Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

The young mobile retail space is starting to consolidate, with today’s announced merger of MobileLime and Cuesol. Sad but true, that the surest sign of a maturing market is when key players start eating each other.

Terms of the purchase were not announced, but the CEO/President of MobileLime–Robert Wesley–was named as the CEO/President of the combined company. That was the only personnel detail released.

Cuesol has focused on what it calls personal shopping experiences, including in-store kiosks and wireless cart-mounted touch screen browsers. MobilLime’s focus has been much more narrow, limiting itself to retail applications of cellphones.…

In the ongoing sage of the TJX breach, the Wall Street Journal today quoted police sources that law enforcement “looking for a possible TJX link in a spate of recent arrests involving credit-card fraud in Alabama, North Carolina and Virginia.”

This comes on the heels of Florida giftcard arrests tied to TJX data. The Journal also quoted an unnamed TJX spokesperson saying: “While we cannot confirm that the data involved with the Gainesville arrests came from TJX, we continue to cooperate with law enforcement.” Yes, it’s not one of the more informative quotes, but it’s the first we’ve seen of TJX even acknowledging that Florida exists.…

Both Visa and MasterCard this week were trying to firm up their respective contactless support, with MasterCard announcing a Coca-Cola vending machine deal while Visa rolled out contracts with Taco Bell, ShopRite and ClearView Cinemas.

The MasterCard deal was with the Great Plains Coca-Cola Bottling Company and involves adding an e-Port G6 contactless device on vending machines first in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Visa’s lineup also included Braum’s Ice Cream and Dairy Stores.…

What a wonderful, altruistic POS market we have. When execs at VeriFone saw that rival POS vendor Hypercom was potentially being distracted by an almost 10 percent drop in its stock market price earlier this month, they wanted to help out.

So VeriFone pointed out the challenges--and added news about the rumors that its rival is up-for-sale. It then altruistically offered to pay for all of Hypercom's customers to move to VeriFone, if they do so "by the end of July." I guess the rationale is that Hypercom could focus on its efforts better if it wasn't being constantly distracted by noisy customers.

In a move that PayPal said reflects “high penetration rates” with shoppers in major European online markets, the EBay company on Wednesday said that it now has “nearly 35 million accounts in Europe.”

PayPal cited a Forrester Research report saying that 23 percent of Euro online shoppers “prefer” paying with PayPal. Last year, PayPal processed $8.4 billion of total payment volume in Europe, the company said. PayPal has a local presence in 15 countries including Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland and the UK.…

The banking world is learning its lessons from massive credit card recalls, as necessitated by data breaches such as those recently suffered by TJX. It's a good thing, too, as such huge breaches are likely to become much more commonplace.

Out of Michigan comes this tale of Comerica Bank's reissuing headache and how customer service painfully collided with credit card security. Despite the breach having been announced in mid-January--and known to credit card players a short time before that--some customers are only now getting recall notices.To read the full story,

Ever had the desire to take the old POS you’ve been looking to upgrade and make it the centerpiece of a bonfire? Or shoot it out of a cannon? Or let a buzzsaw loose on it?

Well, POS vendor Vivonet wants to encourage retailer’s inner beasts with a promotion that offers $10,000 to the retailer who can most sadistically and dramatically destroy a POS unit.

The idea of the contest is to have retailers post their videos on YouTube, with the money going to the creator of the most popular video. They’ve posted a short video to give retailers some ideas, but the examples shown in the video are rather lame. When it comes to brutality and juvenile destructiveness, nobody can touch an angry StorefrontBacktalk reader. So come on and win this one for angry retail IT managers everywhere.…

More TJX rumors flying around. This one–which seems only a little wackier than some of the stranger rumors–has that the TJX data breach was launched via job-application kiosks.

The story ran in Dark Reading. I mostly note it because the writer–Kelly Jackson Higgins–is a very top-notch pro whose work I knew years ago.

Like any good reporter, she both reports the kiosk theory and lays out the theory’s weaknesses, including methods for getting the data to be returned to them. Interesting reading. …

The names of the states investigating TJX, the status of congressional hearings and a federal confirmation are among the latest developments in this huge data breach.

Beyond Massachusetts (who is in charge of the probe) and Rhode Island (which had launched its own probe before giving up and joining the group), states participating include: Alabama; Arkansas; Arizona; California; Colorado; Connecticut; Delaware; Florida; Washington, D.C. (OK, so it's not really a state. Sue me);hawaii (Probe 'em, Danno); Illinois; Maine; Maryland and Michigan. To read the full story--and to see the full list of cooperating states,

The Federal Trade Commission has confirmed that it has been investigating the TJX data breach that the retail chain disclosed last month, but released few details, according to a story in today's Boston Globe.

U.S. Rep. Edward J Markey (D-MA), a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, issued a statement supporting the government probe, as congressional leaders debate whether to hold their own hearings. One Congressional aide said on Tuesday that initial interest to hold House hearings has given way to letting the FTC conduct its own probe and to wait and see what it comes up with.Read more...

A USA Today technology columnist learned the hard way that online-offline integration isn’t what it’s supposed to be. And it was Sears that taught him that lesson.

In the USA Today column, the writer describes having bought a microwave oven from Sears, which was supposed to be delivered and installed through the local Sears store. “Sears.com and Sears at the mall, however, don’t share a common database. My order, I learned later, had to be manually sent from Sears.com to the local store. Unfortunately, that process did not allow the dot-com folks to pass along the fact that we had paid for installation.”

After 14 phonecalls, the columnist surrendered best practises and did his own multi-channel communication: “We eventually gave someone at the retail store our Sears.com login information and walked him through our account online so he could see the original order and that we had paid for installation. We got our money back.” It’s really something IT folk need to read.…

As Connecticut state investigators continue to look into the Best Buy dual Web site situation, current and former Best Buy employees and customers are telling stories that question how accidental some of the confusion was.

The intent behind the confusion of the two sites is crucial to the investigation being conducted by the Connecticut Attorney General's Office, according to a law enforcement source within that department. Were the two sites created as legitimate tools for store associates and the confusion merely a result of insufficient training or was it a deliberate attempt to perpetrate a fraud on the public? The first hint as to intent comes from the site appearing on employee screens simply labeled "BestBuy.com," according to four sources. If the site was indeed designed to show in-store—as opposed to online—pricing, wouldn't it have been labeled in a way to reflect that? To read the full story,

The IHL Consulting Group report saw an 8 percent increase in the size of the POS market, which isn't bad for a market that traditionally increased about four percent. Still, it's a healthy drop from the double-digit growth of recent years.

The North American POS market report released Tuesday said the largest boosts coming from new store shipments for specialty retailers, particularly for clothing, home improve and car aftermarket. Substantial POS purchases by Kroger and Wal-Mart were specifically cited as materially helping to drive the numbers. To read the full story,

As the Connecticut Attorney General's Office continues the probe into possible fraud accusations against the $31 billion retail chain, retailer's executives concede errors.

As it tries to navigate the minefield that today's multi-channel retail strategies have become, Best Buy officials are conceding "human error" and employee "confusion" caused customers to be shown a site showing higher brick-and-mortar prices while the customer was incorrectly being told that the displayed site was showing online prices, according to interviews with Best Buy officials.Read more...

With more than 90,000 employees, what was Best Buy thinking when it created two employee-accessible versions of its Web site that look exactly the same, except that each had different prices?

In any dramatic story—and this Best Buy dual-Web-site story is starting to become deliciously dramatic—there are good characters and bad characters. In a really good dramatic story, those good/bad distinctions are much more complex and they invariably are dependent on perspective, the reader's point of view.Read more...

Intel on Tuesday will aggressively move into the RFID arena, integrating enough RFID into one of its chips to cut reader prices anywhere from 50-60 percent.Intel is expected to make its first move into the RFID space and will try and cram enough discrete components into its chip to slash reader prices, reduce power consumption and shrink the needed footprint.

The UHF RFID transceiver branded by Intel will be called the R1000 and the chip giant is claiming to have schmooshed "approximately 90 percent of the discrete components found in a typical RFID reader radio (including receive, transmit, baseband, modulation and demodulation functionality) onto a single chip." To read the full story,

MasterCard's confirmation this week that TJX had not complied with PCI rules at the time of its huge data breach is setting up yawns throughout retail. Nowhere is there better evidence of the lackluster way PCI is trying to improve retail security.

Earlier this week, MasterCard officially (well, sort of officially) confirmed that retail chain TJX was not in compliance with PCI rules at the time of the $16 billion retailer's infamous January disclosure of a massive data breach.Read more...

Europe's second-largest shoe retailer, the Hamm-RENO Group, today confirmed a program to embed RFID chips into shoes to reduce shrink and to improve customer service.

The deal was between Checkpoint Systems and Reno (part of HR) and it is starting with 700 branches in six countries: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Hungary.Read more...

ShopRite becomes the latest regional grocery chain to jump onto the contactless payment shopping cart, with the announcement that it will start accepting MasterCard PayPass cards.

The deal is officially between MasterCard and the Wakefern Food Corp., the merchandising and distribution arm of ShopRite, which bills itself as “the largest retailer-owned cooperative in the United States” with more than 200 locations in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware.…

In Utah, a grocery chain is touting the winner of the international Best Bagger Championship in its efforts to fight self-checkout. The unusual tactic presented itself when one of the store’s local baggers won the award at a competition in Las Vegas (where else?).

A spokesperson for Associated Foods stores–including Dan’s, Lin’s, Dick’s Market and the Macey’s–told the TimesRecordNews that the move was to bolst perceived customer service. “We feel that self-checkouts diminish the level of customer service,” said Associated Foods spokesman Jason Sokol. “We would much rather provide our guests with a real person to help them, whether it is a checker in a checkstand or the bagger that helps them out to their car.”…

MasterCard has now confirmed that TJX had not been compliant with PCI rules at the time of its massive data breach, according to an employee of a MasterCard PR agency.

Specifically, the agency person said that MasterCard has now “confirmed that TJX’s acquiring bank had identified them as not yet compliant.” This follows a report Monday from ePayNews.com, which added that MasterCard “understands that TJX was actively working toward compliance.” The story suggested–and the MasterCard source confirmed–that the acquirer was Cincinnati, Ohio-based Fifth Third Processing Solutions, which is apparently TJX’s sole acquirer in the U.S..

The suggestion that TJX had not been PCI-compliant at the time of the breach is hardly news–with widespread reports raising questions about both inadedquate encryption and improper data retention–but MasterCard publicly confirming it is is unusual.…

As legislation moves through the Massachusetts legislature--and is threatened to be introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives--assigning responsibility for retailers if they have a data breach that is found to be their fault, former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch makes an interesting observation.

While the debate has focused attention on the banking lobby's position that they foot the bill for the losses due to retail errors, he counters that, ironically, it ends up being the retailers--as a group--who pay for retail security violations.No, we're not talking about retailers having to pay higher card interchange rates to pay for the fraud. That's true, but there's a much more real cost. To read the full story,

When the credit card companies unveiled their Zero Liability programs, their goal was to encourage consumer purchases. The unintended result: it is greatly fostering weak retail security systems. In short, the program intended to make consumers feel more safe is actually making them less safe.

As the TJX data scandal gets worse with each passing day, many in the industry are saying that no retail chain will be so carefree about security again, given what the $16 billion discount clothing chain is enduring.Read more...