Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The Metro Group’s RFID trial efforts have been well-known, but this is an interesting International Herald-Tribune story discussing some of the privacy debates within Europe on their efforts.

The piece quotes a Metro person as saying that a recent European Union effort to force the tags to be deactivated at POS as the kiss of death for consumer-facing RFID. “If we have to deactivate at the check-out, then the technology is going to stay within the logistics process – to say where is a box or where is the pallet in the distribution center. It won’t come on consumer items. They’re going to kill the technology with that.”…

The potential is absolutely there, with retailers collecting molecular mountains of shopping history—sometimes more than a decade's worth—and law enforcement seeking creative ways to find criminals (or people they think are criminals) who are quite determined about not being found. Read more...

"In today's environment, the card is swiped by a consumer and it's never seen by the cashier," said Joe LaRocca, the NRF VP for loss prevention. "There's no way to see the information on the plastic," he said, and therefore no way to verify identity." Read more...

A pair of companies is pushing an approach where hotel guests could use their electronic room key to also open vending machine snacks, which would then be automatically charged to the guest’s room.

The new approach, from Cstar Technologies and Fastcorp, would theoretically make such purchases easy to order repeatedly, offering revenue and margin that could more than compensate for reductions in “honor bar” purchases. …

Global RFID revenue is expected to hit $1.2 billion this year and $3.5 billion in the next four years, according to new Gartner projections. This year’s figures represents an almost 31 percent increase from last year.

Gartner reported that the leading segments were discrete manufacturing (21 percent), national and international government (20 percent), transportation (20 percent) and then retail (14 percent).…

Last week, StorefrontBacktalk ran a story chastising a security vendor, Shift4, for having issued a news release that said retailers using its products wouldn't have to worry about PCI requirements because they would be excluded. The vendor on Monday issued a news release, apologizing for the earlier one and corrected the record. But the core question--about it's encryption approach--still stands. Read more...

RFID-tagged products will have to be deactivated at the POS throughout Europe, if draft guidelines proposed this month by the European Commission are approved.

A public consultation is being launched into the “soft law” guidelines that EU Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding hopes will be adopted by the European Union executive to be applied in all the bloc’s 27 member states, according to this Reuters story. The guidelines are “tentaitively scheduled to be adopted before the summer of 2008,” the Commission said in a statement.…

One person working on the trial—sworn to secrecy by Wal-Mart—said the group initially tried cramming in a lot of sales info into each text message. This was done on the theory that it would increase the probability of hitting on an item that particular consumer would want. "We were sending 10-15 in about three or four text messages," the manager said. "We learned that three messages is where the consumer says, 'I've heard enough from you, Mr. Retailer,'." Read more...

Taking some cabs in New York City this month, I was thrilled to see the contactless devices in the backseat, only to be told by three different cabbies to not use them because customers were complaining about getting double-billed. This week, visiting three different grocery chains in New Jersey, tried unsuccessfully to use my contactless card there. The first time, a cashier looked at me as I asked about using my contactless card.Read more...

Retailers and telcos and others are watching test markets such as New York City and seeing how many consumers are using contactless payment. Their assumptions are based on the number of contactless cards in the population. But if that population doesn't realize that they have a contactless card, there's nothing valid that can be concluded when those people do not use them. Read more...

Breach letters are being sent out so frequently that I wonder if it's going to pique the business interests of Hallmark. A card for every occasion, when you care enough to breach the very best. Perhaps a merger with their Get Well cards? "Sorry to hear that you're not getting around these days.... [open card] .... but your CVV sure as heck is. Call 1-800-DATA-OOPS for your free year of credit monitoring, courtesy of your neighborhood retail chain." Read more...

But, for better or for worse, that's not a long-term situation. Like the presidential candidates who had to fly South for the winter (or fly the coop entirely), these compliance salesfolk have a limited lifespan. Within the next year or so, retailers are going to shift from trying to become PCI compliant to having to maintain PCI compliance. Read more...

At least that's one of the core conclusions from a report released Thursday from technology analysis firm Gartner Inc. Read more...

In a move that researchers said might set up low-cost, high-volume RFID tags that could replace barcodes, the European Holst Center said Wednesday that their 64-bit, inductively-coupled, passive RFID tag achieved a record 780-bit/second data readout.

This development “represents a five-fold increase in bit rate performance compared to state-of-the-art plastic RFIDs,” reported Electronic Engineering Times. The story reported that the 64-bit RFID consists of a low-cost inductive antenna, capacitor, plastic rectifier and plastic circuit, all on foil.…

The traffic watchers at Keynote Systems this weekend saw the problems throughout the region, a key area for supply chain partners of global retailers. Read more...

The trial with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) commuters started Tuesday and is expected to continue for four months, said Mohammad Khan, the CEO of Vivotech, which is one of the technology vendors involved in the trial. Sprint is also a key partner in the project. Read more...

The 389-store grocery chain—employing about 59,000 in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey—has been running this trial since October at 90 of its stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. Read more...

There are quite a few merchants who feel that the drive to PCI compliance has caused them to make some security technology choices that are contrary to their system architectures and prior planning. Others have expressed concerns that they are simply not able to process all the data they are collecting from their various auditing and logging tools, which means they are getting little value from the many thousands of dollars they have spent, other than the "PCI Compliant" seal of approval. Read more...

One day he's in a parking lot and discovers that someone placed a huge scratch along the right side of the car. His insurance company inspects and awards him a large check to have the car completely repainted. Instead, the man uses the check to buy a new state-of-the-art audio system. The way that Chicagoan views his insurance check is how many IT leaders see PCI requirements. Read more...

But there is a huge IT frustration with those mobile devices when it comes to retail employees. It's not the fact that most new retail tech capabilities are mobile and experimental, which just begs the data breach Gods to punish managers. That's less frustrating than infuriating. Read more...

The panel included Google's head of retail, John McAteer, Borders' E-Commerce chief, Kevin Ertell, the corporate development VP at Bill Me Later, Mark Lavelle, Ursula Milan, an E-Commerce manager at the Museum of Modern Art, and the dean of the E-Commerce analytics corp, Jupiter Research's Patti Freeman Evans. Read more...

The carts, jointly crafted by Microsoft and MediaCart Holdings, use consumers' loyalty cards to grab the historic shopping data and the uploaded shopping lists and deliver data back to consumer goods manufacturers about ad performance, by comparing ads displayed with the ultimate customer purchases. That last part is easy to track because the carts assist directly with checkout. Read more...

"Those newly recorded projects represented 20 percent growth in the size of the database, reflecting the rapid growth of the market way beyond the Chinese ID card," said IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das. "We could have added more than 500 more consumer goods companies mandated by retailers to tag pallets and cases but that would be living a lie because most of these are doing little or nothing in the face of the huge financial cost and lack of payback if they comply." Read more...

The Wegmans Food Market chain is going to trial whether RFID-tagged prescriptions could make processing orders more accurate and fast, according to this story in RFID Journal.

But the more controversial aspect of the trial will be looking at “how the usefulness of RFID tags on individual pill bottles or blister packs could be extended beyond the point of purchase. For this application, they’re seeking partners interested in developing in-home RFID tag interrogators that consumers could use to organize their drugs and manage when and how much they should take.”…

Although the initial retailer for this trial wasn't identified, the company has been talking with Best Buy, the Gap, Nordstrom and Target. And for a fee ranging from $250K to 450K, they can leverage the trial to compete against online alternatives. Read more...