Evan Schuman

A major retailer has started quietly testing a university-created robot designed to help visually impaired consumers navigate store aisles and find their desired products. The robot—named RG, for Robotic Guide—is the creation of Vladimir Kulyukin, an assistant professor of computer science at Utah State University and the director of the universitys Computer Science Assistive Technology […]

Point-of-sale terminal shipments grew about 8 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa last year compared with a 5 percent annual increase in 2003, according to a new market share study released this week from the IHL Consulting Group. U.S. POS shipments increased almost twice as much (15 percent) during the same time period, […]

Retailers and consumer goods manufacturers experimenting with RFID are still seeing higher-than-expected error rates, but they are starting to work out low-tech workarounds, according to a major European RFID analyst company that has analyzed about 1,400 recent radio-frequency identification trials. The most common problem has been reader interference coming from either metal or fluid, which […]

Hoping to at least slow down the wave of electronic fraud threatening retailers, a group of major credit card firms—led by Visa—has set June 30 as the deadline for all merchants to submit recognized security audits. The deadline is also for full compliance with 12 key elements of the PCI Data Security Standard, but those […]

The high-tech industry in general—and retail IT is certainly no exception—loves acronyms. The more obtuse, the better. Engineers, designers and programmers come up with them because its fun. Marketing execs use them to simultaneously impress and baffle customers. And PR people use them because … well … the young ones dont know any better. But […]

When Oracle bought retail-software specialist Retek last month, it learned a $670-million lesson about the new importance of retail software and its own inadequacies on the POS front. According to new SEC filings as well as interviews with executives, attorneys and consultants on both sides of the battle, the battle for control of Retek Inc. […]

When the $10 billion 1,000-store Winn-Dixie grocery chain went Chapter 11 (bankruptcy reorganization) on Feb. 21, the initial employee reaction was shock. But the chains CIO said the secondary reaction was a remarkable focus on core business issues, including the strategic use of technology. “There is nothing like that kind of threat. Its had a […]

Back in May 1999, near the height of the dot-com insanity, one of a host of media darlings was an underwear sales dot-com called Underneath.com. Sending boxer shorts to various reporters, this dot-com was written up in BusinessWeek and the New York Daily News, and it made Time Magazines picks for the best e-commerce sites. […]

Although it said the RFID market is booming and predicts it will continue to soar for years—from less than $2 billion this year to almost $27 billion by 2015—many of the radio-frequency identification assumptions in the U.S. retail space are flawed, according to a new report coming from analysts at IDTechEx in Cambridge, U.K. The […]

When customers step into a cab from the Hello Taxi company in Brookline, Mass., they dont have to worry about fumbling in their pockets for cash, or about swiping their credit card in a moving vehicle, or even about finding their wireless fob to wave in front of a reader. To pay and tip the […]

The 1,200-store Ritz Camera chain wants to let customers drop off film without having to slow down and thinks RFID-enabled contactless payments are picture perfect. With competitors including Wal-Mart moving in, this specialty retailer is stressing expertise and getting people in and out quickly. Vice President of Information Systems Bob OHern (Ritz doesnt have a […]

Large retail chains have always had a healthy dose of a shell game in their heritage, exemplified by the highly marketed new larger bottle of shampoo and the much higher, entirely unmarketed price tag that goes with it. A price increase by any other name still delivers fewer hair washes per dollar. When it comes […]