Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

An EU undertaking called the SMART project—set to start widespread testing in October—is getting good support with some creative efforts. It’s looking at scenarios such as “if one product is selling well at store A but selling badly at store B, RFID-powered inventory systems could initiate the transfer of the product from one store to another,” according to this ComputerWeekly story.

The project Web site goes into some other interesting possible directions, such as smart-shelves that tell consumers “whether the product is available in the back-room or whether there is a joint/ personalized promotion” and “shelf replenishment practices that change based on real-time information about availability and product shortages.” One of the tests includes “automatic discounting system for products–specifically, meat–that is nearing its (expiration) date.”…

A possible new slogan for Borders.com in New York: “You give us 90 seconds. We’ll give you a lottery ticket.”

At least that seems to be the idea, as the book chain is trying to get consumers to spend 90 seconds on its newly launched E-Commerce site. For those willing to give it a try, the bookseller will enter them in a lottery to win $1,000. Hardly MegaBucks, but what do you expect from a bookseller? The only problem: Will this attract prospective customers or non-prospects who just want the money?…

Apparently, one of those mistakes included precisely how the retailer said it made too many mistakes, as the company made more than a half-dozen changes to its homepage apology from Wednesday to Thursday. Read more...

Officially, PCI participants are still debating exactly when to roll out the PCI specs to the world, but they have consistently said it would happen before the end of October. Given the desire to share these details with members before the public, the Oct. 21-23 Belgium briefing certainly suggests an announcement will most likely happen the week of Oct. 27. Read more...

For some merchants, who never wanted to collect or retain card data in the first place, this is regarded as a good thing. But it's also a very expensive thing, argues Guest View Columnist David Taylor.Read more...

Wal-Mart plans to move its TV screens closer to eye level and incorporate them into product displays in its second-generation digital TV and signage network, according to an article in Advertising Age.

Details of this new stage in the Wal-Mart Smart Network are set to be spelled out in New York and Northwest Arkansas on Sept. 3 and are said to also include other key changes in the retailer’s digital video signage, according to the article.…

But the comments made by top brass from Hannaford (hit by a 4.2-million-card data breach) and Levi's (a troublesome ERP rollout suspended lots of shipments) have raised the question of where the responsibility line should be drawn. At what point is the software company responsible for doing what it has billed itself to do? And at what point is the CIO supposed to deliver, no matter what? Read more...

Deals like the Amazon-Tivo arrangement will present context-relevant ads to appear right alongside—or embedded within—various entertainment and information shows. For advertisers, this is merely the next logical step following obvious product placement in entertainment shows. ("Gosh, Grandma, what a large Apple logo you have!") For retailers, though, it's a way of getting that profitable E-Commerce site somewhere other than on a PC or on a smartphone. Read more...

The data from several unrelated retail sensor projects—all of which track consumers electronically during their shopping experience—will be hitting IT desks soon, as no fewer than three such efforts are going to be announced by September.

Retail marketers are notorious for arranging for a ton of data to be collected, only to have the task of making sense of it fall on IT. In this case, marketers and their love of dollars and sensors have outdone themselves, with today’s CRM data of what consumers actually purchase becoming a rounding error when compared with the sensor data tracking every move and every potential move. Read more.…

As part of an extensive recent retail sensor trial, technicians noticed a strange phenomena, one where testing equipment seemed to make every grocery store examined appear to be a massive nursery.

The Nielsen-deployed aisle sensors were using thermal measuring, using a customer’s body heat to indicate a person, which was intended to count the number of people in an aisle at any one point. But the devices registered an awfully large numbers of babies sitting in the shopping cart seats, according to Peter Hoyt, executive director of In-Store Marketing, a company coordinating that trial. It turns out that they were interpreting fresh-roasted hot chickens—which were emitting significant body heat and were sitting in the baby seat—as newborns. The devices were then reprogrammed and the attack of the chicken babies was quickly halted. (We deserve brownie points for having resisted saying that the test results were foul.)…

This is called the hazard of being too smart. Nothing is more frustrating to a really smart person (so my smart friends tell me) than to do something incredibly clever and then have to explain it to dumb people. That's the situation many retailers find themselves in when it comes to developing highly customized or integrated data security packages; they're frustrated that they have to prove the effectiveness of the package to their PCI assessor or merchant bank, who just doesn't seem to understand why the retailer didn't just "buy a package." Read more...

As retailers watch the crucial social networking space, overwhelmingly dominant leader MySpace is very comfortably holding onto a 72 percent market share, according to stats covering June. But Facebook saw its growth soar 40 percent, which might be a bad omen for MySpace in a few years.

MySpace is still in a very comfortable position, holding a marketshare that is more than four times as large as Facebook’s 17 percent, according to figures released Wednesday (July 23) by Hitwise. Statistics, though, can be misleading, especially when the base numbers are small. A much smaller site called MyYearBook.com is only at 1.54 percent marketshare, but that was enough for it to register a 318 percent increase, compared with its 0.33 percent marketshare recorded last June.…

A Dutch court has given the go-ahead for a university to publish research about security flaws in the RFID chips used in as many as 2 billion smart cards, despite resistance from a semiconductor company, according to a story in Computerworld.

NXP Semiconductors manufactures the MiFare Classic RFID chip, which is used in government buildings and to board public transportation systems. They had filed a lawsuit in Court Arnhem in The Netherlands against Radboud University Nijmegen in an attempt to stop the university from publishing a paper that reportedly reveals flaws in that chip. That paper is scheduled to be unveiled in October at the ESORICS security conference in Malaga, Spain.…

The latest data points, courtesy of a report issued Monday (July 21) by Comscore, have several encouraging points for global e-tailers looking to tap India's 1.1 billion people, which is more than triple the U.S.'s measly 303.8 million people.Read more...

Such is the case with the announcement Monday (July 21) that Wal-Mart is standardizing on an Oracle business intelligence package—Oracle's Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI Suite EE Plus) to be precise. Read more...

But the specific tactics being considered—and detailed in a Web site for the group officially dubbed the Information Grand Voyage Project—includes searching history of game programs, blog postings, surreptitiously captured video segments from TVs and computers, tracking Wi-Fi locations and using an RFID reader connected to a cell phone to identify a consumer's activities "based on data captured by mobile device camera." Read more...

But with some acquirers being no better off financially than many retailers, it's time to ask some hard questions: Is the risk of a security breach great enough to risk the financial health of our company? Read more...

"How many smart people are out there who are simply not reserving inventory" for all channels, asked Forrester Principal Analyst George Lawrie. "You never know where demand is going to crystallize." He cited morale—not to mention inventory—problems caused by "reserving inventory for stores that could have been sold by the catalog or online channel." Read more...

So this issue's Reach Of The Week goes to IT analyst firm IDC and its report released Wednesday (July 16) that its survey of 250 execs "found that there is a growing level of commitment" to supporting green programs. So far so good, but let's look a little closer at these IDC figures. Read more...

A handful of Stop & Shop stores have been using in-store location tracking–coupled with basket content–to narrowly target ads to customers using handheld shopping devices, the chain confirmed in a statement issued Thursday (July 17). Some 92 of the chain’s 360 stores are participating in the trial.

“If a customer is walking down the health and beauty aisle, it can trigger an offer for a new brand of shampoo,” said Michele Deziel, the senior VP of marketing at Modiv Media, which is working with Stop & Shop on the trial, along with Microsoft.…

Consumers older than 50 are rapidly growing fond of the Web, with such users checking news, for example, more frequently than those younger than 20 as well as participating in online communities more. But the new university study found that instant messaging and video downloads were “still tools for young users. Only 9 percent of users 50+ said IM was important or very important compared with 48 percent of users younger than 20.”

“The perception is that Americans over 50 only dabble on the Internet, but we are finding that they are increasingly spending time online becoming involved in robust Internet activities, such as online communities,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. “In specific areas, there is often little difference in use of online technology between older users and some of the youngest users.”…

For those e-tailers wondering if video is an effective way to reach American consumers, here’s the latest video stat, courtesy of Comscore: In May alone, U.S. Internet users viewed more than 12 billion online videos, representing an increase of 45 percent versus one year ago.

Nearly 142 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 85 videos per viewer in May. Google Sites also attracted the most viewers (83.8 million), who watched an average of 50 videos per person. Fox Interactive attracted the second most viewers (60.8 million), followed by Yahoo! Sites (40.2 million) and Microsoft Sites (29.5 million).…

But Homa's key point is that most retailers handle security backwards: Don't pour everything into protecting the front door. Assume they'll get through and have a plan to control them once they're inside. Read more...