Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

A difficult to duplicate RFID chip? That’s the claim of an RFID startup, which is using MEMs resonators to create a unique signal, or “voiceprint,” which can’t be cloned and can be used to authenticate the chip, according to this RFID Update story.

“Each voiceprint is unique but falls within a defined band so separate readers do not have to be developed for each chip,” the story said. “However, MEMflakes can’t be read with RFID readers currently on the market.” …

The key argument of the report is that none of the three groups of companies involved—the card brands, the issuing banks and key retailers—is spending the dollars to create true incentives to make contactless payment work, said lead report author Bruce Cundiff, who is Javelin's director of payments research. "There is no effective value proposition for merchants and for wireless carriers," Cundiff said. Read more...

RFID vendor Mojix has rolled out a new RFID system that it says can read passive, Gen2-standard tags from 600 feet away; cover 250,000 square feet of area; and pinpoint tag location in 3D, according to this intriguing RFID Update story.

The move is interesting, because it shows a vendor’s willingness to play with the assumed RFID rules to try and generate a little retail ROI. The story quotes company officials saying that the claims are based on advances in digital signal processing, RF antenna design and computational processing power. Mojix’s STAR 1000 differs from traditional RFID systems by using separate components to power and read tags. “There is no rule of physics or regulation that says the receiver and transmitter have to be in the same housing,” said Kevin Duffy, Mojix senior vice president of sales and marketing.…

With reports out this week that Boeing’s much-celebrated upcoming aircraft—the 787 Dreamliner—would be again delayed because of technology problems, some wondered if the delays involved the plane’s extensive RFID experiments.

Boeing spokesperson Nancy Standifer announced Wednesday that the plane’s delays do not involve its experimental RFID capabilities and for a very good reason: the delays have prevented the RFID phase from even starting. The plane is slated to be among the first to truly have RFID tags on thousands of individual parts. And those tags have to work in temperatures that ranged from 40 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero to 1,200 degrees above zero.…

Such claims are commonplace, but the VeriShield Protect from Verifone is making claims that—if ultimately proven true—would significantly advance retail payment security. The new unit uses Hidden Triple Data Encryption Standard (H-TDES) from a company called Semtek Innovation Solutions Corp.. It's hardware unit is designed to deactivate if anyone succeeds in opening the case, making the planting of physical data-capture devices more challenging. Read more...

covers a variety of uses (see the Patent's full text here as well as some illustrations that accompanied the federal filing), but its core functionality would require consumers to download a small applet to their phone, which would then be associated with a payment method plus a password and potentially some other authentication approach such as any form of biometrics. Password-only protection is the default scenario. Another piece of software would be installed in the retailer's POS system. Read more. Read more...

Bankrupt Pay By Touch—officially using the name Solidus Networks—has sold off two key units for a total of $4.8 million.

Phoenix Check Cashing dropped $4.2 million to pick up Pay By Touch’s check-cash¬ing division, known as BioPay Paycheck Secure, according to The Nilson Report. Acculink paid $600,000 for ATM Direct, a unit trying to introduce PIN-based debit card payments for E-Commerce sites, the publication reported.…

This week brings the news that American Express is halting its ExpressPay keyfob, some six years after the payment giant started offering it. The program is expected to deactivate the last of its fobs by July. There are many reasons the fob may have died, but at least Amex—with six years of fob effort under its payment belt—can't be accused of not giving the fob enough time to work.Read more...

The retail move to embrace 2-D barcodes that began with a Sears trial in December and strong interest from BestBuy, the Gap and Target is inching forward, with a 500-store trial starting Thursday in San Francisco.

The trial, involving CitySearch, Antenna Audio and Scanbuy, is a fairly basic mobile integration effort. “More than 500 restaurants, shops and businesses reviewed by Citysearch are placing printed bar codes in their windows, and people who have Scanbuy software loaded on their phones can simply take a picture of the code and their phone’s Internet browser will immediately take them to the restaurant’s corresponding Citysearch page,” said a statement from the group.…

The bill had been pushed by Assemblyman Jeff Morris. The final version of the bill—which Morris said he expects Washington Governor Chris Gregoire to sign into law on Tuesday—makes anyone guilty of a Class C felony if they "intentionally scan another person's identification device remotely, without that person's prior knowledge and prior consent, for the purpose of fraud, identity theft or for any other illegal purpose." Read more...

Pay By Touch (officially Solidus Networks Inc. doing business as Pay By Touch) issued a statement on Thursday that it "regretfully announced today that it will no longer process biometric transactions on behalf of its merchant customers and consumer membership base, as 11:59:59pm March 19, 2008."Read more...

"The PCI Security Standards Council is made up of seemingly smart folks from the credit card brands and security industry. Unfortunately, this group of misfits is saddled with a myriad of competitive conflicts of interest and, worst of all, a complete misunderstanding of how to best protect card data and consumer identity," writes Adams. Read more...

Shortly after reports surfaced that the Hannaford grocery chain had been PCI compliant at the time of its data breach attack, the Web has been crawling with those questioning the value of PCI, even as the confusing preliminary details of the breach are being sorted out.

As one who has frequently used this column to point out the many flaws within PCI, please allow me to stand up and say to those PCI critics: What planet are you from that tolerates only perfect security systems? Do they conclude from one successful burglary of a house protected by a top-notch burglar alarm and high-security deadbolts that burglar alarms and deadbolts are worthless? Read more.…

You don't address security concerns by pretending they don't exist. You acknowledge that everything is relative and that weaknesses are there but there are advantages, too. Read more...

This is one of these “everyone already pretty much knew this but it’s nice someone took the time to prove it” studies. The University of Arkansas was paid by Wal–Mart to find out whether RFID actually improves inventory accuracy. It found that, yes, it does, to the tune of some 13 percent.

But the methodology is a lot more interesting than the as-expected result. The team followed air fresheners at 16 Wal-Marts for 23 weeks where “a national inventory-auditing group determined each day’s on-hand air-freshener inventory by manually counting every item in all 16 stores.” Read this RFID Journal piece for a look into how to prove inventory accuracy and why a retailer can never afford to duplicate this study.…

A grocer offering milk cartons that glow when their milk turns sour and a programmable soft drink that will change its flavor to a consumer’s whim. These are two of the more unusual ways nanotechnology may impact retailers in the next few years, according to this fascinating story in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald.

While the product capabilities can be exciting, the potential health hazards are better described as terrifying. If groceries of any kind are among your SKUs, you should check this piece out. …

"Since Bernie ordered me to accompany him on this stupid trip to Philadelphia and we sit here in a five-hour connecting flight delay in Chicago, it's the least I can do to thank him by giving his luggage a much-deserved holiday in Hong Kong," deviously thinks Brad, the junior LAN administrator with far too much time on his hands. Read more...

JCPenney and Krogers are the latest U.S. members of the National Retail Federation’s Association for Retail Technology Standards, joining the newest global members of Tesco, Carrefour and IKEA.

The Association for Retail Technology Standards is an international membership organization that, since 1993, has said that it was dedicated to reducing the costs of technology through standards.…

Hello, blog readers! We’ve been approached by a company that wants to create a 3-D environment for StorefrontBacktalk, complete with avatars for all readers. Before we explored this more seriously, we wanted to ask our readers whether we should proceed. Therefore…

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Near Field Communication (NFC) is running into the exact same kind of tech hurdles that has slowed down RFID, according to a new report from the Venture Development Corp., which cited a lack of supporting infrastructure, standards problems and a “complex ecoysystem of stakeholders.”

VDC “believes that NFC may take root first in niche vertical applications rather than hypervolume consumer applications like contactless payment,” said this RFID Update story.…

The Metro Group’s RFID trial efforts have been well-known, but this is an interesting International Herald-Tribune story discussing some of the privacy debates within Europe on their efforts.

The piece quotes a Metro person as saying that a recent European Union effort to force the tags to be deactivated at POS as the kiss of death for consumer-facing RFID. “If we have to deactivate at the check-out, then the technology is going to stay within the logistics process – to say where is a box or where is the pallet in the distribution center. It won’t come on consumer items. They’re going to kill the technology with that.”…

The potential is absolutely there, with retailers collecting molecular mountains of shopping history—sometimes more than a decade's worth—and law enforcement seeking creative ways to find criminals (or people they think are criminals) who are quite determined about not being found. Read more...

A pair of companies is pushing an approach where hotel guests could use their electronic room key to also open vending machine snacks, which would then be automatically charged to the guest’s room.

The new approach, from Cstar Technologies and Fastcorp, would theoretically make such purchases easy to order repeatedly, offering revenue and margin that could more than compensate for reductions in “honor bar” purchases. …

Global RFID revenue is expected to hit $1.2 billion this year and $3.5 billion in the next four years, according to new Gartner projections. This year’s figures represents an almost 31 percent increase from last year.

Gartner reported that the leading segments were discrete manufacturing (21 percent), national and international government (20 percent), transportation (20 percent) and then retail (14 percent).…