Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

As a few supermarkets trial customer held scanners to check out items as they shop–sort of a wand approach to a smartcart–the Baltimore Sun caught up with some consumers to get their reactions.

“I wish every store had this,” said White, 39, who recently moved to Sykesville from Baltimore. “This has made my shopping more efficient. As I see my bags getting full, it makes me think about what I’m buying, rather than just piling stuff into the cart.” Not a lot of new information, but an interesting look at how consumers are reacting to the technology.…

An interesting mobile phone payment trial is going on in Taiwan, with consumers being allowed to download MasterCard PayPass cards–plus promotions and coupons–over the cellular networks into a near-field communication (NFC) phone.

The trial, being run by MasterCard, Taipei Fubon Bank, Taiwan Mobile and VivoTech, zaps coupons to consumers “by simply touching mobile phones on smart posters located throughout the region and at retailer’s storefronts,” according to a joint statement from the group. Participants, however, need to use ViVOwallet software to view and select cards for payment and coupons for redemption and then only at ViVOpay-enabled POS stations.…

An innovative RFID trial in Tokyo is using RFID-tagged lipstick to record when various samples are tried as well as to give store clerks full customer history of products purchased as well as tried.

The trial—involving retail chain Mitsukoshi, cosmetics company Shiseido and RFID vendor Fujitsu—also offers consumers a "virtual real-time makeup" session featuring a camera-equipped kiosk, display and RFID tag reader "that will enable customers to view on the display how particular products would look on their face by waving tagged cosmetic products such as lipsticks or eyeshadows over the tag reader," the companies said in a statement.Read more...

Singapore’s Institute for Microelectronics on Monday announced a new silicon chip that it boasted will slash RFID prices. For example, IME officials claimed that an RFID reader built with the new chip will cost less than $100, weigh less than 100 grams and consume less than a watt of power, according to a story in ZDNet.

That compares quite favorably with a typical RFID reader that “costs a few thousand dollars, measures about 6 by 6 inches, weighs approximately 1 to 2 kilograms and consumers about 10 watts of power, the story said.

IME execs told reporters that the biggest hurdle for RFID deployments today is integration, so IME’s approach was a “highly-integrated” 0.18um RF CMOS (radio frequency complementary metal oxide semiconductor) reader IC (integrated circuit), which is usable for multiple RFID tag scanners and compatible with the requirements of different countries, the story said.…

The retail technology world of 2007 is absolutely in transition and nowhere is that more clear than here at the industry's largest gathering, the National Retail Federation's tradeshow and conference.

There are primarily two transitions. The first is an in-store transition, from a world where technology was virtually all behind-the-scenes as far as consumers were concerned to one where the bits-and-bytes are what the industry coyle dubs customer-facing.Read more...

The world of retail technology has learned to always take notice when the Metro Group–a massive German retailer–starts to take anything seriously. So when Metro this week confirmed that it had invited Checkpoint Systems to join its ambituous 36-dock door trial of Gen2 RFID, it raised some eyebrows. Checkpoint’s official role is hardware integrator for the trial.

Each of 36 adjacent dock doors at the Metro distribution center was equipped with a Gen2 RFID reader, according to a story in RFID Update. At the same time, pallet loaded with about 60 tagged Procter & Gamble goods was passed through each portal and onto a docked truck at full operational speed, meaning each pallet was in the RFID read field for between one and one and a half seconds, the story said. A joint statement put the accuracy at a “98.6-percent-plus read rate simultaneously from multiple pallets as they were wheeled through the dock doors.”

“The results represent a significant milestone in European RFID operational deployment,” said Dr. Gerd Wolfram, Managing Director of Metro’s Information Technology Group.…

As key governments–especially in Latin America and Asia Pacific–start protecting against the most common forms of credit card fraud, they are pushing the thieves into other countries and making it the problem of another country’s retailers, according to a new report from market research firm Frost & Sullivan.

“There is a noticeable shift in card related fraudulent activities to
neighboring countries using less secure magnetic stripe cards for a majority of their transactions. With the United Kingdom implementing Chip
and PIN and France implementing dynamic data authentication (DDA) cards, countries such as Germany and Italy are facing the brunt of the increasing migration of fraud,” the report said. “Singapore and Indonesia are facing a significant threat from fraud escalation and are considering a move toward EMV-compliant card technology. This phenomenon is significantly feeding the demand for electronic funds transfer (EFT) at point-of-sale (POS) terminals worldwide.”…

Like the constant reports that every food imaginable causes cancer or some other deadly ailment, IT managers looking for the mythical safe security approach would be best served by giving up and having a bowl of hot fudge. This is prompted by a university report out of the U.K. that chip-and-PIN terminals, which were touted as a more expensive but more secure way to validate credit and debit card purchases, are–you guessed it–not secure.

A team at the University of Cambridge “opened up one of the supposedly tamper-proof terminals, replaced its internal hardware with their own, put it back together without any external evidence of tampering and then got the machine to play Tetris,” according to a report in Computerworld.

Researcher Saar Drimer said the school’s experiments proved that all components of the PIN pads used to authenticate such transactions could be made to interact and respond to input from one another. “This means that the card reader can read information from the chip and display it on the screen. The data from the keypad, such as a PIN, can also be recorded,” Drimer was quoted as saying.…

NCR on Monday confirmed that it is splitting into two independent publicly traded companiesby spinning off its $1.5 billion Teradata data warehousing business.

The impact on retail tech may be minimal, but the company is hoping that the fewer distractions from its self-checkout and POS businesses couldn’t hurt. NCR said the distribution ratio will be determined at a future date and that the spin off is “expected to be completed in six to nine months,” subject to regulatory approvals. …

Tokyo’s famed Ginza shopping district is about to be surrounded by 10,000 RFID tags and beacons, intended to help navigate visitors to local merchants.

The Tokyo Ubiquitous Network Project seeks to install RFID, infrared and wireless transmitters provide location-related information to people carrying prototype readers developed for the trial, Ken Sakamura, a professor at the University of Tokyo and the leader of the project told the IDG News Service. It features a 3.5-in. OLED (organic light-emitting diode) touch-panel display and a host of networking interfaces. There is RFID, infrared and 429-MHz wireless for interacting with the beacons in the trial, a wireless LAN for connection to the Internet and a Bluetooth link. General trials in Ginza are scheduled to begin on Jan. 21 and will run until March.…

Although RFID is making major adoption advances globally, different continents are using the tags in very different ways, according to a report just released by British RFID analysis firm IDTechEx.

North America, for example, leads the world in retail applications (thanks, Wal-Mart) with Europe and East Asia faring better in the Finance space and Australiasia is supreme in the books/libraries/archiving category.

“Contrary to popular opinion, this is at item level, from books to jewellery and apparel, not pallet and case, which is in the ascendant only in North America and then only in the number numbers of RFID projects, not the money spent, which has been little more than $100 million under the retail mandates,” the report said.…

The best gift for a cyber thief is retail and banking apathy. The good holiday news for those thieves is that, this year, they're making out a like a bandit. Security and privacy are among the top issues for consumers so it seems odd that so many retailers and banks often take security so very lightly.

Please don't get me wrong. Officially, all executives with those entities say they take such matters seriously, but when we listen to the day-to-day management, the priorities seem to be elsewhere. Consider an upcoming report from the Aberdeen Group, which details a survey of retail IT execs who were asked to discuss contactless payment.Read more...

Dr. Pepper and Snapple vending machines in Dallas, New York City and Chicago will now be contactless payment friendly, according to a deal announced Thursday between MasterCard and the Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages. As part of that deal, the test machines will accept “all major credit cards” and not just those using MasterCard’s PayPass.

The agreement also included USA Technologies, which makes the e-Port device that lets the vending machines accept contactless payments. The companies said “as many as 1,000” Pepper/Snapple machines effort is the beginning of a larger contactless rollout for 5,000 POS terminals and vending machines in a dozen U.S. cities, including Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, Seattle, Miami, Orlando and Washington, D.C. That larger rollout “will be installed over the next several weeks and represents the largest rollout of contactless technology in the vending and POS markets,” a joint statement said.

The move is not unexpected, as the contactless payment space is one of the brighter spots for RFID. But the vending machine segment is especially compelling as candy/snack/softdrink prices soar, making cash payments more inconvenient.…

A U.S. Patent that deals with the allegedly optimal positioning of RFID antennas, tags and interrogators for read accuracy was awarded to a Dulles, VA, company called Odin Technologies, the firm announced on Thursday. The Patent was applied for on Jan. 22, 2005, and was granted on Nov. 7, 2006.

The improved accuracy is achieved because "the system varies the placement of RFID tag and interrogator antennas with respect to each other and a stationary object or objects. A signal generator sends a known reference signal to the one or more RFID interrogator antennas."Read more...

The dollars spent on contactless payments hardware and software isn’t going to be a huge market anytime, with ABI Research doubting the market will even break $900 million by 2011.

ABI projects that the total market will only be $870 million by that year, up from $260 million for 2006. It argues that the two adoption movers are proprietary transportation ticketing, and open credit, debit, and e-purse payments tied to financial service networks. There is a downside, though, with U.S. and European standards efforts for mobile payments delaying key rollouts.…

A radiation-proof RFID tag? It might be here, for those who believe what a Pennsylvania manufacturer is saying. They are touting a tag that’s safely sterilizable by gamma radiation.

The tag, called GammaTag and manufactured by a company dubbed AdvantaPure, is being positioned for the pharmaceutical, bioprocess/biomedical, food and beverage, and medical device markets.according to a story in Technology News Daily. The idea is that the chip can be attached to devices that needed to overrun by gamma radiation, an act that would wreck havor with most tracking devices.…

In another negative end-of-the-year report for RFID, ABI Research on Wednesday reported that the passive RFID label market—particularly UHF labels—has had disappointing growth because of unrealistically aggressive pricing.

“In a classic vicious circle dynamic, production costs for UHF labels—and hence for Gen 2 passive labels—are still at levels tending to inhibit the high-volume deployments that would provide economies of scale,” an ABI statement said. Said ABI analyst Robert Foppiani: “At current prices, many end-user companies in the retail/CPG supply chain struggle to determine a compelling business case for RFID. Those companies that have high value, high risk goods are often able to find a business case to justify the investment in RFID passive labels at current prices. But many members of the value chain are operating on thin margins, and most are unwilling to drop prices any further until there is much greater volume.”

The report said that Alien, Avery Dennison, Texas Instruments, and NXP “hope that their strap technologies will” cut costs while “multiple vendors are hoping to shrink the size of an IC to obtain more units from a single wafer. A number of EPC Gen 2 RFID vendors are engaged in loss-leader activities, offering labels at unsustainable prices in an effort to gain market share. Eventually, some will drop out of the running, or will find niche markets where their products can find a role. ABI Research believes that cost reduction tactics will not have a short-term effect on market volumes. The substantial price cuts seen in the past year were necessary to attract end users complying with mandates.”…

In a strong concession that fines have not worked in getting retailers to comply with credit card security rules, Visa has switched course and has dedicated $20 million for a fund to reward retailers who actually comply with industry-accepted PCI rules by Aug. 31, 2007.

"This is absolutely a different tactic," said Jennifer Fischer, a director with Visa USA, which is the nation's largest payment system company. "We believe that incentives are necessary to achieve compliance. This is the first time a payment card brand has used positive incentives" to encourage security compliance.Read more...

Reports out of Malaysia have the government wanting to embed into every car license plate an RFID chip with vehicle and owner information.

My favorite comment on this move came from a Wired blog post: “It’s not exactly clear how this will help since Road Transport Department Director-General Ahmad Mustapha was quoted by New Straits Times as saying ‘The first thing thieves do after a car theft is change the registration plates.'”

Perhaps it could help catch thieves in the first minutes after a theft? It would also force the thieves to defeat the RFID chip. Depending on the sophistication of law enforcement, they might then simply search for any license plates that do not generate working RFID signals and label them suspect. At the very least, it would force the car thieves to either fabricate RFID chips to send out false signals or–frighteningly–steal cars in such a way that it’s either not reported or at least not reported for a very long time.…

U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer is formally petitioning the Federal Reserve to crack down on contactless payment, requiring consumers to be warned about privacy risks and preventing retailers from offering incentives for the cards to be tried.

"If you are using a no—swipe credit card, when you put your card in your back pocket or in your pocketbook, you might as well print your credit card number across your back," Schumer said. "Holiday shoppers need to be extremely careful with their credit cards, and these companies need to step up their efforts to protect people from identity theft."Read more...

When it comes to the meat-and-potatoes of the RFID retail business—the tagging of pallets and cases—2006 is going to go down as a very disappointing year. A new report out of London from IDTechEx paints a sad but realistic portrait of frustrated suppliers and very isolated pockets of ROI examples. It does, however, hold out hope for a somewhat brighter 2007.

"The pallet/case market for RFID tags became the nearest thing to a black hole in the RFID universe in 2006," said IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das, who attributed the problems to "reluctant mandated customers, technical problems and pricing for volumes that never came despite retailers reporting excellent paybacks. Tagging the display unit is very different from tagging the pallet and cases."Read more...

Just in time for the holidays, data thieves are giving big brightly-colored wrapped gifts to Visa, MasterCard and AmericanExpress every time they seal their steal.

The traditional credit card companies are fighting for their lives against a plethora of new alternatives, ranging from debit cards, non-credit-card contactless payment, cellphones, eCheck, PayPal and Bill Me Later, not to mention new-fangled hybrids that merge loyalty/CRM, giftcards, incentive coupons and POS card, such as a pilot at the Subway chain.Read more...

Despite consumer—and even some IT executive—beliefs that E-Commerce poses a much greater security risk than store-based point-of-sale systems, a new Gartner report concludes that the opposite is true.

Gartner is reporting that, by 2008, most attacks will be on physical point-of-sale systems and that even by 2009, only one out of three such systems will comply with current security standards. "Device vulnerabilities are often overlooked by enterprises, who tend to focus on enterprise servers and systems when securing their environments," wrote Gartner security analyst Avivah Litan, adding that data transmissions are also closely monitored and "typically ignored by many companies are the devices that hang off of corporate networks where data are either collected or output, particularly point-of-sale devices and printers located throughout enterprise systems."Read more...

The U.S. government is not alone is trying to push a national ID card program to try and improve security and reduce security fraud. But efforts to do so in the U.K. were set back on Thanksgiving when a prominent British Parliament member published government answers on the true cost.

MP Stewart Hosie on Thanksgiving said that the British government's "claim that ID cards could save up to £1.7 billion of identity fraud in the UK economy was totally false" because "there are no costs calculated for the private sector use of ID cards" and that fact "has totally destroyed the credibility of the Government's claims on ID cards," Hosie said, according to a story in PublicTechnology.net. ""Indeed the admission that there are no costs to deploy the system in either the private or public sector without the Home Office makes any claims of savings meaningless. To read the full story,

Millions of Canadian consumers who have moved to debit cards instead of credit cards learned that no payment system is perfect on Black Friday, when Royal Bank of Canada debit cards wend out of service for nearly three hours. The outage began around 4 p.m. EST and lasted until about 6:45 p.m. EST, Royal Bank spokeswoman Beja Rodeck told the Canada.com news service.

“All I can say is that it was a technical glitch and we’re looking at the root cause,” she said, adding that the problem was mostly at POS systems and did not impact the banks’s ATM network. Debit cards from Canada’s other big banks also appeared not to be affected, the news report said.…