Evan Schuman

As Chinese consumers suddenly start to embrace the retail store, orders for point of sale systems are soaring, according to a new study from IHL Consulting Group. IHL is projecting that Chinas accelerating 20 percent annual growth rate last year will catapult it this year beyond the POS sales of Germany, which is Europes largest […]

With a craving for broiled salmon, Jane quickly sifted through her spice cabinet only to find that her bottle of dill weed was nearly empty. With a few clicks on her Bluetooth-enabled PDA, she updated her Web shopping list with the dill, and a window opened onscreen suggesting a new salmon recipe. It looked good, […]

Controlling how people listen to a song on a CD is as easy as humming compared with controlling how 70,000 people every day navigate an e-commerce site, executives at Tower Records have discovered. Like every other e-commerce outfit, Towers Web team makes a long list of assumptions about how people will interact with the site […]

As retailers prepare to migrate from bar codes to RFID, upgrade POS systems and accept wireless input from a wide range of new payment devices, its critical that they know that data points mean the exact same thing at all points on the supply chain. With that goal in mind, a key retail technology standards […]

One of the most disheartening things for a technology journalist to learn is that a lot of readers look at magazines to see the ads. Well, maybe not solely to look at the ads, but the fact that readers even glance at those dastardly marketing con jobs is enough to make us weep in our […]

Somewhere in Arizona—they insist that their exact location be kept secret so that e-commerce bandits wont recognize their address—sits a team of 18 Internet experts who hunt down people and companies that are either selling products illegally or are violating copyrights. But the real work is done overnight, where a suite of homegrown applications crawls […]

As an emergency medicine physician, Dr. John D. Halamka immediately saw the life-saving potential of embedding tiny wireless RFID (radio-frequency identification) devices in people. As the CIO of the Harvard Medical School, he was naturally skeptical of such devices and wanted to test them thoroughly before recommending their adoption. As a physician CIO, he knew […]

In many ways, CIOs are in the prediction business. They must make one-, two- and sometimes even five-year plans for technology buying, when even a two-month prediction in many sectors—especially retail—is barely more accurate a predictor than a dice toss. And, yet, predict they must, so out come the projections, the theories, the hypotheses and […]

A hungry consumer pulls up to the drive-through window in a California McDonalds restaurant and places a dinner order. The person taking the order points out that the caller placed only three drink orders for four dinners and reminds the diner of a special that day on apple pie. This might be a fairly typical […]

Shoppers wanting to see a stores neighborhood before venturing out into a potentially rundown city street corner will be able to do that by looking into a new interactive Yellow Pages site, being unveiled Thursday by Amazon.com. The site—to be housed at the home of Amazon subsidiary A9.com—includes data covering more than 14 million businesses, […]

When major customers walk into a Circuit City location, CIO Mike Jones wants to whisper customized sales pitches into their ears—literally. Joness scenario is simple: As customers walk into the store, they receive a very light wireless headset. As they walk through the store, the device uses sensors to learn where the customer is. When […]

NEW YORK—Speaking to an overflow crowd at the National Retail Federations Redefining Retail show Monday, Metro Group CIO Zygmunt Mierdorf beamed in live footage of the companys prototype RFID-enabled stores from Germany, showing interactive changing rooms that make clothing recommendations and have clerks bring additional pieces, a cashier shelf that instantly scans items (so the […]