Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Being one of the world’s leading advocates for RFID hasn’t shielded Tesco—nor Wal-Mart, for that matter—from feeling RFID’s growing pains.

While Tesco has been playing the typical chicken-and-egg game with suppliers on who will initially fund tagging all products, it’s had to quietly cut back its RFID efforts as it is trying to work with European UHF regulations, said Raghu Das, CEO of European RFID consulting firm IDTechEx.

Tesco has been enjoying a strong four percent revenue boost from RFID-enabled inventory improvements, but it’s been applying the tags by hand, which is not a tactic that can be continued indefinitely. Tesco, which ordered 2,000 RFID readers just two years ago, is in the RFID game for the longterm and is begging suppliers to take a more aggressive position. To read the full story, please click here.…

The International Organization for Standards (ISO) on Wednesday officially embraced the UHF Gen2 efforts from EPCGlobal in what an EPC statement termed "a significant milestone." (Dare I ask what a trivial milestone would be? Perhaps they should have said that it was a very unique significant milestone.)

In other RFID standards news, Wednesday also saw an announcement from Brussels of a 3-year R&D and training RFID exercise dubbed the BRIDGE (Building Radio frequency IDentification solutions for the Global Environment) project. Bridge is being supported by the European Union's Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP6) with €7.5 million funding. Read more...

Wal-Mart Canada’s new RFID program will be entirely voluntary, which is the latest tealeaf suggesting that the chain’s new CIO is adopting a gentler tone.

This is all going on with the background that Wal-Mart is still quietly struggling with its RFID efforts. “Wal-Mart is having significant problems. There are problems inside of Wal-Mart,” such as distribution centers that “can’t handle” Gen2 communications, one observer said. “They’re looking to replace those readers. They can’t comply with the latest standards.” To read the full story, please click here.…

Grocery giant Supervalu has hired retail industry veteran Paul Singer as its chief information officer, to assist the company in digesting its recent $17.4 billion acquisition of the Albertsons grocery chain.

Minneapolis-based Supervalu last week named Singer, who served as CIO of retailer Target from 2000 to 2005, as its new CIO and senior vice president. He will report to executive vice president and chief financial officer Pamela Knous. Singer has 27 years of experience in the retail industry in information technology, merchandising and supply chain management. Prior to joining Target in 1984, he worked for Kmart.

Singer retired last year from Target to pursue personal interests, which included raising public awareness for adoption causes. He founded the Target Adoption Network in 2003, a networking group for Target employees interested in adoption, and is a board member of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute. To read the full Baseline story, please click here.…

Despite the traditional mantra that item-level tagging makes sense when the price drops below 5-cents and preferably 1-cent, a major global consulting firm found the average price was 40 cents, compared with an average 18-cent price for pallet and case tags.

The IDTechEx analysis said that much of that can be explained because of the need for much more robust and larger memory tags for tracking parts and equipment that some of those early testers—such as aviation leaders Rolls Royce and Lockheed Martin–required. To read the full story, please click here.…

SAP has bought out Praxis Software, a Minneapolis-based 12-employee E-Commerce/CRM SAP partner since 2003, for an undisclosed amount.

Praxis’s software will now be combined with SAP’s Business One software, which helps small and midsize users manage accounting, inventory, customer relationships, and other functions. To read the full story in Red Herrring, please click here.…

A beverage company is now selling RFID attachments for bottles, which analyzes the bottle's tilt angle and duration to calculate how much liquor is being poured and whether the bartender is sticking to the recipe.

On a busy Saturday night, a good bartender makes a lot of money for the bar's owner, but an overly generous bartender—or one fond of pouring free drinks for friends--can cost the bar's owner even more.Read more...

Broadcom has introduced an RFID chip that won’t transmit sensitive information until it authenticates with a fingerprint reader. Citing applications included physical access and contactless payment, the semiconductor player rolled out the BCM5890 in a partnership with biometrics company Privaris, according to a report in RFIDUpdate. “A key feature is that the approved fingerprint information is stored on the fob, so the authentication is all done ‘on-board’ and the system does not need to transmit the scanned fingerprint to a remote database for verification,” the story said. To read the full RFID Update story, please click here.…

Giftcards are quickly becoming an extremely popular retail payment option, but the traditional analog cards suffer from a lack of security when used for E-Commerce. One company has a two-factor—and possibly three-factor—way of dealing with that.

Imx Solutions said the products are initially being used by Sears, Kmart and CompUSA along with television’s Ultimate Shopping Network (USN). The giftcard is a mini-CD that uses a company-issued–and hidden–password plus it takes a page from the one-time-password-issuing devices because it has a series of encrypted codes on it that needs to match up with a list of encrypted codes on an Imx server and the correct code “changes twice a minute.” To read the full story, please click here.…

Gentag is touting a way to add classic active-tag capabilities (including temperature sensors) to lower-cost passive RFID tags.

A statement from the Washington, D.C., IP development firm describes the patented offering as " an ultra-linear, low-power single-calibration temperature-sensor circuit that can be directly integrated on any chip for either the Gen 2 UHF or the 13.56 MHz global RFID markets."Read more...

Bob DeRodes, CIO for The Home Depot, has some non-traditional plans for the $81.5 billion home improvement chain, including routing calls to store personnel working in the aisles. “We are piloting a system now so that when a consumer calls in, rather than going to a store call center, the call gets transmitted to the right associate who is on the floor helping customers in between calls,” DeRodes was quoted as saying in RISNews magazine.

“We also now have carts in the aisles using .NET and wireless for an automated new process for shelf labels and inventory checks” and closed-circuit TV “has cut losses at the back door. Run with our POS system, it has slashed shrink at checkout. Play back of accidents has showed how to make safety changes and has helped to identify false claims.” The chain is also toying with using customers’ personal PDAs as a networking tool. “It’s not ready yet, but imagine the impact of customers using PDAs that they already own and know how to use to find what they want or to compare products.” To read the full story in RISNews, please click here.…

Korea’s second-largest supermarket chain is experimenting with RFID tags on shopping carts and baskets, subsidized with $300,000 from the South Korean government, according to a story in Silicon.com. Samsung Tesco last year equipped its shopping trolleys and baskets with RFID chips to track customer movements at each of its 69 stores, the story reported. The supermarket chain is a joint venture established in 1999 between consumer electronics giant Samsung and UK supermarket operator Tesco.

The story quoted Samsung Tesco CIO Lee Kang-Tee as saying the company has had to deal with a few small technical problems. For instance, off-the-shelf RFID readers that were used to pick up radio signals from the roaming trolleys could not fit into the store shelves. As a result, company engineers had to custom-make readers into a smaller size. To read the full Silicon.com story, please click here.…

As contactless payment devices become more adopted by consumers, retailers need to be ready to handle them and, rightly or wrongly, take the blame for associated problems. Popgadget just did a fascinating look at Citibank’s latest RFID PayPass card. It references a Gearlog post about the pros and cons of such a device, along with a hacker’s take on contactless card security.

Little of this is new, as we reported a year ago Shell Canada’s experiments about contactess payment security. But as these cards start to come into common usage, it’s not a bad idea to look at the latest threats and be prepared to deal with the complaints. Trust me: they’ll come. It’s still worth doing, but the easier a system is to use, the more problematic its security profile will be.…

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On Friday, Stores Magazine–the monthly magazine of the National Retail Federation–published its list of the 100 largest retailers. The list is an industry favorite, with few major surprises. Target took an almost 25 percent hit while Lowe’s increased by almost as much (27.3 percent). Rite Aid soared almost 321 percent while Amazon.com dived 39 percent. The report also tracks the number of stores. Take a peek at the full chart.…

Considering the glacial pace that is the world of global standards bodies, it's not surprising that developers need to think far ahead. But as the politically-complicated RFID community has just started getting used to RFID's Gen2, some are already prepping for Gen3. That's making some in the industry feelings a little skittish--or perhaps nauseous.

"Some people are so committed to RFID Gen2" that talk of Gen3 "is like garlic to a vampire," said Kevin Ashton, a VP at ThingMagic and co-founder of MIT's Auto-ID Center. Read more...

Wednesday's decision supports leather goods manufacturer Louis Vuitton's claim that a search for Vuitton should only return sites and ads that mention Vuitton and not those that mention knock-offs or competitors.

A French court of appeals on Wednesday sided with leather goods manufacturer Louis Vuitton and ruled that Google had violated trademark, unfair competition and advertising laws by showing ads for Vuitton rivals when people searched for Vuitton. The closely-watched case—which involves Google having to pay a fine of about $250,000—has huge implications for wide range of search and related Web activities. Read more...

Limitations with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology have delayed a nationwide rollout at supermarket giant Tesco by several years, according to a report in VNU’s Computing. Tesco had planned to install RFID tags and readers in 1,400 shops and 30 distribution centres by the middle of this year, but has so far completed just 40 stores and one depot.

Instead of tagging individual products, it will now permanently tag transport items such as cages and trolleys and install the technology over several years. The supermarket says it has struggled with radio frequency standards, a high concentration of readers in the warehouse that affect performance, slow read speeds and low tag quality. To read the full story in Computing, please click here.…

Following a series of seemingly nonstop theft-of-data problems from quite a few government agencies recently (Veterans Affairs, IRS, Agriculture, Federal Trade Commission and the Navy), the White House has given agencies 45 days to implement new safety procedures, the Washington Post reported today.

The new security guidelines were issued today (Wed., June 28) from the White House Office of Management and Budget. The agencies will have to encrypt all data on laptop or handheld computers unless the data are classified as “non-sensitive” by an agency’s deputy director.

Agency employees also would need two-factor authentication — a password plus a physical device such as a key card — to reach a work database through a remote connection, which must be automatically severed after 30 minutes of inactivity.

To read the full Washington Post story, please click here.…

American consumers—especially frequent fliers—are becoming quite comfortable with self-checkout systems, to the tune of a projected $475 billion in self-checkout purchases this year, according to a new study from the IHL Consulting Group.

That's a 47 percent increase compared with what IHL recorded last year and IHL is predicting the sharp increases will continue, with a projected $1.2 trillion in self-checkout sales projected by 2009.Read more...

Fresh from its merger talks with Siemens, Nokia is announcing a major smartcard company, the first large-scale mobile payment trial in China and the killing of its CDMA deal with Sanyo.

On Tuesday (June 27), it announced a deal with Giesecke & Devrient, the world's second largest producer of smart cards, to form a company that will " provide services to the NFC ecosystem by enabling consumer applications, such as credit cards or transport tickets, to be securely and easily downloaded over-the-air to NFC enabled mobile devices."Read more...

An Israeli company says it is developing a way to mix chemicals with clothing fibers to create a very-difficult-to-replicate product identification and tracking system. Asks News.com: Why attach an RFID chip to a shirt when you can identify the shirt through undetectable, invisible chemicals mixed into the fibers?

The News.com story quotes CrossID CEO Moshe Glickstein as saying that his company has devised a way to put a chemical signature into fabrics, labels, inks, boxes and other materials. When a hand or door scanner tuned to a specific frequency is pointed at an item, chemicals mixed inside the item get excited and give off a signal. The signal, which differs with the addition or subtraction of different substances, then serves as an ID for the item.…

The CIO for billion-dollar clothing retailer Guess Inc. had a challenge. He knew their search engine was delivering terrible results and that he would take many months to replace. What should be done in the meantime?

Even CIOs at billion-dollar retailers have to put their jeans on one upgrade at a time. But Guess Inc. CIO Michael Relich found himself in an especially difficult position when web analytics told him that 60 percent of his E-commerce site's search results were delivering "not found" responses to prospects. Read more...

For those who track such things, Epson Electronics America (and its Seiko parent) have now jumped onto the RuBee bandwagon. To be precise, they’ve been on the bandwagon the whole time, but they decided to publicly confirm it now. Epson is specifically the silicon partner for the key company behind RuBee, Visible Assets.…

Warning consumers about anything presupposes that there is something bad with that item, something that should be avoided. This might be a self-fulfilling prophesy. The commissioner for Information and Privacy in Ontario unveiled on June 19 a series of tips and guidelines for using RFID within Ontario.

But the guidelines themselves certainly need to be examined seriously because North American products can ill-afford to accommodate two different standards and, besides, neither Mexico nor the U.S. have any material privacy RFID rules at the moment.Read more...

In theory, a smartphone can bring into the store the depth of data possible on the web, merged with enough site- and user-specific data to make even the stodgiest CRM system blush. But can it work in the real world? NeoMedia is arguing that it can. Read more...