Evan Schuman

A report from the IHL Consulting Group found that there has been an 8 percent increase in the size of the point-of-sale market, which isnt bad for a market that traditionally increased by about 4 percent. Still, its a healthy drop from the double-digit growth of recent years. The North American POS market report released […]

In any dramatic story—and this Best Buy dual-Web-site story is starting to become deliciously dramatic—there are good characters and bad characters. In a really good dramatic story, those good/bad distinctions are much more complex, and they invariably are dependent on perspective, the readers point of view. With the Best Buy saga, the facts are starting […]

As it tries to navigate the minefield that todays multichannel retail strategies have become, Best Buy officials are conceding that “human error” and employee “confusion” were the reasons customers were shown a site displaying higher brick-and-mortar prices while incorrectly being told that the displayed site was showing online prices. The confusion stems from two visually […]

Intel on Tuesday is expected to make its first move into the radio-frequency identification space and will try and cram enough discrete components into its chip to slash reader prices, reduce power consumption and shrink the needed footprint. The UHF RFID transceiver branded by Intel, of Santa Clara, Calif., will be called the R1000, and […]

Best Buy is getting into some hot water because of an intrastore version of its Web site. The Connecticut Attorney Generals Office has launched a probe into the chains use of an internal version of its Web site that looks and acts virtually identical to the public Web version except that it sometimes offers higher […]

As people looked at the incredible strain placed on Web servers this week when the market took a massive tumble, a frequently heard comparison was with retailers fighting holiday shoppers. There are two reasons such a comparison doesn’t work. First, the start and likely end of E-Commerce heightened purchases are precisely known and known for […]

Earlier this week, MasterCard officially (well, sort of officially) confirmed that retail chain TJX was not in compliance with Payment Card Industry rules at the time of the $16 billion retailers infamous January disclosure of a massive data breach. The significance of this news is not the fact that TJX was not complying with the […]

As the TJX data scandal gets worse with each passing day, many in the industry are saying that no retail chain will be so carefree about security again, given what the $16 billion discount clothing chain is enduring. There are two huge problems with that line of thought. First, the retail tech version of “Remember […]

The mountains of data apparently taken from $15 billion retailer TJX were taken a lot earlier than had previously been announced, with the intrusions starting in 2005 and some of the impacted transactions dating back to 2003, TJX said in a statement issued Feb. 21. As TJX works its way through various investigations from a […]

The PayPal unit of eBay has gone to public beta with its SecurityKey two-factor authentication unit, a product of its acquisition of Verisign Payment Services. By selling the devices for $5 to anyone who wants to participate in the public beta program, eBay is taking a loss, said Dan Levy, PayPals senior director of consumer […]

As the IEEE prepares next week to start focusing on the RuBee standard, the metal-and-water-penetrating RFID alternative is faring well with government and medical trials, said the executive primarily responsible for its launch. Ironically, when RuBee first started getting attention about seven months ago, it was partly because of strong support from leading global retailers, […]

For retail RFID observers, the comment Feb. 9 from U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that his department was abandoning radio-frequency identification for one aspect of border protection should have been big news. Upon closer examination, its really not. The saga started Feb. 9 when a major wire service reported that Homeland Security was abandoning […]