Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Ever since StorefrontBacktalk has covered the news of retail technology, E-Commerce and security, we’ve often been at a loss for a way to deal with a wide range of research documents, from white papers, case studies and analyst reports to detailed slide presentations on new technologies to transcripts of panel discussions.

Sure, we can do news stories and columns on these documents but we thought some some readers might want a database of all of these documents as they evaluate new issues. We’re not sure if we have the right answer, but today we’re launching our best shot: StorefrontBackground.

StorefrontBacktalk and StorefrontBackground are linked and share many of the same resources (such as our image library, some of the editors, shared servers, etc.) but they are, editorially, polar opposites. (Cue theme song from The Patty Duke Show. On second thought, perhaps it’s best that we don’t.)

How are the sites opposite? StorefrontBacktalk is a journalist news site, delivering independent analysis, stories and columns, along with GuestView columns that are strictly edited to be journalistically valid. StorefrontBackground, on the other hand, features verbatim documents generated by the companies making and pushing the technology. In its day, the best place for a detailed technical look at Java was Sun, but they were never considered balanced and editorially-neutral, nor was it supposed to be.

StorefrontBackground is designed to be a place to get the unfiltered technical and marketing thoughts of the top vendors in retail. And, yes, some hyperbole and exaggeration (plus a lot of good old-fashioned lies) goes along with that territory.

For years, our editorial perspective kept us from seeing the value of these documents for so many of our readers. For that, we apologize.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, how are the sites the same? Beyond some cosmetic design elements (and a blatant ripoff of three-quarters of StorefrontBacktalk’s name), there will be a lot of content exchange. If you’re visiting StorefrontBacktalk and you go into any of our categories, such as Security or E-Commerce (if you go to the upper-right-hand corner of the page, you should see a green pulldown menu that says “Click Here To View All Categories”), you’ll now see a list of research documents that will appear in that category’s counterpart at StorefrontBackground. In other words, if you’re reading about Security in our news section, you’ll see the most five research documents dealing with security on the right-hand column.

And if you’re visiting one of our categories in StorefrontBackground, you’ll have the opposite experience, being able to see the five most recent Security news stories from StorefrontBacktalk when you’re in the security category of StorefrontBackground.

If you have any documents that you’d like to submit for posting (all submissions have to meet editorial standards) on StorefrontBackground, we encourage you to submit as many as you’d like. It’s all free, of course.

Speaking of free, the site is also free for anyone to visit and to download as many documents as you’d like. We are asking if people would be willing to register for the site. For those who don’t register, they can see the tops of all documents. The free registration is required to have unlimited download access for all files.

Please visit and drop me a line at eschuman@storefrontbacktalk.com. Our goal is to make this as valuable for our readers as possible so we need to hear if we came up short.