Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Even more cynically, is it possible that those execs know that surveys like this tend to impact CEO/CFO expectations and, therefore, they'll give the answers they want their CFOs to believe? Even if the execs are being straight with the survey takers—and that the survey takers are being straight in reporting all of the collected data without sanitation—we have to wonder what was behind those answers.Read more...

The IHL Group, which conducted the independent research, had expected to find the economic disaster was giving low-cost Linux a boost, but found the opposite, said IHL President Greg Buzek. "This aggressive pricing and packaging of the operating platform not only took share from Linux, but also took a heavy toll on other legacy operating systems as retailers sought replacements as part of their PCI DSS compliance initiatives."Read more...

The few details that have been released raise more questions than they answer, but it also provides crucial clues as to what really happened.Read more...

And both firms quickly retreated. The specifics here do not indicate a major inappropriate reaction, but the pattern is discomforting. For companies to lead the industry and stake out strong global positions--especially in a weak economy—requires bold action. That means being aggressive at times to see how far consumers and competitors will permit them to go.Read more...

The retailer initially suspected that one of its third-party payment card processors caused the problem. But in mid-January, company officials said no outside entities were to blame. Instead, they attributed the incidents to a problem with a gateway. The lack of new details makes determining precisely what happened difficult, especially when dealing with a phrase as vague as "formatting flaw" somewhere within the POS. What role did the high holiday rush traffic play? Was the system so overloaded that response times were too slow? Or was it more of a programming error, such as assuming that when more than X number of transactions are processed during any one-hour period, presume it's an attack and suspend authorizations?Read more...

In a proof-of-concept experiment in Bangalore, Intel India is marrying RFID tags and POS with a CRM database where “frequent customers would have their preferences and favorites recorded.” Such a system could tout related products and flag new versions of that consumer’s preferred brands.

“This system is designed to replace the current simplistic computer or other system that only provides billing and basic services,” said Sanat Rao, Marketing Director (Emerging Markets), Embedded and Communications Group, at Intel. “Our system, once implemented, allows the possibility of being operated as a kiosk and provides the information on inventory.”…

To interpret motivation and real intent, sometimes a look at history can be useful. Do you remember another Facebook privacy incident back in December 2007? In that case, Facebook tried sharing—without permission—customers' purchases with people on their friends list. Is this a pattern? Is Facebook trying things, and if it's caught and there's a loud enough protest, the site pulls back? In short, is Facebook trying the permission versus forgiveness approach? Indeed, it seems to have tried both options. For a company that is trying to solidify a brand and build as much trust as possible, these tactical approaches seem odd.Read more...

Wal-Mart has historically had a strong fondness for its own homegrown apps, given the $401 billion chain’s rather absurdly large size. The company has liberalized that policy recently, allowing a few shrink-wrapped enterprise apps to slip in. Now there’s a report in Economic Times that Bentonville is seriously considering an Indian business process outsourcing contract that could include “non-core processes of procurement, merchandising, finance, accounting and payroll” and be valued at as much as $500 million.

The story quoted from a Wal-Mart document that said “Wal-Mart will expand staffing of certain elements of IT application maintenance and development with some of India’s leading information technology firms. India is one of several countries that the company is targeting as part of its remote sourcing model for IT activities.” Vendors in the running, the story said, include IBM, TCS, WNS and Wipro.…

No stunning revelation here, but the facial recognition included with several vendors’ laptops laptop vendors doesn’t work very well. Yes, it can be fooled by a photograph or other digital images. The latest details were revealed at the Black Hat security conference—tagline: Yes, You’re Every Bit As Doomed As You Thought—by a researcher at Bach Khoa Internetwork Security Centre, a Hanoi-based security firm.

To be fair, most vendors have marketed the face-recognition feature as a convenience, and they suggest using more robust security (such as almost anything else) to protect sensitive files. Also, the research said that it sometimes was a bit more complicated than showing an ordinary photo. For example, Toshiba systems forced the researcher “to move the images a bit to fool the technology because it looks for facial movement.” But if any retail IT folk are thinking of using this method as even a first-level security defense, they should probably rethink it.…

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...

The payment application data security standards (PA-DSS) are actually tougher in some respects than PCI DSS. As a result, some ERP vendors and users of packaged enterprise applications are considering tokenization as a strategy to modularize and centralize all payment processing by these applications. It's either that or partner with payment processing specialists (which provide payment processing functionality) to remove the overall ERP software from PCI scope.Read more...

The researchers found that 57 percent of the retailers they categorize as "laggards" in terms of adopting price localization cited their technology infrastructures as being a "gating factor" preventing them from delivering differentiated pricing. Forty-seven percent of the companies RSR labels "winners," those with average sales growth of three percent, told RSR that technology was impeding their localized pricing desires. "It's the entire technology infrastructure, particularly the integration bus," said RSR Managing Partner Paula Rosenblum.Read more...

Regardless of what Best Buy ends up doing, in today's rock-bottom economy, with its mergers and bankruptcies, the retail concept of data ownership is getting quite a workout. For example, CompUSA closed its doors but has now reemerged in a very different form in Florida. And there's no telling where the petabytes (exabytes?) of customer information now controlled by Circuit City will wind up. From a privacy perspective, there are even scarier possibilities than someone's music or computer purchases falling into the wrong hands.Read more...

Some of these increases were substantial: The "value" of a CompTIA security certification increased 46.7 percent during the period and Cisco Certified Design Associates were worth 40 percent more, according the "2009 IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index" released by the Foote Partners research group. "Clearly, an urgent demand for talent in these areas is eclipsing broad, knee-jerk reactions to reducing budgets and cutting people, projects and purchases that have been characteristic of IT management decision behaviors in past recessions," the report says. "Those times were often marked by lack of careful forethought about the future consequences of budget decisions."Read more...

Sitemorse reviews and ranks sites on several parameters, including function, accessibility for the disabled, code quality and performance of each site's first 125 pages. It ranked amazon.co.uk 104 out of the 109 sites tested, giving it a measly 1.26 points out of a possible 10 and finding that the site required "urgent attention" because its shortcomings posed a "significant business risk" in function, accessibility and code quality. Read more...

But, GuestView PCI Columnist David Taylor argues, how long is a "point in time"? And is there any way to make that point in time last longer, so that a "state of compliance" can persist for months--or at least until the next "point-in-time" review?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...

Malware has two countervailing trends, both likely to continue. The first is that there is a rapidly growing market for highly automated malware that uses basic building blocks and can be easily adapted to identify and exploit new vulnerabilities. This malware exploits unpatched servers, poorly defined firewall rules, the OWASP top 10, etc. It is really aimed at the mass market--SMEs and consumers. Then there is the high-end malware that employs the "personal touch"--customized to specific companies and often combined with social engineering to ensure it's installed in the right systems. This type of malware got TJX, Hannaford and now Heartland.Read more...

Sears.com was "completely offline," said Shawn White, director of operations at site performance monitoring company Keynote Systems. "And if anybody made it through without getting redirected (to a placeholder page that said the site was experiencing load-related difficulties), their experience would have just been horrendously slow. Slow to the point they would have walked away." Read more...

Following a site meltdown by a major U.K. retailer this month, Internet traffic tracking firm Hitwise was able to document and make concrete what has always been assumed: Consumers abandon a retail site when it melts down faster than politicians vote for a tax cut. When Debenhams’ site suffered severely during a well-publicized late November sale, the percent of its downstream traffic that went to competing retailers jumped from 33.2 percent to 46.9 percent, according to a nicely detailed Hitwise post.

“Looking at the top individual retail Web sites that received traffic from debenhams.com last week, the biggest beneficiaries were Marks & Spencer (which accounted for 4.6 percent of downstream visits, up from 2.8 percent the previous week), Next (2.2 percent) and John Lewis (1.7 percent),” said the posting written by Hitwise Research Director Robin Goad.…

When are related product lists helpful and when are they distracting? Is it an obviously useful upsell or is it doomed to the fate of the salesperson who shows a customer one too many choices? HP thinks it’s often the latter and has sharply trimmed the number of related items it shows. And the company is claiming a 30 percent sales increase as a result.

An interesting detail in this BusinessWeek piece points out that an Argentinean physicist apparently analyzed—on HP’s nickel—data from Facebook, YouTube, Digg and Amazon to mathematically model user attention. Conclusion: “The long lists of recommended add-on products commonly featured on E-Commerce sites yield diminishing returns. Web shoppers tend to stop paying attention after a certain point.” Aside from the fact that all of the sites selected (other than Amazon) skew to one demographic extreme of Web shoppers, this raises the question: Don’t HP E-Commerce workers ever shop online for themselves? They truly needed a physicist to tell them this? …

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...

The trial is only available to a little more than one-fifth of TiVo's 3.6 million subscribers (just those who pay for broadband TiVo) and is limited to those willing to pay cash. Still, the approach is quite interesting, at least for those who believe that convergence was a good idea ahead of its time. Read more...