Evan Schuman

Its only fitting that the largest retailer should have the worlds largest database, but at more than one-half a petabyte, thats a lot of information, even for Wal-Mart. The vendor that is supporting those many bytes of data—NCRs Teradata division—begged for the extraordinary permission from the normally secretive Wal-Mart to announce this achievement Wednesday to […]

Claiming the wireless ability to read tags that are literally hundreds of meters away, a retired Boeing engineer thinks he can deliver item-level tagging years faster than can conventional RFID and with technology that is much more readily available. The claim is an appealing one for an industry that has fast-and-then-faster requirements for RFID deployment, […]

Leveraging the deep retail installed base of Teradata, SeeCommerce and Teradata announced on Monday an integrated package focusing on one of retails most troubling issues: out-of-stocks. The package—which starts at $150,000—doesnt necessarily promise better analytics, but it does say that the more deeply integrated approach will allow for much more timely updates of product status […]

When America Online recently announced its yawn-oriented shopping portal (“Gee,” asked executives from Microsoft and Yahoo simultaneously, “why didnt we think of that? Oh yeah. We did.”), it renewed the perennial offline/online e-commerce debate. Since shortly after the Web came into being and browsers became graphical, the Web was without form, and void and darkness […]

When Microsoft Corp. unveiled its embedded operating system for retailers on Monday, it stressed the mini-OS plug-and-play capability. But one key motivation for the company might have been the fear that retailers were considering upgrading without Microsoft. Late 2004 has retailers at a key IT management point, with aging POS (point of sale) systems pressuring […]

One problem that retailers have with the World Wide Web is that its so … well … worldwide. A group of newspaper publishers tried to address that issue Thursday with the launch of a Web site intended to match consumers looking for specific products with local retailers that have those products on special promotions. The […]

Frustrated by what some see as IT executives hoarding CRM information, retail store managers are starting to do an end run around corporate with their own customer-information-gathering systems. One result of this retail technology revolt are smart store kiosks, which today do a lot more than display electronic brochures. As the technology has become much […]

Its a common complaint within retail circles. Store management is given the most hard-line responsibility—your store beats its numbers or youre in serious trouble—along with much of the work of executing every corporate IT decision, but yet those store managers have virtually no say in what those systems will be or how they will be […]

In an attempt to fend off retail moves from SAP AG, PeopleSoft Inc. and JDA Software Group Inc. have announced an alliance that they say better serves retailers. Under the deal, the companies will integrate PeopleSofts Enterprise Financial Management with JDAs Portfolio Merchandise Management. The move follows PeopleSofts alliance with IBM, announced earlier this week. […]

One of the most logistically challenging situations for any large retailer is the return. Newgistics Inc., a Texas retail service firm, this week launched a tracking service intended to alleviate some of the uncertainty involved in the process. When it comes to returns, there are questions on both sides. The retailer might wonder: Is the […]

As RFID stories start appearing in the consumer media and on the television network news shows, were starting to hear the same death and despair stories that were all the rage when the consumer media first discovered the Web. My personal favorites were the early stories of shock when a reporter found out that government […]

As the industry slowly moves ahead with RFID integration, one of the critical issues has been the need for retailers to seamlessly work with both bar-code and RFID readers. Its difficult enough for 20-year-old point-of-sale devices to handle RFID, let alone handle RFID while still working with bar-code devices. A Canadian technology startup called Intelletto […]