The Internet continues to take its toll—both pro and con—on the U.S. Postal Service, but the post office may be starting to win the fight. In 2005, for the first time in several years, the USPS reported an increase in first-class shipments, albeit a nominal one of one-tenth of one percent. Read more...
When two major food companies—select H.J. Heinz food operations and Del Monte—merged a few years ago under the Del Monte umbrella, it forced Del Monte CIO Marc Brown to do some radical consolidation. Almost 100 systems were eliminated and the combined company standardized on ERP, data warehouse and a very different approach to supply chain. Even telecom advanced, with a huge push for voice over IP. Read more...
Major retailers were given a teaspoon of good news that their sites fared well during what was expected to be a super-intense traffic day. But the real wave of intense traffic was expected to hit in late December, so the strong Black Monday performance might have proven to be a brief-lived cause for celebration. 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...
Like a Java version of the sword of Damocles, the threat of a Web tax has loomed over e-Commerce players since the Web was formed a little more than a decade ago.
But fitting for an October deadline, this sword is more of the tissue-paper and cardboard type, one that looks scary only from a distance. Upon closer examination, e-commerce shops are discovering it's a twist on the Halloween tradition called Threat Or Treat. Read more...
Several indications—from reduced ATM interest, increased use of online bill payments and sharply improved consumer bank perceptions—show that banks are starting to understand their customers. Given that it's a business where almost everything comes down to moving numbers from one column to another, one might think that online banking should have been one of the first e-Commerce segments to mature. From that perspective, it's an Internet natural. 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...
One key part of a CIO's job is to protect company information. That forces a healthy amount of paranoia, as the exec must anticipate the unlikely and envision the impossible. Maybe we should call CIOs Chief Imagination Officers? Perhaps a Stephen King-like imagination. Read more...
With the nation's worst credit card security disaster on its resume and AmericanExpress and Visa cutting its contract, payment processor CardSystems has few long-term options.
In what might signal the closing chapter in the CardSystem credit-card security breach saga, CyberSource announced its intent to acquire all of CardSystem's assets for an undisclosed amount. Read more...
With 1,200 stores in 47 states, the Cold Stone Creamery chain is growing quickly with its do-it-yourself ice cream concoctions. But the acting CIO is trying to whip those do-it-yourself treats into a corporate CRM sundae.
The managers at one of the nation's fastest-growing ice cream chains pride themselves on customers who know exactly what they want sweet-wise when given the tools to make it. Read more...
SAP AG officially made its countermove to Oracle Corp.'s retail efforts with the announced purchase of Canadian POS player Triversity. Not coincidentally, the deal—which had been in the works for almost two months—was announced the day Oracle's OpenWorld conference opened.
Financial terms of the deal were not announced, nor were the revenues of privately held Triversity confirmed. Read more...
For years, the retail and supply-chain worlds have spoken of item-level tagging as the holy grail of inventory control, but added it can't be done until tag prices hit 5 cents. With recent pricecuts delivering 12.9-cent chips, is that Holy Grail imminent? When leading RFID chip manufacturer Alien Technology announced it was cutting the price of its 96-bit Gen 1 RFID labels some 44 percent to 12.9 cents apiece, it was more than a typical price cut. It pushed the industry tantalizingly close to the much-ballyhooed 5-cent RFID tag.Read more...
With an estimated $10.5 billion of idle spare change lying around American households, Amazon sees that found money as found money. And it will now accept it for purchases. Pity the poor penny, the neglected nickel, the despondent dime and the queasy quarter. The times are changing and for change, it's for the worse. 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...
The most altruistic gift is an anonymous contribution, in which a giver wants to help but does not want to benefit from the donation. Sometimes, though, anonymity is not possible, and that's where things can get dicey. Read more...
The concept of e-commerce micropayments—small Web purchases typically less than $2—is nothing new, but it has never gained widespread acceptance among e-retailers because credit card fees took too much of a bite out of a micropayment to make the exchange profitable.Read more...
CardSystems violated contracts by not encrypting data and retaining data it wasn't supposed to—and then became the nation's largest data-theft victim. Now it wants bygones to be bygones. When credit card processing firm CardSystems announced Thursday that an independent auditor had declared its systems sound, one CardSystems executive said he now wants Visa and American Express to take it back. Read more...
Generous people wanting to help victims of Hurricane Katrina should direct their financial contributions carefully, so that the money isn't diverted by e-commerce thieves.
Scammers taking advantage of the disaster don't need much capital or personnel: The Web provides them all they need in the way of cover, illusion and false identities.Read more...
Yahoo Inc. has gone into beta on an enhanced version of its e-commerce hosting service, which is positioned for the small business that can't justify its own Web team nor the time to outsource it to programmers and Web designers. Read more...
It has been said that CIOs at large companies today have limited direct power and—more than almost any other C-level executive—need to push the IT/business agenda by persuasion and by maintaining good relations with other stakeholders. Taking that to heart, the CIO of Overstock.com recently sent off a note to key business partners taking the heat for a wide range of technologies that weren't working out. Read more...
Are consumers seeing self-checkout as the anti-customer-service initiative they feared? Not according to one industry study, which predicted self-checkout revenue would double in 2005 (compared with 2004) to $161 billion, and could hit $454 billion by 2008. The study, conducted by retail consulting firm IHL Consulting Group, found some intriguing trends. Read more...
With almost 3,000 stores in all 50 states, the Rent-A-Center retail chain needs to be able to expand quickly and easily. But its business model allows customers to rent and return merchandise with little notice, forcing store layouts to be flexible. What if 30 customers return mattresses to the same store tomorrow? Read more...
A major regional fast-food chain—with 433 restaurants in the Southeastern United States—is going to offer free wireless connections to anyone who wants to surf while sitting in a burger joint.
The Krystal Co. (the nation's second-oldest fast-food restaurant chain, founded in 1932) is clearly hoping that a lot of customers will be intrigued and will munch on a burger and fries while gulping from its unlimited refill 802.11 fountain. Read more...
Typically, a CIO arguing for a $30 to $40 million IT investment for new payment systems has to answer a lot of questions from a skeptical CEO, chief financial officer and board members. But that wasn't the experience of Canadian Tire Corp. CIO Andrew Wnek. Read more...
Cards issued by European banks when used online cross border don't usually support AVS checks. So, when a European card is used with a billing address that's in the US, an ecom merchant wouldn't necessarily know that the shipping zip code doesn't match the billing code.
-Marc
