Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

“We’re not advanced in that capacity. We’re probably the retailer that is farthest behind. But we’re going to do the same thing that everybody else is doing. If you authenticate on our HomeDepot.com site and we retain your credit card, then we’re going to process you the same way,” Kinzey said. “But we’ll offer you—if you don’t want to log in that way—the alternative methods. At some point, we’d like to get to what you’re talking about, it’s just probably three or four years out for us.”

Pizza Hut CIO Baron Concors, another panelist, applauds these possibilities. But he stressed that chains should slow down until mobile standards are clear.

“My personal opinion is that I do think it has great potential. But I think that we have to wait until a standard evolves, especially here in the U.S. What you don’t want to do is hitch your wagon to some train that ends up being the Betamax to the VCR,” Concors said. “We need to wait for the device saturation to occur and then figure out how a standard evolves here in the U.S.”

In our podcast on the security topics from the discussion, a concern was raised about wireless hotspot detection and how mobile payments will have the interesting side effect of making the job of tracking rogue wireless connections almost impossible.

“What will happen is the IT helpdesk will have to go in and manually remove all of those rogues. So when you’ve got hundreds of sites—especially in malls or urban locations—it doesn’t take much before the system gets totally overloaded,” said Richard Nedwich, retail head at Meru Networks. “Now square that as mall properties continue to deploy wireless and the stores in the mall continue to deploy their own wireless and shoppers in the mall bring their Wi-Fi smartphones with personal hotspots into the mall. In New York City, they’re trying to put Wi-Fi hotspots into taxicabs, what I like to call ‘rogues on wheels.’ Each Wi-Fi taxi passing by your store is creating its own rogue AP alert.”