Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

“More than 95 percent” of the Visa-issuing banks have agreed to a multi-million settlement worked out between Visa and TJX, TJX announced late Thursday.

The announcement—which came one day after the deadline for the banks to accept and two days after TJX had negotiated separate settlements with other banks suing them—cleans up some of the last remaining loose threads from the TJX case. Read more.…

Almost all of the banks and bank associations still suing TJX agreed to settle for undisclosed sums on Wednesday, in an anticipated move following the collapse of bank’s the federal class-action lawsuit against TJX. This all stems from the worst-ever data breach in credit card history, impacting more than 100 million credit/debit cards.

TJX CEO Carol Meyrowitz issued a statement that TJX has finally achieved PCI compliance. Read more.…

Many of the initial media and analyst reviews of the device were less than favorable, pointing out things like an inability to flip through pages and the buttons obscuring some viewing areas. But in two very significant ways, Kindle is falling victim to the focus on specifics obscuring big-picture reality syndrome. Read more...

Getting to the bottom of these he said/she said exchanges—which is necessary to put these pieces of information into meaningful context—is made difficult because so much of the supporting material being referenced is still classified as confidential in the lawsuits surrounding the worst data breach in credit card history. Read more...

Beyond the cost per-use, Soares said the trial continuously delivered a 100 percent accurate read-rate and delivered a "21 percent reduction in out-of-stocks for the items that were counted." The chain also saw "zero percent shrink" on the tagged items, which Soares said was especially noteworthy because the tagged items high-theft-targets such as MP3 players, laptops and desktop PCs. Read more...

The move, which had been expected ever since U.S. District Court Judge William Young ruled that the case shouldn't be considered a class-action, will mean a different set of rules for the few financial entities that decide to pursue the case anew.Read more...

This is not merely a multimedia ad-displayer. It has the potential to interact with smartphones, smartcarts and contactless credit cards. So where are the retail IT leaders in all of this? Nowhere near, as IT isn't seriously involved with—and certainly not in charge of—most of the major retail digital signage deployments today. Right there, in a Unix shell, is what's wrong with corporate IT departments today.Read more...

A fascinating report aired on the 60 Minutes site tonight. Not a tremendous amount of new ground was covered, but the comments from NRF CIO Dave Hogan—where he said that Visa and company are pressuring retailers to retain credit card data specifically so that they can bring in money—was a new angle.

“If you do the math on it, this could be a windfall of $200 million annually for the credit card companies as far as a revenue stream,” Hogan was shown saying on the video. Even at my most cynical, I’m not so sure I’d buy into that rationale. Clearly, the credit card companies don’t want to take on the burden and most larger retailers would truly like to avoid the hassle. But deliberately faciliating PCI violations so they can pocket the fine money? That’s pretty Machiavellian, even for Visa. (But 60 Minutes also linked to only one media source—StorefrontBacktalk—for further information about the TJX data breach, so they certainly got that part right.) ;-) …

But in what could be called the Boomerang Strategy, what consumers will see in-store this season will be quite far removed from the utopian epitome of merged retail channels, with the customer shopping through whichever channel is most convenient and store management apathetic about that customer choice.Read more...

She doesn't go the low-tech route and hand the merchant a printed coupon. This holiday shopper also opts to not go high-tech, deciding to neither beam the coupon to the store's POS nor to have the coupon's value added to her store account. She opts for the sneakernet version of mobile commerce: she shows the cashier her phone's screen, which depicts the coupon. The cashier enters the unique number on the coupon and, voila, a discount is framed.Read more...

In other RFID news, a major analyst report is about to show a sharp price in transactional kiosks shipping without magstripe support. Read more...

The inspections by wireless security firm AirDefense found mis-configured access points, extensive data leakage as well as poorly named SSIDs and naming fields.Read more...

In El Paso, Texas, Sam's Club gas stations launched a mobile payment program. The consumer was supposed to pull up to the pump, text some numbers on a sign and be told of instant discounts and related deals. It was all detailed on a Sam's Club sign by the pump. Read more...

"Pay By Touch has 20 days to respond to the petition once it is officially served on the company and it can choose to oppose, accept, or make an alternative suggestion to resolve the petition. The company is in the process of retaining bank¬ruptcy counsel. It is also seeking financing to cover its cash flow needs including past, present, and future payroll obligations," the report said. Read more...

The program, which Metro calls "Tag it, Easy," is intended to better track products through Metro's global supply chain. The first phase of the program, launched in May, used 30 Chinese suppliers. The second phase was launched at "a kick-off event for suppliers today in Hong Kong" and will start to ship the first tagged products by December, Metro said.Read more...

For years, American technology leaders have gotten used to seeing the U.S. no longer globally technologically dominant. But nowhere is that lack-of-dominance more pronounced than with cellphone technology. That's why I saw this week's Google Android news as something that was exciting in its potential to shake the industry up. Trust me: this is one sector that truly needs a lot of shaking up. Read more...

"its payment processing assets are no longer part of the company's core business and are being considered for sale," the newsletter report said. Read more...

"As smartcards continue to penetrate applications such as contactless payment, ticketing, security/access control, and e-government, the need to simplify interactions by reducing the overall number of smartcards used by an individual will increase," the report said. Read more...

New court filings on Friday also made public E-mail exchanges involving the TJX CIO, which attorneys are using to show that the retail chain knew how weak its security was right before the breach and yet allowed it to continue. Read more...

The Akamai deal is directly related to an Apple/Starbucks deal announced month, where visitors to the coffee chain will be able to download music from the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store at Starbucks using a variety of Apple hardware, including the iPod, iPhone and a Mac running iTunes. Read more...

TJX knew how "antiquated and deficient" its security efforts were and yet never told MasterCard or Visa, resulting in negligent misrepresentations. That's how U.S. District Court Judge William Young summed up what the banks are going to have to prove to win at trial in his courtroom. In an hour-long federal court hearing Tuesday in Boston, Young peppered attorneys from TJX, TJX processor Fifth Third Bank and banks suing TJX, providing a good sense of where a TJX bank trial might go. Read more...

"Shoppers want barcode readers on their trolleys (shopping carts) to calculate the nutritional content and tell them when they have blown their calorific budget," EDS's Sion Roberts, director of consumer industries and retail, told Reuters. Setting aside for the moment whether consumers really want to know, the bigger question is whether retailers and consumer goods manufacturers would want to pay to let them know. Read more...

Barnes & Noble is gently testing the mobile-commerce waters, as it prepares to announce a deal on Monday to sell books, CDs and DVDs, but only on BlackBerry phones.

The deal with Digby will deliver a small version of the book chain’s site—optimized for mobile, presumably—to allow faster and easier ordering. Downside: the BlackBerry version will only be updated once a day.…

Retailers started using the credit card numbers to identify purchases with specific consumers, given that they had to store them anyway. It turned out to be a convenient link into CRM systems, especially for customers who weren't using the traditional retailer-issued loyalty card. Read more...