Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

In their efforts to dominate retail software, the several-year-old war of words between SAP and Oracle has leveled off at a merely obnoxious level and has no signs of stopping. Although the back-and-forth rhetoric is nothing new–we ‘ve reported repeatedly on both Oracle’s and SAP’s inclination to not let reality stand in the way of a good news release.

But a new story from the Bloomberg news service puts the distortions beyond carelessness and aggressiveness and argues that it’s a deliberate campaign, intended to force one side to prematurely react to the other. A good read, either way.…

A major Wall Street analyst firm delivered a good news/bad news joke to Yahoo on Tuesday: The good news is that your online advertising space is doing much better than we feared. The bad news is that you're not.

The Cowen and Company report downgraded Yahoo to Neutral from Outperform after it included that Yahoo's recent drop in marketshare--attributed by Yahoo to an industry-wide drop in banner ads and paid search--was a Yahoo-only situation. Don't mean to pile on, but another report today—from eMarketer, which tracks Web ads—also pours HTML unhappiness unto Yahoo's yodel. The eMarketer report gives Yahoo nemesis Google control of 25 percent of all U.S. online ad spending in a calendar year, which is the first time any company has controlled that big a slice of the Web ad market. To read the full story,

Beyond Redmond’s interest in POS for small business, Microsoft has not been taken very seriously in designing retail applications. Is Microsoft seriously pushing its Office suite to build supply chain collaboration apps? Looks like they’re trying, at least, according to at least one Microsoft blog.

This particular blog has pushed cutting edge approaches before so it’s not something to be dismissed out of hand. The argument for considering Office is that it’s likely already in the system but is Office robust enough for mission-critical supply chain coding? …

A report due out Tuesday from the IHL Consulting Group sees grocers aggressively moving to upgrade to self-checkout systems, even before they replace or upgrade the aging point-of-sale systems they are based on. But another retail technology report—released Monday by the Aberdeen Group—has a very different self-checkout take, calling retail self-checkout "an absolute failure."

The reports on their own do not directlty contradict each other, in that the IHL report simply says a lot of retailers will move to self-checkout and the Aberdeen report doesn't dispute the intended purchases, but merely the wisdom of it. To read the full story,

There’s just something about being a $338 billion retail chain that casts huge significance over even trivial moves. When the world’s largest retailer moves into pharamacy sales, it quickly becomes the largest pharmacy. It starts to do some grocery and it quickly dominates a third of all grocery sales.

So it is with Wal-Mart’s in-house video system. It’s just a system to broadcast ads to store visitors, but as IHL Consulting Group President Greg Buzek has said, “it has a bigger audience than any TV show.” This week, that “tv show” moved into the next phase, with an order for 100,000 flat panel screens, designed to deliver product messaging for specific aisles via eye-level plasma screens. Wal-Mart’s IPTV network will run transmit over–logically enough–IP connections. Wal-Mart, which is working on the in-store media network with Premier Retail Networks, is considering future capabilities that might be linked into customers’ actions, said PRN VP Genet Garamendi.…

One of retail's most important IT executives--Circuit City CIO Mike Jones--has left the $11.6 billion chain, with the chief IT job going to his VP of business applications.

Jones had a very creative and visionary perspective for the chain and a company statement left unclear the circumstances of his departure, although the vaguely ominous phrase "to pursue other interests" was used. The statement said Jones will relinquish his CIO role "immediately" but added that "he will remain at the company until mid-November to transition his duties to his replacement."Read more...

"Can you hear me now, Mate? You can't? IBM must be testing RFID again." Alas, the Australian Tennis Open has little love for Big Blue and neither do Australian Vodafone users.

Seems that IBM was preparing a major demonstration, to show that RFID is now accurate, reliable and can function without causing interference. Unfortunately, IBM had to pull the plug on the demo because .... well .... it was causing too interference. To read the full story,

The changes for this holiday’s shopping season—both online and offline—were the highlights of this week’s StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review show, featuring panelists Patti Freeman Evans, from Jupiter Research, Cathy Hotka, from Cathy Hotka & Associates, Richard Mader from the National Retail Federation and former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch. StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderated.

Jupiter’s Evans anticipates more sophisticated search capabilities as the most interesting development expected, along with earlier purchasing. The panel also explored whether more indirect issues—such as interest rates and gasoline prices—influence shopping behavior. The panel also explored whether new standards proposed by the National Retail Federation to make it easier for e-tailers to send data to price-comparison sites will also make it harder for retailers to hide selling identical products for higher prices. To listen to the pricing and standards discussion, please click here. To listen to the E-Commerce prediction discussion, please click here. To listen to the shopping influences discussion, please click here.…

We now have closure to a story we reported in April about a Texas man who smashed in a Wal-Mart self-checkout man when it froze. The punching consumer—46-year-old Joel Wallace Hansen of Euless, Texas—pleaded guilty this week to disorderly conduct and was fined $286 and ordered to pay $1,000 for restitution, according to a report in the Star-Telegram.

“Our office position was that we attempt to get some type of restitution and that the defendant be held accountable for his actions” Tarrant County Assistant District Attorney Al Lazarus told the daily newspaper. “We accomplished that.”…

PayPal expanded its global reach Thursday, adding ten new currencies: the Czech Koruna, Danish Krone, Hong Kong Dollar, Hungarian Forint, New Zealand Dollar, Norwegian Krone, Polish Zloty, Singapore Dollar, Swedish Krona, and Swiss Franc. PayPal had already supported U.S. Dollars, Australian Dollars, Euros, Pounds Sterling, Canadian Dollars, Japanese Yen and Chinese RMB.

PayPal also announced that residents in 48 new markets can now use PayPal in their local markets to send money online. These new markets include Indonesia, the Philippines, Croatia, Fiji, Vietnam and Jordan. PayPal currently has 114 million accounts globally. In the second quarter of 2006, PayPal’s total payment volume — or the total value of transactions — was $8.9 billion.…

Tuesday morning, reports started circulating that German police had arrested a man they had accused of being Osama bin Laden's webmaster. It was at that moment that I realized how different a war this is and how the Internet—and particularly its multimedia-friendly Web component—has truly changed all.

Imagine if during World War II, French law enforcement had arrested Hitler's speechwriter? But that's not even a clean analogy because a speechwriter would presumably help craft the message. This guy, identified in a Reuters report only as a 36-year-old Iraqi named Ibrahim R., is accused of being a programmer and of helping Bin Laden's Web sites stay up. But even German authorities know that taking out one HTML wizard isn't going to cripple the terrorist kingpin with Page Not Found errors. Read more...

As retailers and consumer goods manufacturers struggle with achieving the supply-chain nirvana of complete item-level tagging, $60 billion aerospace giant Boeing has gotten item-level RFID to soar, with two thousand high-memory passive tags in every plane of an upcoming line.

Boeing's item-level RFID efforts are intriguing because of their scope, but also because of the extreme environmental and frequency hardships they must endure. Beyond the expected vibrations, altitude, air pressure and humidity impact of routinely flying that far above the clouds, the tags must be able to handle temperatures that range from 40 degrees (Fahrenheit) below zero and they were tested to 1,200 degrees above zero, which is what the exhaust nozzle right outside a jet engine experiences. The wireless unit must be nonflammable and be accessible to frequency ranges between 860 MHz and 960 MHz, so it can communicate with devices from any country that using UHF RFID readers. They also must last about 20 years.Read more...

A major tradegroup on Tuesday unveiled new E-Commerce product format guidelines, which might help consumers more accurately compare products. But first, retailers have to reverse their proprietary ways. The new standard data exchange formats were introduced by the Association for Retail Technical Standards (ARTS), which is a part of the National Retail Federation (NRF).

The intent of the new rules was clearly to help lighten the processing burdens of retailers as they submit product details to various product-comparison Web sites. But a possible unintended consequence of the move is that it might help those product-comparison sites more easily identify which products are identical. For years, product-comparison sites have complained that retailers deliberately make such comparisons difficult. Read more...

An upcoming retailer/supplier trainwreck collission over store localization, Amazon's abandonment of key features of its A9 search engine, whether a new giftcard service will change retail approaches and the privacy controversy surrounding Hitachi's new RFID tag. Those were the topics for this week's StorefrontBacktalk Week In Review audiocast.

This week's panel featured Forrester Research's Nikki Baird, the Retail Systems Alert Group's Steve Rowen and Ken Morris of The Lakewest Group, along with StorefrontBacktalk Editor Evan Schuman moderating.Read more...

To the sadness of absolutely no Web surfers, pop-ads—and other forms of disruptive media—dropped this year by 9 percent, to the point where it’s worth barely 0.7 percent of all online advertising dollars, according to an Interactive Advertising Bureau report released in London. “The random scattergun approach is dying out,” said IAB chief executive in the U.K., Guy Phillipson, according to a story in The Guardian newspaper.

Here in the U.S., “pop-ups are irritating advertisers” and it’s not even something that the U.S. chapter even looks at, said IAB’s U.S.-based Senior VP Sheryl Draizen. “We don’t even think about it anymore. It’s not what online is all about anymore. Popups were an issue for us four years ago.” Draizen was pushing stats that show online ad purchases—for the first six months of 2006 compared with the first six months of 2005—increasing by 37 percent. That compares to the same period ending 2005 of 26 percent, 39.7 percent for 2004 and 10.5 percent for 2003.…

The A9 search engine’s highly-touted street-level images and the ability to remember almost everything a user has ever searched for have been abandoned by Amazon, according to an Associated Press story. Amazon removed those capabilities—”along with several others”—late Friday, the AP report said. It quoted Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener as saying that Amazon is “shifting its priorities to areas where it can provide the greatest benefit for customers.”

This is not good news. Amazon was pushing the HTML envelope on creative search techniques. When Amazon starts pushing and starts retreating, what does that say to the industry? On greater concern to many, what does it say to Google?…

Saw a note this morning listing winners for the Organic Semiconductor Industry Awards and, for some pyschotic reason, I felt the need to suggest that the Whole Foods chain would be an ideal sponsor for this event.

Maybe they could serve Alf alpha sprouts and organic tofu and maybe Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for dessert? We could get this whole no preservatives, no pesticides, no barcodes theme going. (Plextronics apparently won the start-up of the year award, for which I thank them because it gave me an excuse to run this silly item.)…

In an interesting wireless payment approach, the 2006 Arizona State Fair will allow consumers to pay for rides with credit and debit cards at all ticket booths on the midway. Given the temporary nature of fairs and carnivals, it seems a natural for wireless payment potential.

“Taking credit cards for rides has always been a challenge because we move the ticket booths regularly to accommodate different fair layouts, so installing the cables required to carry the transactions over a wired connection for each event has been impractical as well as expensive. In addition, we have never been able to accept debit cards,” said Kristi Walsh, Marketing Director for the Arizona State Fair. The fair will be using Hypercom Optimum M2100 wireless payment terminals. …

Hitachi on Monday announced what it is billing as the industry’s first WiFi active RFID tag for wireless LAN position detection and management of people entering and leaving buildings.

According to a report in the Japan Corporate News wire service, Hitachi’s new offering will also include an emergency message capability that reportedly “allows users to send a message to the control center, automatically informing disaster relief officials of their whereabouts.” The Air Location II Tag-w, which will be released on October 3 at 21,000 yen, will be displayed at CEATEC Japan 2006 from October 3-7.…

As the established large E-Commerce sites pour millions of dollars into security and enterprise-league hardened POS systems, cyber crooks have been giving more attention to much smaller and less well-protected merchants.

Those smaller merchants can't even necessarily protect themselves by opting to not have a Web site, as the thieves are grabbing credit card information as its transmitted over the Internet to POS servers. "In general, the smaller retailers, whether they're operating E-Commerce sites or physical stores, don't have the resources to think about security," said Gartner Group retail security analyst Avivah Litan.Read more...

BestBuy was the retail maverick about two years ago, when it rolled out its customer loyalty program that charged customers $10. It worked to the tune of some 7 million takers, many of whom spent 130 percent more than typical BestBuy customers. Beyond the $70 million in additional direct revenue, those cardholders on average spent 130 percent more than typical BestBuy customers.

This week, though, BestBuy gave up the fight, opting to give up the $70 million in hopes of getting a far larger percentage of its customers to start using the card and being tracked.…

The marquee names of the participants in lockstep agreement couldn't have been more impressive: Wal-Mart, P&G, Kellogg's, Coca Cola, Miller Brewing, Disney, Walgreens and more. They were all coming together to support a method for tracking aisle traffic for the purpose of properly pricing promotion fees. But according to a panel of retail technology experts this week, they couldn't be more wrong.

The dramatic infrared sensor announcement will offer no true advantages over the old-fashioned mechanical counters and is a puzzling move, said Paula Rosenblum of the Retail Systems Alert Group.Read more...

The folks at Visa and PayByTouch just want everyone to know that they’re doing fine. Visa on Thursday issued a statement identifying a handful of retailers–7-Eleven., Clearview Cinemas, Dairy Queen, Domino’s Pizza, and Sonic Drive-In, to be precise–who have agreed to use the card’s No Signature Required Program, for transactions costing less than $25. That campaign is aimed at cash-intensive retailers.

The day before, it was PayByTouch’s turn to reassure people that it was still around by announcing its three-millionth consumer customer. That is a good indication that biometrics is gaining a little acceptance out there, but signing up to get whatever incentives are being offered is one thing. The frequency of use is another. …