Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Given P&G's reputation for ROI worship, many assumed the company pulled the plug because RFID was failing the test. What is closer to the truth is that the test failed, not the technology. And to the extent that Wal-Mart was as much a player in this trial as P&G, it could also be said that the test didn't fail, the tester did.Read more...

Some 13.3 percent of respondents say 18 to 24 months, and only 6.7 percent assume it will take "more than 24 months." The respondents who "do not know" account for the remaining 18.3 percent. Those are some very sobering numbers. Do IT managers truly believe these goals, or have they convinced themselves to believe? Or were they forced to say what they really need to get their CFOs' spending authorization and now need to be consistent?Read more...

Prior to the ACMA decision, formally published Jan. 15, 2009, RFID devices were limited to one measly watt in Australia. Boosting the power of RFID readers will allow retailers to use fewer of the devices and enable the units to process more simultaneous data.Read more...

Noting that Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy, among other major retailers, “are moving rapidly to require RFID tags on the products they sell,” two New York legislators have introduced a bill governing the use of the technology. Similar legislation has been introduced or enacted in 28 other states, according to RFID Update.

The “Radio Frequency Identification Right to Know Act” would require retailers to disclose the use of RFID devices and any gathered personal information. It would also require labeling of retail products or packages containing an RFID tag as well as POS removal of RFID tags. Additionally, the bill “restricts aggregation and disclosure of personal information.”…

"Why would you want to invest in technology, training, software and people when Wal-Mart can do it for you for 12 cents?" asked Louis Bianchin, senior RFID analyst and program manager at VDC Research. "The risk there is that they (Sam's Club) could have sent the wrong message to the supplier community. That is not the message the supplier community needs to get."Read more...

The adoption of contactless by a retailer of Carrefour's size "is one of the largest victories so far" and a "very positive win" for contactless technology, said Forrester Research Analyst Ed Kountz. "It's looking like we are going to see more deployments in Europe. It's also being done well in Turkey, of all places, and Asia really remains the number one market for contactless payments."Read more...

Wangfujing, a huge Chinese department store chain that claims to serve 10 million shoppers every day and is Beijing’s largest retailer, has launched a SaaS trial, a move that the chain said will be the first time for any retailer in China.

The Web-based supply chain package will be available to all of Wangfujing’s 20,000 suppliers–to handle all business transactions from order processing to settlement—by December 2008, but only about one-tenth that many have access now, according to a Wangfujing statement. Wangfujing brought IBM in for this trial, where Big Blue said it would be using its WebSphere Application Server and DB2 database.…

Among the changes are a centralized search box, new categories and comments that are much more easily accessible.Read more...

Dan Mullen, President of the Association for Automatic Identification and Mobility (AIM) said the proposals "could be pretty traumatic for businesses and consumers." Read more...

It's the Great PCI divide: The Dids and The Never Dids. The problem with this divide is that the retailers who need PCI's guidelines the most are the ones most likely to be put off by the guidelines, seeing them as unreasonably demanding and expensive.Read more...

VDC is now slashing its RFID projections for this year by a billion dollars, with growth rates “no more than 9.2 percent over 2008 levels.”

The new figures, according to RFID Update, are attributed entirely to the economy. “There is still going to be growth. It is going to slow significantly, but there isn’t going to be a contraction,” said Drew Nathanson, VDC’s director of research operations.…

The common refrain was not how new retail technology can boost revenue but how it can slow the ongoing bleeding. Despite the absence of any single regal retail rollout, the more than 100 products and services introduced at the show did tend to cluster in groups. And those groups—not coincidentally—reflected today's difficult economic climate.Read more...

Can an RFID chip be made uncloneable? No, but one Palo Alto vendor is arguing that it’s gotten quite close.

The vendor’s position, according to this well-done NetworkWorld story, is to “create multiple PKI-like key pairs based on integrated circuit impurities so that a given chip will always respond to a particular stimulus in a predictable way. And, because it’s the impurities in the silicon that cause this effect, it’s impossible to create a chip that will respond to a specific stimulus.” For one possible future of RFID, it’s worth a read.…

As retailers debate how much they truly want to embrace mobile payment efforts, the Mercator Advisory Group is reporting that the tide will soon become unavoidable.

Mercator is now forecasting that smartphone-based remote mobile payments will reach $389 million in 2009, $1.7 billion in 2011 and $8.6 billion in 2014.…

The details of how he did it aside, the concept is interesting in potential future retail uses, assuming that the per-tag price can be brought down low enough. For a grocery store's greeting card section, what if the store—and its suppliers—could know which cards were picked up and which ones were opened?Read more...

Payments for taxis, parking and movies may prove less patient in waiting for new technologies than E-Commerce, a move that could be a bad sign for once-promising mobile payment method Near Field Communication (NFC), according to a new report on Tuesday (Dec. 9) from ABI Research.

With a headline “NFC No Answer for Mobile Payments,” ABI reported that “once, NFC was the leading contender among technologies that could enable mobile payments. But NFC has developed more slowly than anticipated and will not offer viable large-scale mobile payment solutions for at least six years.” That will open the door for SMS, mobile Internet and downloadable mobile applications, the research firm wrote. We should add that 2-D barcode was once seen as a placeholder for NFC, but unexciting trial performance for 2-D has increased support for alternative alternatives.…

In a trial initially limited to the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Israel and Italy, Visa Europe is starting a trial this month of a card with an 8-digit alphanumeric display, 12-button keyboard and a long-life battery, according to a report in The Nilson Report, a respected credit card industry newsletter.

The card has the ability to offer reciprocal authentication, which is designed to allow consumers “making transactions via phone or the Web a way to identify the party on the other end before transmitting identifying credentials,” the report said. Such a card could be extremely useful to E-Commerce efforts to thwart phishing sites set up to harvest credit card data from unsuspecting consumers visiting look-alike fraudulent Web sites.…

Such is the plight of Michal Geller, Amazon's director of consumer gift cards. Down the road, Amazon is toying with other ways to truly customize cards. But avoiding privacy issues, Geller said, is non-negotiable. "Anything related to privacy is off the table," he said, forcing Amazon to focus on "some creative ways (that are) not creepy." Read more...

Beyond the simple fact that a consumer with such a card could decide to cut off a particular chain's access to the CRM data juice to which they have grown addicted, Equifax President Steve Ely argues that his firm could leverage the masses of consumers. In so doing, he could tell consumers which retailers have been disappointing a certain percentage of their fellow consumers. Read more...

Wal-Mart will insist that its Chinese suppliers comply with RFID tagging by January 2009. And given various recent safety problems reported from China, Wal-Mart is also requiring sub-contractor information be included with every tagged product. The move, according to this nicely detailed piece in RFID News, “is expected to cost the suppliers roughly 20 times more than the bar-coding system now in place.” But China Retail News is quoting Chen Chang’an, general manager for the Shenzhen-based RFID provider Invengo Information Technology, as saying that the move will save Wal-Mart some $8.35 billion. No problem, given that Bentonville always passes such savings along to suppliers, right?

That China Retail News story also quotes Wal-Mart VP Mike Duke confirming that Wal-Mart would “not only ask its Chinese suppliers to report the name and factory location of their products, but also require them to take the responsibility for their subcontractors’ work and products. Suppliers who failed to meet these standards would be dropped from Wal-Mart’s Chinese supply chain if no improvements were made. He said the new standards would be put into effect in the apparel sector from November 2008 and gradually cover all products in its stores.”…

MasterCard’s PayPass is ramping up its mobile program with an over-the-air provisioning service to supposedly make it easier for consumers to personalize their payment data on their mobile devices.

As long as a consumer has a phone using Near Field Communications (NFC), MasterCard says the program should work. “First, the PayPass application is securely transferred onto a secure area of the consumer’s mobile phone via the mobile network. Next, the PayPass application is personalized with the consumer’s individual payment account details,” a MasterCard statement said.…

RFID sales globally will be more than $5.3 billion this year, with supply chain management, ID documents, ticketing and contactless payment drive shipments leading the way, according to a report released Monday (Nov. 3) by ABI Research.

If you take automobile immobilization out of the picture, RFID is slated to grow at a 15 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2008 through 2013, and ABI projects the market will be worth about $9.8 billion in 2013. Said Research Director Michael Liard: “To a casual observer, the five-year CAGR for the RFID market as a whole may not seem impressive at face value. In this case, however, traditional applications with single-digit and low-double digit five-year compound annual growth rates continue to dominate current and near-term RFID market revenue share. If these traditional applications—access control, automatic vehicle identification, automobile immobilization and ID documents—are removed from the equation, the 2008-2013 CAGR for total RFID systems revenue exceeds 20 percent.”…

Let's not get too optimistic here. "Mostly unharmed" doesn't mean escaping untouched. But it does mean that when large companies—especially retailers—have to suddenly make do with a lot fewer people, they need that good ole IT magic more than ever. They need the efficiencies that IT promises and the employee-replacing devices that IT enables. Read more...

Pet product maker Normerica opted for an unorthodox combo of smart boxes with embedded RFID tags and a mobile reader to comply with Wal-Mart’s RFID requirement. The application, described in wonderful detail in this RFID Update story, was attractive because it reportedly involved “no significant retooling of its packing or shipping lines.”

“If you compare the print-and-apply process at consumer goods manufacturing with eight packaging lines, you’d have to have eight applicators and printers,” said Paul de Blois, HIDE-Pack vice president and general manager. “We can produce the boxes on flexo-folder-gluer at a speed of 300 per minute, which is much faster than the throughput of a typical print-apply system.” A story worth checking out.…

A Hong Kong RFID vendor is boasting about a new $1,950-$2,500 handheld UHF reader “with a read range exceeding 25 feet with standard dipole passive tags and a throughput reaching 400 tags per second.” That claim is usually reserved for fixed readers, a very sharp claimed performance boost.

Convergence Systems Limited has dubbed it the CS101, and it eked out an endorsement from the normally publicity-shy folk at Boeing. Boeing Research Engineer Steve Villa praised Geiger counter mode. “In this mode, the reader’s ability to singulate and locate tags, even in a highly reflective environment, is excellent.”…