...

"How many smart people are out there who are simply not reserving inventory" for all channels, asked Forrester Principal Analyst George Lawrie. "You never know where demand is going to crystallize." He cited morale—not to mention inventory—problems caused by "reserving inventory for stores that could have been sold by the catalog or online channel." Read more...

A handful of Stop & Shop stores have been using in-store location tracking–coupled with basket content–to narrowly target ads to customers using handheld shopping devices, the chain confirmed in a statement issued Thursday (July 17). Some 92 of the chain’s 360 stores are participating in the trial.

“If a customer is walking down the health and beauty aisle, it can trigger an offer for a new brand of shampoo,” said Michele Deziel, the senior VP of marketing at Modiv Media, which is working with Stop & Shop on the trial, along with Microsoft.…

But Homa's key point is that most retailers handle security backwards: Don't pour everything into protecting the front door. Assume they'll get through and have a plan to control them once they're inside. Read more...

But several major cellphone carriers are preparing to bundle the 2-D barcode software with phones as they ship. Will that make a difference? Read more...

The PCI Security Council is branching out a little, with an attempt to bring unattended payment terminals (UPTs) under its jurisdiction. As kiosks get more sophisticated and start taking cash, credit cards, mobile transactions and other payment methods, the UPT security risk is sharply increasing.

The council has also launched a testing program for Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). “PIN entry devices go well beyond the typical POS terminals we are all familiar with and we are continually expanding into more and more areas,” said Bob Russo, general manager, PCI Security Standards Council. “Any device that processes personal identification numbers is an important link in the transaction chain.” …

A semiconductor company is suing a Dutch university to keep its researchers from publishing information about security flaws in the RFID chips used in up to 2 billion smart cards, according to this intriguing Computerworld story.

NXP Semiconductors filed suit in Court Arnhem in The Netherlands against Radboud University Nijmegen. The company is pushing the courts to keep university researchers from publishing a paper about reported security flaws in the MiFare Classic, an RFID chip manufactured by NXP Semiconductors, the story said.…

Although the question of RFID safety has been debated extensively over the years, with conflicting study results, a major new medical study released this week points to very specific electromagnetic dangers within nine inches of the transmitter.

The highly respected Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found 34 electromagnetic interference instances out of 123 tests, with 22 of them rated potentially hazardous. “Interference changed breathing machines’ ventilation rates and caused syringe pumps to stop” at a distance of about nine inches, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. This may give serious pause to some retail IT operations, who can have dozens of RFID devices in loading docks and assembly lines, in addition to trucks and even on shelves. …

"Response times for some short codes degraded severely during the busiest hours of the day. One CSC (common short code) showed a 60 percent peak-period slowdown every day, indicating a major capacity issue was present," Keynote said. "Many of the CSCs monitored showed significant reliability issues. Several (experienced) more than 10 hours of outage while one (experienced) more than 50 hours." Read more...

Major retailers won't invest in a truly robust mobile deployment until they see most of their rivals doing so. Yes, this is why American business is in the global position it's in today—that grand American Can-Do-But-Only-If-You-Do-It-First attitude. Read more...

Note to retailers looking to offer free Wi-Fi: It’s a good idea to first make sure you can make the offer. Starbucks discovered that an offer of two hours of free Wi-Fi a day simply wasn’t working.

“Due to overwhelming interest in Card Rewards we are currently experiencing difficulty accessing Starbucks Card accounts. We are working to fix the problem and ask that you please try again later,” said a page shown to site visitors, according to this IDG News Service story. A Starbucks spokesman said that the problems were on Starbucks’ end, not AT&T’s. “Customers overwhelmed the site when joining Starbucks Card Rewards,” said Doug Cavarocchi, a Starbucks spokesman, in an e-mail. …

A university study of cellphone users’ habits–which found that nearly half of the people tracked kept to a circle little more than six miles wide–is raising some ethical issues and might suggest a non-traditional retail testing method.

The Northeastern University study–according to this Associated Press story–could only have done its secret tracking because it was conducted outside of the United States, because such testing would likely be illegal here. Retailers looking to try out new mobile strategies might consider testing the domestic-only applications overseas.…