Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

RFID-tagged products will have to be deactivated at the POS throughout Europe, if draft guidelines proposed this month by the European Commission are approved.

A public consultation is being launched into the “soft law” guidelines that EU Information Society and Media Commissioner Viviane Reding hopes will be adopted by the European Union executive to be applied in all the bloc’s 27 member states, according to this Reuters story. The guidelines are “tentaitively scheduled to be adopted before the summer of 2008,” the Commission said in a statement.…

Retailers and telcos and others are watching test markets such as New York City and seeing how many consumers are using contactless payment. Their assumptions are based on the number of contactless cards in the population. But if that population doesn't realize that they have a contactless card, there's nothing valid that can be concluded when those people do not use them. Read more...

Breach letters are being sent out so frequently that I wonder if it's going to pique the business interests of Hallmark. A card for every occasion, when you care enough to breach the very best. Perhaps a merger with their Get Well cards? "Sorry to hear that you're not getting around these days.... [open card] .... but your CVV sure as heck is. Call 1-800-DATA-OOPS for your free year of credit monitoring, courtesy of your neighborhood retail chain." Read more...

But, for better or for worse, that's not a long-term situation. Like the presidential candidates who had to fly South for the winter (or fly the coop entirely), these compliance salesfolk have a limited lifespan. Within the next year or so, retailers are going to shift from trying to become PCI compliant to having to maintain PCI compliance. Read more...

At least that's one of the core conclusions from a report released Thursday from technology analysis firm Gartner Inc. Read more...

In a move that researchers said might set up low-cost, high-volume RFID tags that could replace barcodes, the European Holst Center said Wednesday that their 64-bit, inductively-coupled, passive RFID tag achieved a record 780-bit/second data readout.

This development “represents a five-fold increase in bit rate performance compared to state-of-the-art plastic RFIDs,” reported Electronic Engineering Times. The story reported that the 64-bit RFID consists of a low-cost inductive antenna, capacitor, plastic rectifier and plastic circuit, all on foil.…

The trial with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) commuters started Tuesday and is expected to continue for four months, said Mohammad Khan, the CEO of Vivotech, which is one of the technology vendors involved in the trial. Sprint is also a key partner in the project. Read more...

One day he's in a parking lot and discovers that someone placed a huge scratch along the right side of the car. His insurance company inspects and awards him a large check to have the car completely repainted. Instead, the man uses the check to buy a new state-of-the-art audio system. The way that Chicagoan views his insurance check is how many IT leaders see PCI requirements. Read more...

But there is a huge IT frustration with those mobile devices when it comes to retail employees. It's not the fact that most new retail tech capabilities are mobile and experimental, which just begs the data breach Gods to punish managers. That's less frustrating than infuriating. Read more...

The biggest current concern—which is also likely to be the most short-lived—is that the service is available on a relatively few number of phones in the U.S.. That concern—a shortage of supported phones—was mentioned by a Sears manager involved in the trial. Read more...

"Those newly recorded projects represented 20 percent growth in the size of the database, reflecting the rapid growth of the market way beyond the Chinese ID card," said IDTechEx CEO Raghu Das. "We could have added more than 500 more consumer goods companies mandated by retailers to tag pallets and cases but that would be living a lie because most of these are doing little or nothing in the face of the huge financial cost and lack of payback if they comply." Read more...

The Wegmans Food Market chain is going to trial whether RFID-tagged prescriptions could make processing orders more accurate and fast, according to this story in RFID Journal.

But the more controversial aspect of the trial will be looking at “how the usefulness of RFID tags on individual pill bottles or blister packs could be extended beyond the point of purchase. For this application, they’re seeking partners interested in developing in-home RFID tag interrogators that consumers could use to organize their drugs and manage when and how much they should take.”…

Wal-Mart is threatening Sam’s Club suppliers with a $2 to $3 fine for each non-tagged pallet as of Jan. 31, according to this intriguing RFID Update story.

The story reported that Wal-Mart has “discussed the possibility of allowing suppliers to raise prices to help offset tagging costs.”…

Japan’s Fujitsu this week announced a Gen2-standard RFID tag with 64 kilobytes (KB) of memory, which it claims is the highest-capacity Gen2 tag available, according to this story in RFID Update.

Fujitsu’s tag uses ferroelectric random access memory (FRAM) memory technology, which features a film capacitor for data storage. Fujitsu manufactures numerous FRAM memory products, which it claims provide capacity and read/write advantages over EEPROM memory, the story.…

I was reminded of this when shopping this past holiday season in a major national chain and wanted a particular model product, which the store was out of. "No problem," I was told by a store associate. "We'll have a large shipment in just a few hours. It may be in there." Read more...

The arguments raised are similar to the total cost of ownership (TCO) strategies that were all the rage a few years ago, but they take it one step further. Read more...

Is the human factor to blame? Managers "are going to have to build dependence on RFID. Instead of routing through styles of slacks, will they trust it? It's going to take a lot more than technology. People are going to have to change the way they work."Read more...

Beyond the cost per-use, Soares said the trial continuously delivered a 100 percent accurate read-rate and delivered a "21 percent reduction in out-of-stocks for the items that were counted." The chain also saw "zero percent shrink" on the tagged items, which Soares said was especially noteworthy because the tagged items high-theft-targets such as MP3 players, laptops and desktop PCs. Read more...

This is not merely a multimedia ad-displayer. It has the potential to interact with smartphones, smartcarts and contactless credit cards. So where are the retail IT leaders in all of this? Nowhere near, as IT isn't seriously involved with—and certainly not in charge of—most of the major retail digital signage deployments today. Right there, in a Unix shell, is what's wrong with corporate IT departments today.Read more...

Has the Web succeeded in taking away perhaps just a touch of the advantage that comes from being a massive retailer? This well-reasoned CIO Magazine story does a nice job of exploring that question by looking at whether Wal-Mart’s IT department has lost its edge and started to hurt Wal-Mart’s dominance.

The piece looks at the mixture of corporate ideas forced onto the stores and whether RFID efforts distracted the company from more practical objectives. A good read.…

In other RFID news, a major analyst report is about to show a sharp price in transactional kiosks shipping without magstripe support. Read more...

The inspections by wireless security firm AirDefense found mis-configured access points, extensive data leakage as well as poorly named SSIDs and naming fields.Read more...

The program, which Metro calls "Tag it, Easy," is intended to better track products through Metro's global supply chain. The first phase of the program, launched in May, used 30 Chinese suppliers. The second phase was launched at "a kick-off event for suppliers today in Hong Kong" and will start to ship the first tagged products by December, Metro said.Read more...

Retail software sales last year were $7.3 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 7 percent through 2011, "catapulting the market to $10.4 billion," the report said. Read more...