Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Fresh from its merger talks with Siemens, Nokia is announcing a major smartcard company, the first large-scale mobile payment trial in China and the killing of its CDMA deal with Sanyo.

On Tuesday (June 27), it announced a deal with Giesecke & Devrient, the world's second largest producer of smart cards, to form a company that will " provide services to the NFC ecosystem by enabling consumer applications, such as credit cards or transport tickets, to be securely and easily downloaded over-the-air to NFC enabled mobile devices."Read more...

An Israeli company says it is developing a way to mix chemicals with clothing fibers to create a very-difficult-to-replicate product identification and tracking system. Asks News.com: Why attach an RFID chip to a shirt when you can identify the shirt through undetectable, invisible chemicals mixed into the fibers?

The News.com story quotes CrossID CEO Moshe Glickstein as saying that his company has devised a way to put a chemical signature into fabrics, labels, inks, boxes and other materials. When a hand or door scanner tuned to a specific frequency is pointed at an item, chemicals mixed inside the item get excited and give off a signal. The signal, which differs with the addition or subtraction of different substances, then serves as an ID for the item.…

Warning consumers about anything presupposes that there is something bad with that item, something that should be avoided. This might be a self-fulfilling prophesy. The commissioner for Information and Privacy in Ontario unveiled on June 19 a series of tips and guidelines for using RFID within Ontario.

But the guidelines themselves certainly need to be examined seriously because North American products can ill-afford to accommodate two different standards and, besides, neither Mexico nor the U.S. have any material privacy RFID rules at the moment.Read more...

The IPO reports that Alien has "had limited success in accurately predicting future sales of our RFID products." Is that like my saying that I've had limited success in making billions of dollars as the world's ugliest male model? That is suddenly my favorite new phrase. When my wife asks me if I've finished cleaning the kitchen, I'll tell her that I'm enjoying limited success in that endeavor. Read more...

This year, some 1.3 billion RFID tags will be sold, a number that will top 2.2 billion next year, according to figures released Wednesday by European market analyst firm IDTechEx. Those figures are noteworthy in the sense that they show particularly steep growth in the immediate future.

But the most interesting detail in the new figures is an estimate that 200 million of those tags to be sold this year will be used for item-level tagging, which is the same problem the firm is projecting will be sold this year for contactless smart cards. Let's put those figures into startling context: the 400 million for item-level and smart cards is merely 20 percent less than the 500 million IDTechEx expects to be purchased for the traditional pallets and cases of supply chain drudgery. Read more...

More than a quarter-of-a-million Hotels.com customers are now at high risk for credit card theft after a password-protected laptop computer containing their credit card information was stolen from an Ernst & Young auditor's locked car in what appears to be a "randon petty theft," a Hotels.com spokesperson was quoted as telling the Associated Press. The Seattle incident at Hotels.com, a subsidiary of Expedia.com, is just the latest in a series of data-identity cases recently centering not around criminal hackers but around the garden-variety thug breaking into locked places. Read more...

Just as E-Commerce players are getting used to the idea of people buying products using their cellphones, whether in a physical location beaming right to a POS or making purchases online, the cellphone wants to make the next leap forward. Nokia has ported the Apache webserver to Symbian, which will theoretically allow cell phones to directly serve Web content.

According to a report in LinuxDevices.com, Nokia installed its experimental port, initially, on a Nokia 6630, which it then accessed over a Bluetooth PAN (personal area network). This proved somewhat useful, in that it brought “the possibility of accessing functionality on the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard.”

However, the project’s goal was to enable access to the phone of the cellular network, the story said. This proved challenging due to firewalls explicitly deployed by operators to prevent such access.

This is the logical next step with the growth of the Web. The Internet’s early days were made powerful because of the networking of millions of PCs around the globe. The potential to expand that now with the networking of huge numbers of connected cellphones is, to say the least, powerful.…

MasterCard today tolled out its PayPass watch in Taiwan today, allowing consumers to pay with contactless without having to take out a credit card. The watch comes with some small retail discounts, but Taiwan consumers are expected to show minimal resistance.

Would this catch on in the United States? Not likely, unless the discounts were a lot more generous than the 10 percent discount in one chain being offered with today’s promotion.

But it’s hard to beat the sex appeal of a lime-green watch with a vendor’s brand on it. Rolex, watch out.…

As retailers find dollars in having certain stores specialize in various Ethnic or lifestyle segments, they are often neglecting to update their store data to match, so finds a new Forrester Research report. This is a matter of frustration among some consumer goods manufacture suppliers who now need to know more about those customers. A product that appeals to only two percent of shoppers should be viewed very differently, for example, if it happens to be appealing to 85 percent of Hispanic shoppers or 86 percent of vegetarian shoppers or 89 percent of senior citizen shoppers.Read more...

The vision of convergence circa 2000 was a remote control influencing live network broadcast action. That never happened, but BET has gotten close, But BET's executives found the profit rested in knowing the particulars of its large niche audience. What will this mean for E-Commerce? Will broadcast, cable, cellphones and PCs finally learn to play together, with smart advertisers along for the ride?Read more...

Joel Hansen, a 45-year-old Texan, was visiting his local Wal-Mart to purchase some food at about 5:30 p.m..

After what everyone seems to agree was an unpleasant human-computer interaction, the self-checkout terminal had a smashed-in monitor, courtesy of the fist of the consumer. Read more...

Although the market for content for cell phones and PDAs is still in its infancy, the two applications that are expected to seize major market-share the fastest are reservations for airplane seats and hotel rooms. Read more...

Like every major sales and communications advance that preceded it, e-commerce's 12-year existence has moved along in phases, as it slowly abandoned earlier methods to accept the new reality.
Offline and online brands were initially kept distinct, then they were awkwardly merged. Initial e-commerce efforts were flashy brochure sites, with rudimentary shopping carts and checkout. Read more...

It was apparently a coincidence that two of the biggest names in contactless payment today, Exxon Mobil's Speedpass and credit card leader Visa, both announced changes to their contactless payment system on the same day. The changes were definitely minor tweaks, with Exxon Mobil deploying a much faster way to sign up for Speedpass (taking a weeks-long process down to a few minutes) and Visa rolling out a much smaller form factor, specifically a mini-card suitable for hanging on a keychain. Read more...

With more home deliveries and installations, retailers and restaurants are facing the point-of-sale challenge of verifying payments away from the POS while paying higher credit card fees for card-not-present purchases. Read more...

At Todd Pacific Shipyards in Seattle, management knows that accurately tracking employees, including the hours and projects they've worked, and assessing daily staffing needs is often the difference between running a tight ship or sinking it. Read more...

Wal-Mart isn't the only major early RFID backer to have cooled its RFID enthusiasm lately. One of the most anticipated RFID trials was at the Department of Homeland Security, which last year made a move to use super-beefed-up RFID devices track all U.S. ports of entry. Read more...

Breakthrough technologies invariably require some IT executive somewhere to have the guts to deploy when no one else is seriously doing so.

That's a bold and dangerous move, given how many technologies fizzle and die after an impressive beginning. Read more...

Joe Chiavetta was facing a potentially huge hardware purchase to keep his always-on-the-road sales force current with pricing, orders and customer backgrounds. It's not what a food distribution company's chief financial officer likes to think about. It then struck Chiavetta that the device the reps were already using to check voicemail—their cell phones—could also include small customer databases for the 200 or so prospects that each rep works. Read more...

As retailers and manufacturers start bridging the gap between passive and active RFID chips, one RFID consortium is cautioning vendors to watch their mouths when talking about sensors.

The self-appointed sensor censor is the nonprofit SAL-C (Smart Active Label Consortium), which has about 20 members from the RFID manufacturing community.Read more...

The Virgin Entertainment Group is trying to push the envelope on kiosk use, with plans to use the multimedia machines not just to play video clips, audio samples and game demos but to identify customers and to handle payments. "Our minds are racing where we can go with this," said Robert Fort, the CIO for the 17-store chain with some 1,600 employees and $225 million in annual revenue. "Virgin is definitely a company known for innovation and our demographic may indeed be much more willing to participate in all of this stuff." Read more...

TMasterCard International Inc. Vice President Oliver Steeley is working to make contactless payment available to millions of Americans. Contactless payment is where a customer authorizes a charge to a credit card without the credit card being touched, often by using a key fob, a smart credit card or a chip embedded in something else (such as a cell phone or wristwatch). The authorization is sent to a reader wirelessly, from which it is then communicated to a POS (Point of Sale) unit, which might be a significant distance away. Read more...

Bar code pioneer and scanner manufacturer Intermec Technologies Corp. planned to unveil a new generation of bar code readers that rely on pure silicon to read bar codes, rather than mechanical means. Intermec predicted its readers would be 80 percent more accurate with the new approach to scanning. Traditional bar code readers use several lasers set at different angles, and mirrors to direct light from the laser across the whole bar code, even when it's on a product that is cylindrical or irregularly shaped. Read more...

A U.S. Court of Appeals panel this week issued a ruling in a long-running patent infringement lawsuit that threatened retailers using bar-code readers. The panel affirmed a lower court ruling that the patent infringement case should not go forward. The case involves several bar-code system manufacturers that were sued by a foundation that owns the patents from an early bar-code inventor named Jerome Lemelson. Read more...