Evan Schuman

For years, American technology leaders have gotten used to seeing the United States no longer globally technologically dominant. But nowhere is that lack-of-dominance more pronounced than with cell phone technology. Whether it’s interacting with digital signage, communicating with stores about inventory or paying for products directly with phones embedded with RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips, cell […]

Julie Roehm, the onetime Wal-Mart marketing chief who said she was improperly fired and counter-charged that Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott extorts discounts from suppliers, issued a statement late Friday that she was giving up. In her statement, which is now a leading contender for the “What did you expect would happen?” awards, Roehm said: […]

Pay By Touch, which has made a major push in point of sale biometric payments, is backing off that business, according to a report in the current issue of The Nilson Report, a major payments newsletter. “Pay By Touch has shifted its focus away from being a company that provides biometric-based payments at the point […]

With contactless payment leading the way, the market for smartcards is expected to hit $1.42 billion by 2011, up from about $472 million today, according to a report published this week by RFID analyst firm Venture Development. “As smartcards continue to penetrate applications such as contactless payment, ticketing, security/access control, and e-government, the need to […]

Creating what amounts to a private version of video-sharing site YouTube, Best Buy is launching a video sharing service the week of Nov. 5. It differs from YouTube in that customers have a much smaller audience and that they have to pay. In the reversal of age-old television advertising pricing models, Best Buy wants more […]

The influence of social networking sites on e-Commerce has been overblown and such sites have very little influence on purchases, according to a report the week of Nov. 5 from JupiterResearch. “There has been a lot of talk about social shopping,” said Patti Freeman Evans, the report’s lead analyst. However, that talk hasn’t translated into […]

Visa fined TJXs card processor $880,000 last summer, and said it would continue to fine the retailers card processor $100,000/month, for TJXs role in the worst data breach in the payment industrys history, according to documents filed in federal court Oct. 26. As the class-action lawsuit by various banks against TJX continues, documents and details […]

Sixty-five percent of the nations largest retailers are now compliant with the industry-standard Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, Visa reported Oct. 24, up 81 percent from December 2006 and 63 percent since July. Although the numbers do show a sharp increase, they also reflect the fact that 35 percent—more than 1 out of every […]

A school for diplomatic nuance, MasterCard aint. (My apologies for using the never-correct word “aint,” but every so often, a journalist blogger must set aside rules of grammar for what simply feels right.) Recently, MasterCard issued a statement in reaction to a National Retail Federation proposal that retailers should no longer be required to store […]

Citing new information about the TJX data breach, attorneys suing the clothing retail chain amended their complaints on Oct. 25 and want a jury to evaluate TJXs security professionalism. New details that emerged from documents filed in federal court Oct. 25 include: A TJX consultant found that not only was TJX not PCI-compliant, but it […]

The TJX data breach has been a veritable data dynamo of details that, if carefully pieced together, say virtually nothing. But those details have typically hinted at a wide range of security problems, including weak firewall protection, encryption irregularities, wireless problems and a Trojan horse that may have been planted. After months of motions and […]

Second Life experimentation aside, major retail chain Tweeter is wondering if 3-D e-commerce might prove to be practical and a major advance for shoppers. When discussing the possible future intersection for e-commerce and 3-D interactive environments with realistic avatars, the line between Web transactions and science fiction gets blurry. But consider this scenario. A consumer […]