Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

"Can you hear me now, Mate? You can't? IBM must be testing RFID again." Alas, the Australian Tennis Open has little love for Big Blue and neither do Australian Vodafone users.

Seems that IBM was preparing a major demonstration, to show that RFID is now accurate, reliable and can function without causing interference. Unfortunately, IBM had to pull the plug on the demo because .... well .... it was causing too interference. To read the full story,

The changes for this holiday’s shopping season—both online and offline—were the highlights of this week’s StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review show, featuring panelists Patti Freeman Evans, from Jupiter Research, Cathy Hotka, from Cathy Hotka & Associates, Richard Mader from the National Retail Federation and former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.

Jupiter’s Evans anticipates more sophisticated search capabilities as the most interesting development expected, along with earlier purchasing. The panel also explored whether more indirect issues—such as interest rates and gasoline prices—influence shopping behavior. The panel also explored whether new standards proposed by the National Retail Federation to make it easier for e-tailers to send data to price-comparison sites will also make it harder for retailers to hide selling identical products for higher prices. To listen to the pricing and standards discussion, please click here. To listen to the E-Commerce prediction discussion, please click here. To listen to the shopping influences discussion, please click here.…

As retailers and consumer goods manufacturers struggle with achieving the supply-chain nirvana of complete item-level tagging, $60 billion aerospace giant Boeing has gotten item-level RFID to soar, with two thousand high-memory passive tags in every plane of an upcoming line.

Boeing's item-level RFID efforts are intriguing because of their scope, but also because of the extreme environmental and frequency hardships they must endure. Beyond the expected vibrations, altitude, air pressure and humidity impact of routinely flying that far above the clouds, the tags must be able to handle temperatures that range from 40 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero and they were tested to 1,200 degrees above zero, which is what the exhaust nozzle right outside a jet engine experiences. The wireless unit must be nonflammable and be accessible to frequency ranges between 860 MHz and 960 MHz, so it can communicate with devices from any country that using UHF RFID readers. They also must last about 20 years.Read more...

An upcoming retailer/supplier trainwreck collission over store localization, Amazon's abandonment of key features of its A9 search engine, whether a new giftcard service will change retail approaches and the privacy controversy surrounding Hitachi's new RFID tag. Those were the topics for this week's StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review audiocast.

This week's panel featured Forrester Research's Nikki Baird, the Retail Systems Alert Group's Steve Rowen and Ken Morris of The Lakewest Group, along with StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderating.Read more...

Saw a note this morning listing winners for the Organic Semiconductor Industry Awards and, for some pyschotic reason, I felt the need to suggest that the Whole Foods chain would be an ideal sponsor for this event.

Maybe they could serve Alf alpha sprouts and organic tofu and maybe Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for dessert? We could get this whole no preservatives, no pesticides, no barcodes theme going. (Plextronics apparently won the start-up of the year award, for which I thank them because it gave me an excuse to run this silly item.)…

In an interesting wireless payment approach, the 2006 Arizona State Fair will allow consumers to pay for rides with credit and debit cards at all ticket booths on the midway. Given the temporary nature of fairs and carnivals, it seems a natural for wireless payment potential.

“Taking credit cards for rides has always been a challenge because we move the ticket booths regularly to accommodate different fair layouts, so installing the cables required to carry the transactions over a wired connection for each event has been impractical as well as expensive. In addition, we have never been able to accept debit cards,” said Kristi Walsh, Marketing Director for the Arizona State Fair. The fair will be using Hypercom Optimum M2100 wireless payment terminals. …

Hitachi on Monday announced what it is billing as the industry’s first WiFi active RFID tag for wireless LAN position detection and management of people entering and leaving buildings.

According to a report in the Japan Corporate News wire service, Hitachi’s new offering will also include an emergency message capability that reportedly “allows users to send a message to the control center, automatically informing disaster relief officials of their whereabouts.” The Air Location II Tag-w, which will be released on October 3 at 21,000 yen, will be displayed at CEATEC Japan 2006 from October 3-7.…

The marquee names of the participants in lockstep agreement couldn't have been more impressive: Wal-Mart, P&G, Kellogg's, Coca Cola, Miller Brewing, Disney, Walgreens and more. They were all coming together to support a method for tracking aisle traffic for the purpose of properly pricing promotion fees. But according to a panel of retail technology experts this week, they couldn't be more wrong.

The dramatic infrared sensor announcement will offer no true advantages over the old-fashioned mechanical counters and is a puzzling move, said Paula Rosenblum of the Retail Systems Alert Group.Read more...

The folks at Visa and PayByTouch just want everyone to know that they’re doing fine. Visa on Thursday issued a statement identifying a handful of retailers–7-Eleven., Clearview Cinemas, Dairy Queen, Domino’s Pizza, and Sonic Drive-In, to be precise–who have agreed to use the card’s No Signature Required Program, for transactions costing less than $25. That campaign is aimed at cash-intensive retailers.

The day before, it was PayByTouch’s turn to reassure people that it was still around by announcing its three-millionth consumer customer. That is a good indication that biometrics is gaining a little acceptance out there, but signing up to get whatever incentives are being offered is one thing. The frequency of use is another. …

There’s not that much that is retail-specific about this, but it’s difficult to not at least note the introduction of a 16-GByte, which claims the title of the world’s highest-capacity card. The card, with a suggested price of $1,050, truly has the potential to shake up the IT world. When that much memory can sit atop a fingertop, it is going to enable some fascinating things.

The SanDisk Extreme III CompactFlash cards claim minimum write and read speeds of 20 MBytes/sec. and are slated to ship by late December, SanDisk said.…

A fascinating story in ComputerWeekly reports on British retail powerhouse Marks & Spencer and their efforts to increase the number of products being tracked at the item-level from 25 million to 49 million.

Staff in 42 stores use Bluetooth retail handheld devices to scan garments in a weekly stock check. Every tagged garment in a store can be read in 90 minutes.…

When we see news releases that try to spin something out of nothing, we typically *sigh* and write nothing. Every now and then, though, a PR stunt is so brazen and misleading that it begs to be shared. Cisco this week gave the retail world just such an offering.

It trumpeted on Monday the introduction of the “Cisco Unified Communications for Retail solution.” The fact that it uses the word “solution” is the first hint that it’s worthless, unless they’re referring to liquids sitting in a beaker atop a Bunsen burner. But other than that word, it sounds impressive. Major vendor introducing a retail-only package. What followed? They took four old case studies (one was so old we reported on it more than a month ago) and called it a new offering. What those retailers had purchased many months ago were existing products. They weren’t even beta sites. Oh well. If you hear about Cisco’s Unified Communications For Retail package, you can feel safe in ignoring it. It reminds me of one of my favorite Johnny Carson jokes. He described the White House Press Secretary’s job as “When the President has nothing to say, he puts it into words.”…

A New Zealand company is pushing a digital signage/RFID system that fills an aisle with smells to reinforce marketing messages. In the Regency duty free shop at Auckland International Airport, for example, digital images of vodka company Absolut’s raspberry vodka were reinforced by—yep—a strong raspberry smell. The system isolates the smells for specific customers and can spray as many as 2,000 different fragrances into different parts of the store at different times, according to a report in the Sunday Star-Times in New Zealand.

“What we’re getting into now is really something more than digital signage,” said OpenEye chief executive Gareth Croy. “It’s more the digital experience” with one-on-one electronic messaging. “You pick up a bottle of Johnnie Walker Green Label and put in your shopping basket. Suddenly, the digital sign near you tells you you can buy two bottles of Johnnie Walker on special for $100. Visual images then reinforce the message.” If a customer uses an infant-carrying pram, OpenEye has the security camera track the customer’s movements and co-ordinates digital signs and audible messages pushing the hottest items for babies. As for smells, options include vanilla for women, leather for men, chocolate for all and cut grass for gardening issues.…

RFID tags are secure for only a handful of very specific situations, according to a new report from Forrester Research. “RFID is not mature enough yet to protect your company secrets,” the report said. “This technology will inevitably bring changes to business processes, but adopters need to anticipate the potential threats that can arise with new changes and know the limitations of their RFID systems.”

Forrester says that risks include the lack of ability to see modified data on a RFID tag, passive tags lacking confidentiality protection and an attacker’s ability to send their own signals and block others.…

Motorola has taken over RFID and barcode vendor Symbol Technologies for almost $4 billion in cash, which came to about $15/share.

Wall Street saw this as good news for Symbol and not-so-great-news for Motorola, as Motorola shares dropped 50 cents in afternoon trade on the New York Stock Exchange, while Symbol shares increased 3 cents at $14.70 on the NYSE. But its stock price had already soared about 15 percent on Monday when it absorbed rumors that it might be purchased.

Motorola CEO Ed Zander issued a statement that the positions Motorola well for a digital future: “Everything is going digital and everything digital is going mobile. This is especially evident in the way businesses are run today. Motorola and Symbol share the same vision of a digital, mobile world for enterprises that matches the world people enjoy at home and at play.”…

The question of whether smartcarts are truly smart investments got a brief exploration in a recent AP story, that spoke of the struggle of smartcarts to make money, but that seemed to miss the point. Ultimately, yes, Smartcarts are intended to boost profits and sales and I believe they will, assuming the CRM-friendly data they generate is put to shrewd use.

In the short-term, though, they have a much more urgent goal: stop the customers from going elsewhere. They are there to show customers that grocery stores can indeed make shopping efficient and fun again. But like any other sophisticated piece of retail technology, they won’t work if they’re not integrated into the store. A store that throws them out there with just a bunch of videos in the screen–as depicted in the story–deserves to lose its investment.…

The CIO of the nation's largest movie theater chain struggles with how to push 500 popcorn-popping patrons through the refreshment stand before their movies start. For David King, CIO of the $2.7 billion Regal Entertainment Group with theaters in 40 states, the challenge is a combination of arithmetic and consumer incentives.

Beyond staggering movie start times and trying to get people to arrive earlier, King's non-technology options are limited. Among some of the options is stealing some ideas from sports arenas. "We're even going to be experimenting with some things that are ballpark-like where people will take orders in the auditoriums and have food and refreshments delivered to them," King said. "In a variation on that, we're looking at something called hawking, which is like the guys who walk up and down aisles in a ballpark with Cokes and a tray that has a strap around their neck and they sell Cokes out of the tray to the patrons." Read more...

Recent changes to credit card security rules reflect a maturing of the payment rules, with wireless monitoring requirements made much more strict while file software integrity monitoring frequency and the encryption demand have both been softened.

"This is a bow to reality," said Mark Rasch, a former federal prosecutor who now specializes in retail security issues. "The first version was more of a Utopian of what Visa and MasterCard thought were workable standards based on what people should do. This is a minor tweaking based upon what people are doing." Read more...

This week’s show included a special guest, David King, CIO of the Regal Entertainment Group, which is the nation’s largest movie theater chain, bringing in about $2.7 billion a year from theaters in 40 states. King lead a spirited discussion about the new PCI changes and how his chain is viewing them, including a new wireless requirement. On the RFID front, the panel looked at the new Gen2 support promised from both Wal-Mart and the Metro Group as well as what may be truly behind it. Metro’s experiment with physically separating payment from checkout also prompted a debate of whether two lanes would be seen as being slower even though it’s faster.

Other than CIO King, our panel this week featured the Retail Systems Alert Group’s Paula Rosenblum, IDC’s Pete Abell, Chris Noell from TruComply and former federal prosecutor and security consultant Mark Rasch. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.…

McDonald’s in Japan is letting cellphone-touting consumers instantly see the nutrition information–such as it is–for all of their fastfood, courtesy of a barcode printed in the food’s wrapper. According to a Cellsuite news story, the wrappers have QR codes printed on the labels, taking users to a site that will detail the calories and fat of the product.

The piece says this should save McDonald’s costly printing runs to keep the data current, but I’m not so sure that information would change that often, unless the product itself is tweaked. But it also says this could reinforce McDonald’s image for selling healthier food. Although the openness is to be applauded, I’m wondering if it might have the opposite result. When I’m eating a quarter-pounder, the nutrition specs are the last thing I want to see.…

The German-based retail giant The Metro Group this summer started quietly experimenting with a radical change in supermarket layout and procedure: physically separating where groceries get scanned and where customers make their payments.
The move is designed to both cut costs and accelerate customers through the checkout process, said Gerd Wolfram, the groups' chief technical officer and the managing director of Metro Group Information Technology. Read more...

Look for Symbol Technologies next week to introduce a mobile Gen2 RFID reader that is designed to be integrated into forklifts, pallet jacks and stretch wrappers. The unit—to be dubbed the RD5000—runs on Windows CE 5.0 and can use Bluetooth. At a cost of about $8,000, though, it’s a tad bit pricey. The vendor will also claim that it saves battery life because it uses sensors to detect the device’s proximity to tagged items, shutting down when motionless or out of tag range.

“Previous RFID deployment strategies have depended heavily on the predictable movement of goods, with RFID readers installed at ‘choke points’ such as dock doors,” said Anthony Bartolo, vice president and general manager of Symbol’s Wireless Infrastructure and RFID Divisions. “By RFID-enabling material handling equipment, organizations gain increased visibility to items in the supply chain all the way to the shelf or staging area.”…

Our panel this week whipped up some sweet insights into Starbucks’ headaches with an electronic coupon that they had intended to be strictly localized but the Web had other plans. It also jumped into the renewed interest from some major retailers into using closed-circuit video feeds for a lot more than catching thieves, including CRM and preventing child abductions.

Our panel this week featured IHL President Greg Buzek, the Retail Systems Alert Group‘s Steve Rowen, Forrester Research‘s Sucharita Mulpuru and The Lakewest Group‘s Sunita Gupta. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.…

Plenty of options is typically seen as a good thing, unless the screen involved is the size of a cellphone monitor. But which options are displayed and which are hidden? A Santa Clara, CA, cellphone software firm has been awarded a patent on its method of allowing the cellphone itself to make that selection based on the buying pattern of the consumer.

July Systems, which announced the patent today, argued that the system's support of realtime personalization is "key to overcoming screen size and other limitations" to help "the mass adoption of mobile video, games, music and other services." Read more...