Evan Schuman

The IT director at bath products retailer Crabtree & Evelyn wants to move away from the homegrown applications that run point-of-sale and back-office systems, but he says hes trapped. The multimillion-dollar cost of moving to off-the-shelf apps would easily outweigh the cost of sticking with apps that work quite adequately. The privately held retailer is […]

In what Yahoo is carefully characterizing as mere research, the portal is asking some of its users whether they would be willing to perform all—or at least most—of their searches on Yahoo in exchange for discounted music downloads, frequent flier miles, video rental discounts and even charity donations. One of the Webs first search engines, […]

Breakthrough technologies invariably require some IT executive somewhere to have the guts to deploy when no one else is seriously doing so. Thats a bold and dangerous move, given how many technologies fizzle and die after an impressive beginning. Those technologies sometimes die because customers dont like it, its pricing is too high or major […]

As assistant director of information systems for the $700 million Piggly Wiggly grocery chain, Rachel Bolt has been one of the most vocal proponents of biometric retail authentication systems. At Piggly Wiggly, that system—like almost every other retail biometric system being tested today—is based on fingerprints. But although Bolt saw initially strong consumer interest and […]

For all its powerful potential, retail IT users know all too well the error problems with RFID, especially when the more powerful UHF chips get close to liquids or metal. But as RFID enters mainstream status in 2006, retail users are going beyond traditional engineering means to address those shortcomings and falling back on the […]

Catching misleading statements and half-truths in vendor news releases takes me back to my old days of covering New Jersey politics. It was never news to say that a particular New Jersey politician was a crook. The news was when they slipped up enough to let you prove it. As any IT manager knows, news […]

Microsoft this week will roll out a new dot release of its Point of Sale package, one that claims better scalability capabilities. Although that is clearly not earth-shattering, it does cast some light on the age old question of IT organizational strategy when a company is enjoying rapid growth. The conventional IT thinking has been […]

Retailers who have tried selling wines next to the canned plums and the greeting cards have grown frustrated. The high-margin beverage is bathed in its own language, leaving non-wine-schooled consumers drunk with confusion. One retail software company is trying to deal with this situation by introducing next week a kiosk that uses a sophisticated form […]

In the middle of last year, Joe Chiavetta was facing a potentially huge hardware purchase to keep his always-on-the-road sales force current with pricing, orders and customer backgrounds. Its not what a food distribution companys chief financial officer likes to think about. “Our salesmen, who are really out in the field all the time, we […]

The National Security Agency, whose NSA initials are typically preceded by “super secret” or a similar cool-sounding phrase, is known as the home for code-breakers extraordinaire. After 9/11, the NSA was given even more freedom to do whatever it takes to track terrorists and identify their plots. The New York Times recently reported about their […]

Like a counterintelligence officer or an anti-spyware company, some entities in life have the sole raison dêtre of countering something else. RFID (radio-frequency identification) today is an unstoppable supply chain force and even the most fervent privacy advocates concede that. But as retailers and manufacturers continue to toy with ways to use RFID in both […]

The ease of use of a gift card is making them popular, with e-commerce sites expecting a tidal wave of gift card redemptions next week. The question is whether they will be met with a similarly enthusiastic number of thieves hoping to use replicas of the cards in brick-and-mortars and the numbers themselves online. The […]