Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

FCC regs on RF exposure safety requires that at least 8.7 inches always exist between RFID antennae radiating elements and people. How many DCs bother to check?

One industry official—who asked that his name not be used—wondered whether the potential danger from RFID and related readers was being seriously explored. “Some backrooms have 14-30 antennas and all of these are clustered around doors,” the official said. “No one has started to address any of the OSHA safety issues, nor even ask any questions.”

It’s a fair question. In other industries, labor unions would sometimes push such questions, but the lack of unionization in many of these sites truly puts the onus back on management.…

The IPO reports that Alien has "had limited success in accurately predicting future sales of our RFID products." Is that like my saying that I've had limited success in making billions of dollars as the world's ugliest male model? That is suddenly my favorite new phrase. When my wife asks me if I've finished cleaning the kitchen, I'll tell her that I'm enjoying limited success in that endeavor. Read more...

A technology vendor called SmartTools thinks that customers should stop lollygagging around in the cashier checkout lanes. While waiting, they should be scanning their own items and saving the cashier's time. If you find this idea attractive, we need to chat. (Hint: This is not an especially good career-advancement purchase.) Read more...

The old BidPay online payment service—which boasted more than 4 million registered users when it shut its doors in December 2005—has relaunched under the umbrella of new owner CyberSource. But the service has been significantly revamped.

CyberSource has a fondness for bargains, especially when the potential acquirees have as little negotiating room as possible. Read more...

When a Cincinnati man brought his hard-drive to Best Buy to be repaired, he was told that he couldn't have his old hard-drive back. But fear not, he was told: the drive would be made useless by having holes drilled in it. A few months later, the fully intact drive is purchased at a flea market in Chicago for $25.Read more...

The Web is all abuzz with the Grass Is Always Greener On The Other Side Of the Firewall stories about Google preparing an online payment system (a la EBay's PayPal) to be called GBuy while EBay is preparing a contextual Web ad service (a la Google's AdWords) to be called EBay AdContext.

But the most reality-based analysis is that Ebay and Google are proving to be the quintessential example of coopertition (is there an accepted spelling yet for that blend of cooperation and competition?). Read more...

When IEEE unveiled a major RFID alternative this week dubbed RuBee, it touted it as a way to avoid many technological problems with RFID. Mostly, though, it gave IT execs political cover to look at RFID alternatives without admitting failure.

For years, RFID proponents have pointed to item-level tagging as the Holy Grail, the ultimate payoff when all of the RFID pieces fell into place. That's when full ROI would happen, out-of-stocks would become an age-old memory and smartcarts would become what The Jetsons had always intended. Read more...

The IEEE has started work on a new protocol—a standard called IEEE 1902.1 also known as RuBee--that is expected to give retailers and manufacturers an attractive alternative to RFID for many applications, especially item-level efforts. Officials say they expect products based on the protocol to be available within 12-18 months.

The initial backers of RuBee being considered as a protocol include industry heavyweights from both the retail side—including the U.S.'s Best Buy, U.K.-based Tesco and Germany's Metro Group—plus technology vendors including Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Sony, Panasonic, Motorola and NCR, said Pete Abell, a veteran RFID analyst now working for IDC's Manufacturing Insights. Paris-based CarreFour is also supporting the effort, Abell said. Read more...

Just what the federal government needs this week: more data-protection problems. An Internal Revenue Service employee lost an agency laptop early last month that contained sensitive personal information on 291 workers and job applicants. The Washington Post reported Thursday.

The paper reported that the employee checked the laptop as luggage aboard a commercial flight while traveling to a job fair and never saw it again. The computer contained unencrypted names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and fingerprints of the employees and applicants.…

In the ongoing saga of the Veterans Administration and how it’s been protecting confidential information, the VA Secretary will confirm today that the VA is about to recall all laptops, according to an eWEEK.com report today.

Perhaps an overreaction, given that employees could just as easily burn a CD or use a USB drive to bring work home and work on their home PCs. But at least it shows someone is trying to take some action, which is a good first step.…

This year, some 1.3 billion RFID tags will be sold, a number that will top 2.2 billion next year, according to figures released Wednesday by European market analyst firm IDTechEx. Those figures are noteworthy in the sense that they show particularly steep growth in the immediate future.

But the most interesting detail in the new figures is an estimate that 200 million of those tags to be sold this year will be used for item-level tagging, which is the same problem the firm is projecting will be sold this year for contactless smart cards. Let's put those figures into startling context: the 400 million for item-level and smart cards is merely 20 percent less than the 500 million IDTechEx expects to be purchased for the traditional pallets and cases of supply chain drudgery. Read more...

As the rules for payment data get tighter and well-publicized incidents invite regulatory scrutiny, hungry lawyers and bad publicity, many smaller E-Commerce shops are hungry for an easy way out. Being the kind-hearted altruistic souls that they be, vendors are flocking to help these folk out. Read more...

Shortly after the media began reporting this weekend on its data loss from a car thief, Expedia hired a PR firm to call reporters and stress that the incident was not in reality exposing its customers to identity thieves, but merely to credit card thieves.

Now there's a comforting distinction. First, what does it say about Expedia that it not only felt that exposing customers to credit-card theft was a lot nicer than exposing them to identity thieves, but it was willing to pay money to try and make that difference clear? Even better, one could make the argument that if you give a clever con artist sufficient access to a consumer's credit card data, they will easily be able to extract enough personal data to try for an identity theft. Read more...

More than a quarter-of-a-million Hotels.com customers are now at high risk for credit card theft after a password-protected laptop computer containing their credit card information was stolen from an Ernst & Young auditor's locked car in what appears to be a "randon petty theft," a Hotels.com spokesperson was quoted as telling the Associated Press. The Seattle incident at Hotels.com, a subsidiary of Expedia.com, is just the latest in a series of data-identity cases recently centering not around criminal hackers but around the garden-variety thug breaking into locked places. Read more...

Just as E-Commerce players are getting used to the idea of people buying products using their cellphones, whether in a physical location beaming right to a POS or making purchases online, the cellphone wants to make the next leap forward. Nokia has ported the Apache webserver to Symbian, which will theoretically allow cell phones to directly serve Web content.

According to a report in LinuxDevices.com, Nokia installed its experimental port, initially, on a Nokia 6630, which it then accessed over a Bluetooth PAN (personal area network). This proved somewhat useful, in that it brought “the possibility of accessing functionality on the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard.”

However, the project’s goal was to enable access to the phone of the cellular network, the story said. This proved challenging due to firewalls explicitly deployed by operators to prevent such access.

This is the logical next step with the growth of the Web. The Internet’s early days were made powerful because of the networking of millions of PCs around the globe. The potential to expand that now with the networking of huge numbers of connected cellphones is, to say the least, powerful.…

MasterCard today tolled out its PayPass watch in Taiwan today, allowing consumers to pay with contactless without having to take out a credit card. The watch comes with some small retail discounts, but Taiwan consumers are expected to show minimal resistance.

Would this catch on in the United States? Not likely, unless the discounts were a lot more generous than the 10 percent discount in one chain being offered with today’s promotion.

But it’s hard to beat the sex appeal of a lime-green watch with a vendor’s brand on it. Rolex, watch out.…

Just what major retail E-Commerce sites need these days: Security holes associated only with their site. The Washington Post reported today that the security hole, which has existed for more than two weeks on the Circuit City site, created a “back door” for hackers to assume control of the victim’s machine and use it to send SPAM. The problem, which only reportedly impacted users who were not current with their Internet Explorer patches, lived on Circuit City’s customer-support portion of its site.

Users are tolerant of–nay, even used to–browser and OS security holes. But when the fears start routinely becoming site specific, E-Commerce players may finally take patches and security seriously. …

Some of the largest Web retailers—including including CircuitCity, CompUSA and RitzCamera--use the same product-comparison database. But a comparison of those sites with each other—and with the full database—show what they're choosing to keep from their customers. Read more...

When $57 billion consumer products giant Procter & Gamble decided to experimentally tag and track its Braun Cruzer razors, it tied that tracking in with a 61 percent increase in sales. Is a rock-solid RFID ROI business case far behind?

The CEO of RFID company Applied Digital, which owns Verichip, has gone on television to altruistically suggest that . Some ideas are so absolutely awful that words don't do them justice. Read more...

As retailers find dollars in having certain stores specialize in various Ethnic or lifestyle segments, they are often neglecting to update their store data to match, so finds a new Forrester Research report. This is a matter of frustration among some consumer goods manufacture suppliers who now need to know more about those customers. A product that appeals to only two percent of shoppers should be viewed very differently, for example, if it happens to be appealing to 85 percent of Hispanic shoppers or 86 percent of vegetarian shoppers or 89 percent of senior citizen shoppers.Read more...

The vision of convergence circa 2000 was a remote control influencing live network broadcast action. That never happened, but BET has gotten close, But BET's executives found the profit rested in knowing the particulars of its large niche audience. What will this mean for E-Commerce? Will broadcast, cable, cellphones and PCs finally learn to play together, with smart advertisers along for the ride?Read more...

The world's largest retailer wants to attract more customers and it sees selling computer parts as one way. That includes PCs with no operating system and spare parts to create your own desktop. But it shows a lack of understanding of how people buy technology. Read more...