Evan Schuman

A new report from industry analyst firm Aberdeen Group does not bring a lot of optimistic news for RFID proponents. The report predicts that companies will have trouble in areas such as finding sufficiently experienced RFID (radio-frequency identification) personnel, migrating to the use of biometrics and other new data-collection methods, and scaling RFID to the […]

A wireless item-level checkout device being trialed by regional grocery chain Stop & Shop is demonstrating the potential — and simultaneously the difficulties — of distributed checkout. The 389-store grocery chain — employing about 59,000 in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey — has been running this trial since […]

The Federal Trade Commission on Jan. 17 cracked down-albeit mildly-on an e-tailer that the government alleged made security claims that were “deceptive and violated federal law.” The company, a clothing and home accessories e-tailer named Life Is Good, collected a wide range of information from its consumer customers, including names, addresses, credit card numbers, credit […]

A Chicago man has an older car that he’s not wildly in love with, but it’s good transportation. He’s not into the car’s appearance, figuring that the paint job is for the entertainment of everyone else. He cares about what’s on the inside. One day he’s in a parking lot and discovers that someone placed […]

PCI compliance for the nation’s largest retailers hit 77 percent for the end of last year, according to Visa. In addition, the credit card company said Jan. 22 that compliance among midsize merchants, or Level 2s, also sharply increased, growing to 62 percent. When Visa last reported PCI compliance figures for the largest retailers, or […]

One of the fastest growing segments of retail technology today is clearly mobile, whether it’s in the hands of consumers accessing the Web or using 2-D barcodes on ads or in the hands of employees changing prices on the shelf or doing inventory or even processing customer purchases while they stand in line. But there […]

Efforts to implement retail 2-D bar codes are accelerating, with Sears becoming the first U.S. retailer to begin a public trial that started in mid-December at a store in Marietta, Georgia. Sears’ name is now on a substantial list of top-tier U.S. retailers who have been seriously exploring the technology, including Best Buy, Gap, Target […]

RFID sales around the world hit $5 billion in 2007, a figure significantly pushed by a $2 billion investment in China’s chipped national ID card, according to a report from U.K.-based RFID analysis firm IDTechEx. The Chinese national ID card program “made China the biggest RFID market, but if we peel that away, we see […]

Motorola introduced a wireless scanner designed for price and inventory-checks on Jan. 14 that also makes voice calls over a VOIP connection. Motorola said that the unit-called the CA50-“is expected to be available globally in the first quarter of 2008.” The CA50’s purpose is to eliminate the need for store-wide pages on the retail floor […]

Among the major announcements at the National Retail Federation show in New York will be a major 2-D barcode trial backed by Microsoft. The technology, new to the United States , allows retailers to generate sales and mine data from consumers who use their smart phones to interact with posters and other 2-D media. Other […]

Retailers lost about $93 billion in possible sales in 2007 because customers couldn’t get the products they expected, according to a study performed by the IHL Group and RIS News. The report identified these as out-of-stocks, but it used a rather expansive definition of out-of-stocks, including in-stock products that had an incorrect price, as well […]

The bigger a retailer’s IT budget is for next year, the better the IT salary raises will be this year. That’s the intriguing conclusion reached by the IHL Group this week, when analyzing data about IT spending with major retailers. It wasn’t simply that larger companies have larger IT departments and that, therefore, managers make […]