Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

An alliance between the FBI and two retail groups–called the Law Enforcement Retail Partnership Network (LERPnet)–has great potential, but it is still hampered by the same weaknesses that undermine most retail security today: apathetic employees.

The premise is simple: by sharing the data, crime patterns could be detected much more quickly across jurisdictions, which would both reduce the length of a fraud spree as well as making it more likely to catch the fraudsters.

The approach is indeed attractive and will prove helpful, but it is still based on employee attentiveness and caring. As long as cashiers are incentized solely on speed and have no incentive to catch thieves, the bad guys have got a huge advantage.…

The electronic POS is faring well overseas, with IHL reporting a four perfect increase in the Europe/Middle East/Africa region. The new IHL figures–to be released Wednesday–said shipments are “expected to surpass 1.8 Billion Euros and the total installed base value (including shipments, hardware and software maintenance) to surpass 3.2 Billion Euros in 2007 ($4.3 Billion).”

“Retailers continue to see the EPOS as more than just a method for accurately recording sales,” said Greg Buzek, president of IHL Consulting Group, a global research and advisory firm that serves retailers and retail technology vendors. “Added functionality at the till, whether in the form of capabilities like customer returns, inventory look-up, or workforce management, helps retailers see EPOS as THE central system in the store, and they are willing to invest in it accordingly.”

On the OS front, Windows Embedded for Point of Service shipments grew by 54 percent, while Windows XP Embedded grew by 45 percent and Linux-based EPOS shipment grew by 22 percent, IHL said.…

Coke apparently considers contactless payment the real thing, as Coca-Cola, the nation’s third-largest bottler, moved to support cashless vending machines.

The soft-drink giant issued a rather non-effervescent statement confirming the move. “The United States is rapidly becoming a ‘plastic nation’ with fast food restaurants and convenience stores accepting credit and debit cards,” said Coca-Cola marketing VP Thacher Worthen. “We feel the time is right to begin providing these same payment options to our customers.”

Note from the Blog Editor about this photo: On the one hand, this is a perfect picture as it depicts a soft-drink contactless payment vending machine. I hope Coke doesn’t get too upset because of the beverage displayed. One can only get so picky when dealing with generic stockart. …

RadioShack is the latest retailer to fall victim to accusation of lax handling of sensitive customer information. This time, though, there are no anonymous cyber thieves to paint as the culprits.

The Texas Attorney General accused RadioShack of violating provisions of the 2005 Identity Theft Enforcement and Protection Act because "company employees dumped bulk customer records in garbage containers behind the store. According to investigators, the records contained sensitive consumer information, including Social Security numbers, credit and debit card information, names, addresses, and telephone numbers," said a statement the Texas AG issued.

CircuitCity’s IBM outsourcing deal–worth about $775 million to Big Blue over seven years–is an interesting move where CC decided to use IT as a specialized strategic center and fully ditch the more day-to-day operational issues.

The companies said the move will actually transfer fewer than half of CC’s current IT team (only 50 of 130 such positions) will move to IBM. Could this be the start of a trend, where IT gets back to being a strategic decision group and not the helpdesk and installer of every device needed. With about 650 stores in 158 U.S. markets, the rationale to consider such a move is clear.…

The young mobile retail space is starting to consolidate, with today’s announced merger of MobileLime and Cuesol. Sad but true, that the surest sign of a maturing market is when key players start eating each other.

Terms of the purchase were not announced, but the CEO/President of MobileLime–Robert Wesley–was named as the CEO/President of the combined company. That was the only personnel detail released.

Cuesol has focused on what it calls personal shopping experiences, including in-store kiosks and wireless cart-mounted touch screen browsers. MobilLime’s focus has been much more narrow, limiting itself to retail applications of cellphones.…

In the ongoing sage of the TJX breach, the Wall Street Journal today quoted police sources that law enforcement “looking for a possible TJX link in a spate of recent arrests involving credit-card fraud in Alabama, North Carolina and Virginia.”

This comes on the heels of Florida giftcard arrests tied to TJX data. The Journal also quoted an unnamed TJX spokesperson saying: “While we cannot confirm that the data involved with the Gainesville arrests came from TJX, we continue to cooperate with law enforcement.” Yes, it’s not one of the more informative quotes, but it’s the first we’ve seen of TJX even acknowledging that Florida exists.…

As Borders executives discussed the various reasons they severed their multi-year partnership with Amazon.com on Thursday, the most critical was the least expected: taxes.

As a pure online play, Amazon.com was an ideal long-term partner for Borders as there was no physical store conflict. But as the years passed, that initial advantage quickly turned into the Amazon Albatross, as the online retailer couldn't doing anything in-store, for fear of running up huge tax bills in various states.Read more...

Oracle's SAP lawsuit accuses SAP of "corporate theft on a grand scale." So what was stolen? Support material freely available to any of thousands of Oracle customers. These are the super-secret corporate espionage documents that Oracle is screaming about?

The Oracle lawsuit against SAP, although fascinating in its detailed tracking of who took what and when, is so much pure Oracle. This would be like Microsoft suing a small software company and accusing them—with great indignation—of not treating their partners with courtesy and respect.

Both Visa and MasterCard this week were trying to firm up their respective contactless support, with MasterCard announcing a Coca-Cola vending machine deal while Visa rolled out contracts with Taco Bell, ShopRite and ClearView Cinemas.

The MasterCard deal was with the Great Plains Coca-Cola Bottling Company and involves adding an e-Port G6 contactless device on vending machines first in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. Visa’s lineup also included Braum’s Ice Cream and Dairy Stores.…

Gourmet food retailer Harry & David has thrown its apple boxes behind SAP.

The multi-channel chain—with about 130 stores in 34 U.S. states—signed off on a media statement that not only said nice things about SAP, but it took the unusual move of specifically saying that it chose SAP over Oracle. Although such a choice is not unusual, it's quite rare for a retailer to sign off on a news release that has the name of a vendor that they did not choose.

What a wonderful, altruistic POS market we have. When execs at VeriFone saw that rival POS vendor Hypercom was potentially being distracted by an almost 10 percent drop in its stock market price earlier this month, they wanted to help out.

So VeriFone pointed out the challenges--and added news about the rumors that its rival is up-for-sale. It then altruistically offered to pay for all of Hypercom's customers to move to VeriFone, if they do so "by the end of July." I guess the rationale is that Hypercom could focus on its efforts better if it wasn't being constantly distracted by noisy customers.

In a move that PayPal said reflects “high penetration rates” with shoppers in major European online markets, the EBay company on Wednesday said that it now has “nearly 35 million accounts in Europe.”

PayPal cited a Forrester Research report saying that 23 percent of Euro online shoppers “prefer” paying with PayPal. Last year, PayPal processed $8.4 billion of total payment volume in Europe, the company said. PayPal has a local presence in 15 countries including Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland and the UK.…

The banking world is learning its lessons from massive credit card recalls, as necessitated by data breaches such as those recently suffered by TJX. It's a good thing, too, as such huge breaches are likely to become much more commonplace.

Out of Michigan comes this tale of Comerica Bank's reissuing headache and how customer service painfully collided with credit card security. Despite the breach having been announced in mid-January--and known to credit card players a short time before that--some customers are only now getting recall notices.To read the full story,

SAP used the CeBIT tradeshow on Thursday as the backdrop for its entry into the RFID software space, with what it claims is the first ERP enterprise-level RFID application.

The goal is take the avalanche of data RFID and RFID-related systems are creating—with everything from EPC, RFID tags, barcodes and sensors—and marry them with ERP data. "This is so you don't end up with 10 different repositories for 10 different reasons," said Krish Mantripragada, SAP's global head of RFID. To read the full story,

Mirror Mirror on The Wall: Will this retailing stunt work at all? Bloomingdale’s is about to find out.

Fresh from its showing at the National Retail Federation’s tradeshow floor, IconNicholson’s social retailing demo is being trialed with Bloomingdale’s customers in New York City for two days this week. The demo involves clothing consumers shopping in the store while friends–plus quite a few strangers–watch them and give them advice.

“An interactive mirror transmits high-bandwidth video to friends who comment back via instant message and who send their own suggestions from an online catalogue,” said the Bloomingdale’s statement.…

Ever had the desire to take the old POS you’ve been looking to upgrade and make it the centerpiece of a bonfire? Or shoot it out of a cannon? Or let a buzzsaw loose on it?

Well, POS vendor Vivonet wants to encourage retailer’s inner beasts with a promotion that offers $10,000 to the retailer who can most sadistically and dramatically destroy a POS unit.

The idea of the contest is to have retailers post their videos on YouTube, with the money going to the creator of the most popular video. They’ve posted a short video to give retailers some ideas, but the examples shown in the video are rather lame. When it comes to brutality and juvenile destructiveness, nobody can touch an angry StorefrontBacktalk reader. So come on and win this one for angry retail IT managers everywhere.…

More TJX rumors flying around. This one–which seems only a little wackier than some of the stranger rumors–has that the TJX data breach was launched via job-application kiosks.

The story ran in Dark Reading. I mostly note it because the writer–Kelly Jackson Higgins–is a very top-notch pro whose work I knew years ago.

Like any good reporter, she both reports the kiosk theory and lays out the theory’s weaknesses, including methods for getting the data to be returned to them. Interesting reading. …

The names of the states investigating TJX, the status of congressional hearings and a federal confirmation are among the latest developments in this huge data breach.

Beyond Massachusetts (who is in charge of the probe) and Rhode Island (which had launched its own probe before giving up and joining the group), states participating include: Alabama; Arkansas; Arizona; California; Colorado; Connecticut; Delaware; Florida; Washington, D.C. (OK, so it's not really a state. Sue me);hawaii (Probe 'em, Danno); Illinois; Maine; Maryland and Michigan. To read the full story--and to see the full list of cooperating states,

In a speech to an Australian media conference, Sony Pictures CIO David Cortese said he was unhappy with where Oracle has gone since its buying spree. "The good thing is I only have to write one check instead of four. The bad news is it's Oracle," Cortese said.

Sony has been using apps from PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Demantra and Hyperion, all of which are now under the Oracle umbrella.Read more...