Wal-Mart is certainly a company of few words. But when the world’s largest retailer (it’s expecting to hit $400 billion in annual sales later this year or early next year) wants to make a technology endorsement, a few words are all that’s necessary.

Such is the case with the announcement Monday (July 21) that Wal-Mart is standardizing on an Oracle business intelligence package—Oracle’s Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI Suite EE Plus) to be precise. Read more.

In an eerie snapshot of where some top marketers want to take the next generation of search engines, a Japanese government-backed research project is working on a search that is based on what a user does, not a keyword a user types in.

But the specific tactics being considered—and detailed in a Web site for the group officially dubbed the Information Grand Voyage Project—includes searching history of game programs, blog postings, surreptitiously captured video segments from TVs and computers, tracking Wi-Fi locations and using an RFID reader connected to a cell phone to identify a consumer’s activities “based on data captured by mobile device camera.” Read more.

Staples’ Canadian operation has been quietly testing 2-way live video kiosks at 34 locations, but these kiosks do more than talk with customers: They remotely control hardware, including scanners and payment authorization devices.

The trial, which one Staples Business Depot manager described as “one of the largest pilots that we’ve ever done,” involves one video kiosk—with a high-resolution Web camera, microphone, scanner and a touch-screen—at each store that is networked to 10 kiosks at a Toronto office with customer service reps. Read more.

Despite an almost universal embrace of the idea of merged channel, most retailers aren’t getting any closer to making it a reality, with overly restrictive inventory reserve policies, inconsistent data and political resistance getting most of the blame, according to a new Forrester Research report.

“How many smart people are out there who are simply not reserving inventory” for all channels, asked Forrester Principal Analyst George Lawrie. “You never know where demand is going to crystallize.” He cited morale—not to mention inventory—problems caused by “reserving inventory for stores that could have been sold by the catalog or online channel.” Read more.

The problem with mom, apple pie and environmentally friendly programs is that everyone wants to support them, which leads to a lot of thin marketing claims slithering in among the legitimate.

So this issue’s Reach Of The Week goes to IT analyst firm IDC and its report released Wednesday (July 16) that its survey of 250 execs “found that there is a growing level of commitment” to supporting green programs. So far so good, but let’s look a little closer at these IDC figures. Read more.

A handful of Stop & Shop stores have been using in-store location tracking–coupled with basket content–to narrowly target ads to customers using handheld shopping devices, the chain confirmed in a statement issued Thursday (July 17). Some 92 of the chain’s 360 stores are participating in the trial.

“If a customer is walking down the health and beauty aisle, it can trigger an offer for a new brand of shampoo,” said Michele Deziel, the senior VP of marketing at Modiv Media, which is working with Stop & Shop on the trial, along with Microsoft.

Consumers older than 50 are rapidly growing fond of the Web, with such users checking news, for example, more frequently than those younger than 20 as well as participating in online communities more. But the new university study found that instant messaging and video downloads were “still tools for young users. Only 9 percent of users 50+ said IM was important or very important compared with 48 percent of users younger than 20.”

“The perception is that Americans over 50 only dabble on the Internet, but we are finding that they are increasingly spending time online becoming involved in robust Internet activities, such as online communities,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. “In specific areas, there is often little difference in use of online technology between older users and some of the youngest users.”

Bill Homa, who just stepped down July 1 as the CIO for the 165-store Hannaford grocery chain, considers Microsoft’s OS to be “so full of holes” and describes the fact that current PCI regs do not require end-to-end encryption as “astonishing.”

But Homa’s key point is that most retailers handle security backwards: Don’t pour everything into protecting the front door. Assume they’ll get through and have a plan to control them once they’re inside. Read more.

Two recent developments—one involving a New York federal judge and the other involving a group of U.S. senators—are signaling serious difficulties for E-Commerce efforts over the next two years.

The assumption of some anonymity on E-Commerce sites can be critical. Let’s look at a scenario for Amazon.com. One of its most critical value-adds is customer comments—both good and bad—about its products. What if a consumer—employed in the consumer appliance world—purchased a toaster that was absolutely horrible? Read more.

Retail deployment of the 2-D barcode, a technology that allows consumer cellphones to see virtually unlimited amounts of content by taking a picture of a special barcode, has slowed after an initial flurry of activity in January.

But several major cellphone carriers are preparing to bundle the 2-D barcode software with phones as they ship. Will that make a difference? Read more.

The number of reported data breaches has been soaring, with the figure from the first six months of 2008 some 69 percent higher than the number from the identical period last year. Among those were little-known recent breaches of Facebook, H&R Block and BearingPoint.

The report from the non-profit San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center lists 342 data breaches since Jan. 1, 2008. Of those 342 breaches, about 12 percent were cyber thieves, 16 percent were insider theft, 15.2 percent were accidental exposure and 13.5 percent were subcontractor issues. Also, about 20 percent of the data breaches involved data “on the move,” referring to laptops, thumb drives or PDAs. Read more.

Fujitsu is hoping retailers in the United States will embrace a checkout system used by some European stores, but untested in the U.S., that splits scanning and payment processes into two different stations in the store. If American retailers decide to switch to this system, it will call for a significant overhaul of their current checkout systems.

The Hypermarket U-Scan Genesis Payment Station works by allowing products to be scanned at one station–by a cashier–and then paid for at another–via self-checkout. After the cashier scans the items, the customer pays for them at the U-Scan Genesis Payment Station, freeing up the cashier to move on to the next customer. Read more.

Guest View Columnist David Taylor argues that outsourcing is considered the thing to do these days, like a summer barbecue. But it’s both easier and more complex than most merchants think.

The first move has to be to take a serious look at your data. Think of it like a residential move. How much of that accumulated stuff do you really need anymore? How much are you honestly going to be leveraging and using? The less you keep, the less you have to protect and manage. And the less you keep, the easier it will be to outsource. Read more.

RFID vendor Impinj on Thursday (July 10) purchased all of Intel’s RFID operation–including the R1000 RFID reader chip. A joint Intel/Impinj statement said that the acquisition details are not being released, but The Seattle Times reported that Intel will get an equity stake in Impinj.

The move is not expected to change things much for RFID-focused IT execs in the near term, because both firms were pretty much headed in the same direction anyway. But ABI RFID Research Director Michael Liard said the move could accelerate already-projected RFID reader price drops over the next few years. Read more.

No sooner had IT concocted a system to try and automatically detect an under-age shopper than someone has crafted a remarkably low-tech way to fool it. How low-tech? How about a picture ripped out of a magazine?

This delightful story from Pink Tentacle shows how the Japanese cigarette-machine RFID-leveraging face-recognition system is completely fooled by the magazine photo. “The face-recognition machines rely on cameras that scan the purchaser’s face for wrinkles, sagging skin and other signs of age. Facial characteristics are compared with a database of more than 100,000 people, and if the purchaser is thought to be well over 20 years old (the legal age), the sale is approved,” the story said.

Will consumers ever deploy counter-top barcode scanners and a Web site to have groceries delivered to them automatically? A company called Ikan.net is hoping they will.

The system combines a Web-connected barcode scanner, which scans every product before it’s thrown out or recycled, and then adds it to a shopping list. The list then is shared with either a grocery retailer directly or a grocery delivery service like Peapod, which does the delivery of the empty items. This nicely done New York Times story shows the efforts of its writer to use the system.

The PCI Security Council is branching out a little, with an attempt to bring unattended payment terminals (UPTs) under its jurisdiction. As kiosks get more sophisticated and start taking cash, credit cards, mobile transactions and other payment methods, the UPT security risk is sharply increasing.

The council has also launched a testing program for Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). “PIN entry devices go well beyond the typical POS terminals we are all familiar with and we are continually expanding into more and more areas,” said Bob Russo, general manager, PCI Security Standards Council. “Any device that processes personal identification numbers is an important link in the transaction chain.”

For the second time in two weeks, one of the largest grocery chains in the U.K. hit a snag with its Web site, triggering a 24-hour outage and causing the 823-store retailer to use a temporary homepage. Sainsbury’s, a $38 billion retailer, is calling these incidents coincidental.

The first outage on June 20 was an internal glitch with the retailer’s delivery processing system, forcing the chain to take down its site because it couldn’t fulfill the orders. But the site itself wasn’t the problem. Read more.

When the $1.3 billion JCrew apparel chain launched its new Web site on June 29, it was the culmination of a 2-year deployment effort. Seems that customers may have to wait a bit longer to fully use those new capabilities, as the site quickly crashed and has suffered significant slowdowns ever since.

On Tuesday (July 8), the tenth day of the problematic performance and a “our website and call center are running slowly as we fine-tune the improvements” apology replacing JCrew’s homepage, JCrew spokesperson Margot Brunelle-Fooshee said the problems are still slowing things down and the associated disclaimer “will probably be up until Friday” (July 11). Read more.

J.C. Penney customers are twice as likely to say they are highly satisfied with their in-store shopping experience if they are working with store employees who are accessing the company’s Web site while standing next to them. That according to an Internet Retailer story quoting Kevin Gebhardt, the chain’s director of multi-channel coordination and implementation.

It’s been almost two years since the chain connected all 35,000 of its point-of-sale systems to the Web, giving associates in its nearly 1,100 stores access to the retailer’s e-commerce site, JCP.com, the story said. “J.C. Penney also has tested placing Web-enabled kiosks in stores so that customers can access JCP.com on their own, but decided against deploying them,” Gebhardt said. He added that “the retailer is focusing on helping employees provide better service rather than on self-service technologies, with the exception of kiosks that customers use for accessing online gift registries.”

When an order processing snafu shut down the delivery operations of one of the U.K.’s largest grocery chains, the $38 billion retailer acted starkly different than the typical U.S. retailer.

The London-based 823-store Sainsbury’s grocery chain immediately issued almost a half-million dollars’ worth of £10 (roughly equivalent to $20) vouchers to some 30,000 disgruntled customers and personally–through staff volunteers and no software automation—called every one of those 30,000 to apologize and tell them about the vouchers. Read more.

A new Retail Systems Research report is challenging the way retail IT looks at application development backlogs. The report is based on a survey showing that some 79 percent of retailers have app dev backlogs of at least a year, with one-fifth of those hitting delays of more than two years.

But that’s not news to retail IT execs, who have come to see huge backlogs as a way of life. A time-revered IT tradition, if you will. The report, however, argues that the battle between system maintenance/security patches—which always get top priority—and the creation of new capabilities that the business needs should be thought of in different terms. Some are opting for outsourcing more, which would allow them to reallocate resources to accelerate new capabilities. “There’s been this shift where business has been taking more of the direction of IT investments,” said RSR’s Nikki Baird. “It should no longer be about ‘either/or.’”

Although the question of RFID safety has been debated extensively over the years, with conflicting study results, a major new medical study released this week points to very specific electromagnetic dangers within nine inches of the transmitter.

The highly respected Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found 34 electromagnetic interference instances out of 123 tests, with 22 of them rated potentially hazardous. “Interference changed breathing machines’ ventilation rates and caused syringe pumps to stop” at a distance of about nine inches, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. This may give serious pause to some retail IT operations, who can have dozens of RFID devices in loading docks and assembly lines, in addition to trucks and even on shelves.

In one of the first wide-scale studies of SMS’ capability to hold up under volume pressure, the technology fared “surprisingly” poorly, according to Keynote Systems. This has particular significance for retailers, who are exploring the technology’s use for mobile communications connecting to both online and in-store.

“Response times for some short codes degraded severely during the busiest hours of the day. One CSC (common short code) showed a 60 percent peak-period slowdown every day, indicating a major capacity issue was present,” Keynote said. “Many of the CSCs monitored showed significant reliability issues. Several (experienced) more than 10 hours of outage while one (experienced) more than 50 hours.” Read more.

A federal appellate court backed a group of retailers Monday (June 23)–including Best Buy, Circuit City, Costco and Lowe’s—by ruling that their gift card systems do not violate any patents.

This case has been winding its way through the federal court system for almost four years. It began when a telecom reseller called Realsource Communications said a 1998 patent protected the way it dealt with phone card payments. Read more.

Internal audit is not staffed to enforce PCI at the store level, argues GuestView Columnist David Taylor. Except for about a dozen leading retailers, most retailers do not have enough IT-skilled internal auditors to meet the requirement for a “continuous” review of store-level IT security.

Since almost no one can afford to add another group of people with both auditing skills and IT skills, nor can most retailers afford to pay consulting firms to do this, I tend to recommend very specific PCI audit training courses for your internal audit staff. One way to do this is to send them to the same two day course that PCI auditors go through. Read more.

The environmentally friendly green retail campaigns have been an embarrassing mix of pseudo-environmental policies that have little real benefit to those true policies that have real impact. Rather, these campaigns are akin to demanding that recycling be enforced.

But Wal-Mart and a handful of others have been trying to do green the right way, with policies that will have a significant environmental impact and that also improve operations. Read more.

When Oracle finally introduced its Retail 13 integrated suite this week, after three years of acquisition and integration, the teams working for the world’s largest enterprise software vendor might have breathed a sigh of relief. They might have hoped that the hardest part was behind them.

But creating a vast integrated suite is not the hard part. Convincing retail IT execs, worried about politics, perception and pragmatism, to turn over their most valuable data to one license-fee-hungry vendor? That’s where the real fun starts. Read more.

After three years of acquisition and integration, Tuesday (June 17) saw the official launch of Oracle’s Retail Release 13, consisting of some 33 retail applications, only four of which were new. The rollout was billed by Oracle as the be-all and end-all of end-to-end integrated retail application suites, but some analysts said the integration was lacking.

“Given that they waited so long, I would have expected better connectivity with some of the supply chain assets that they’ve acquired over the years and not have to wait until who knows when for some of that connectivity,” said AMR Research Director Mike Griswold. Read more.

North American self-service transactions will process $607 billion this year, a figure that is projected to soar to $1.7 trillion by 2012, according to a report published Wednesday (June 18) by the IHL Group.

When IHL began work on the report, “I did not expect the acceleration that we’re seeing in the out years,” said IHL President Greg Buzek. “I did not expect how fast it’s growing.”

Ironically, Buzek said, the jump in later years is being partially caused by the sales slowdowns of today. As dollars are getting tighter, retailers are pushing more sales through less-labor-costly self-checkout systems and paying for the installation of more such systems. Those additional machines, over the years, will increase the number of dollars being processed by self-service. Read more.

One of the repeated arguments made in retail data security circles is that retailers tend to have much weaker security because it’s not as much of a cultural priority as, for example, banking. So it’s a little bit consoling that the latest ATM databreach is apparently not the result of a retail breach, not the result of social engineering and the trusting bank clerk, but is the first proven incident of a bank server’s breach linked to ATM fraud.

A computer intrusion into a Citibank server that processes ATM withdrawals led to two Brooklyn men making hundreds of fraudulent withdrawals from New York City cash machines in February, pocketing at least $750,000 in cash, according to a Wired story. Although Citibank told Wired that its systems had not been breached, Citibank “warned the FBI on February 1 that ‘a Citibank server that processes ATM withdrawals at 7-Eleven convenience stores had been breached,’ according to a sworn affidavit by FBI cyber-crime agent Albert Murray.”

Are European retailers going to have any better luck than American retailers with consumer-facing biometric payments? The 750-store Albert Heijn supermarket chain, the largest such chain in the Netherlands, is about to find out.

While various European chains (such as Germany’s Wagener Department Stores) have enjoyed modest success with biometrics, the Albert Heijn chain’s June 17 statement said it would commit to the trial for six months.

One day after lawyers presented a proposed settlement in the Ameritrade 6.2 million-customer data breach, a U.S. federal court judge has tentatively rejected the settlement (on June 13), questioning the value of the deal for the consumer victims and the size of the $1.87 million attorneys’ fees.

San Francisco-based U.S. District Court Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker gave lawyers on both sides until June 26 to address his concerns. The judge didn’t specifically say that the lawyer’s fees were too high, but merely that “plaintiffs’ counsel has not established the basis for its fee request,” leaving himself the opportunity to potentially approve the figure if he is satisfied with a justification. Read more.

A pair of unrelated reports out this week are challenging several fundamental IT security assumptions, including that data breach laws will reduce consumer losses and that insiders account for more thefts than external evil-doers.

A Verizon Business security report analyzed more than 500 data breach incidents over four years and found that 73 percent started from the outside and only 18 percent were inside jobs. Read more.

Incidents at Amazon and Ameritrade this week raise troubling questions about whether secrecy is used far too often and too quickly. Let’s say that a large Nordstrom’s store suddenly—without explanation—shut its doors at noon on a weekday, refusing to let anyone in. After several hours, the doors opened and people were let in, with no explanation. On the next business day, it happens again. And, again, no explanation.

The hypothetical Nordstrom example shows how much less respect is paid to the online consumer than the brick-and-mortar one. Does the inherent anonymity in the Web cut both ways? Like the site visitors emboldened by their namelessness who post comments and get into flame wars that they would never have the nerve to try in person, are E-tailers treating their customers with a disrespect that they would never dare consider in a physical store? Read more.

After admitting it had security holes that allowed a security breach of more than 6.2 million customers, attorneys for TD Ameritrade this week agreed to a settlement of a class action lawsuit.

The 74-page settlement outlined several efforts by Ameritrade, but it did not include any cash payments to the consumers who sued the company. Among the agreements were that Ameritrade will warn consumers about investment SPAM, pay for limited security testing, seed E-mail accounts seeking violators, pay $20,000 to the Honeynet Project and $35,000 to the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance as well as buy some of the impacted consumers a one-year license for an Ameritrade-selected anti-SPAM software package. Read more.

GuestView Columnist David Taylor thinks of logging and envisions Rodney Dangerfield.

“Whether we’re talking about logs generated by network or application firewalls, intrusion detection systems, file integrity monitor tools or the operating systems themselves, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only people who don’t hate them are the vendors who sell them. But, whether we hate them, disrespect them or merely ignore them, we need to learn to live with them.” Read more.

Just in time for Friday the 13th, Oracle is finally ready to unveil Oracle Retail V 13, with a formal rollout slated for Tuesday (June 17).

Oracle’s main retail suite is not expected to undergo any radical changes (even the name change is expected to be slight); it’s mostly claims of better integration and interoperability.

For the second consecutive workday, Amazon.com suffered a major crash on Monday (June 9), with the increasingly unlikely scenarios explaining why the historically robust site is failing.

The cause of the crash, which apparently took the weekend off after bringing down Amazon completely on Friday for almost three hours before seriously (but less severely) slowing down Amazon for several hours on Monday, ranged from excessive site sophistication to some kind of malware attack or excessive load. Frustratingly, there are reasons to discount all three scenarios. The fact that Monday’s slowdown was global–while Friday’s was solely domestic–complicates matters. Read more.

E-Commerce leader Amazon.com completely crashed for almost three hours on Friday afternoon (June 6), with one Web site performance tracking firm attributing the crash to excessive site complexity.

“One thing that is true about Amazon’s site is that it is very complex, utilizing numerous backend database, proxy servers, distributed application and Web servers, lots of dynamic images, etc.,” said Shawn White, director of external operations at Web site performance tracking firm Keynote. “Even accessing the homepage involves complex multi-step interactions between the Web browser and a number of backend systems within Amazon.” Read more.

Note to retailers looking to offer free Wi-Fi: It’s a good idea to first make sure you can make the offer. Starbucks discovered that an offer of two hours of free Wi-Fi a day simply wasn’t working.

“Due to overwhelming interest in Card Rewards we are currently experiencing difficulty accessing Starbucks Card accounts. We are working to fix the problem and ask that you please try again later,” said a page shown to site visitors, according to this IDG News Service story. A Starbucks spokesman said that the problems were on Starbucks’ end, not AT&T’s. “Customers overwhelmed the site when joining Starbucks Card Rewards,” said Doug Cavarocchi, a Starbucks spokesman, in an e-mail.

Most U.S. Web sites fail the most basic of site performance tests, according to new stats issued by Pingdom. “The worst performance grades were given to Foxnews.com, IGN.com, Gamespot.com, CNN.com, Break.com and ESPN.go.com. The best performance grades were given to Google.com, Live.com, Orkut.com and Craigslist.org. This is not entirely surprising considering their minimalistic style.”

But the more interesting part of the Pingdom stats is the analysis that looks at the sites’ size, HTTP requests and caching. It’s worth a read.

Computerworld columnist Frank Hayes–a former colleague of mine from CMP and an awesome folk singer as well–has a wonderful column out about why the Wal-Mart RFID effort is still having problems.

Although some of the proprietary arguments are slightly overstated, Hayes makes a great point about how Wal-Mart’s $2 per pallet non-RFID penalty reflects a lack of understanding of why suppliers have resisted RFID tagging. It’s the software implementation costs and the fact that different retailers demand different versions. Hayes’ column is worth reading. (But not everyone seems to agree. The RFID Journal took exception to the piece, on several levels. And then some RFID Journal readers took exception to that disagreement.)

For those retailers worrying about the legal threats associated with the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act (FACTA), in particular the rule that says they can’t give a customer a receipt displaying the last few digits of the payment card nor can it show the expiration date, they can rest a lot easier this week. That’s thanks to a ruling on Wednesday from a federal judge and the passage of a bill this week softening the law.

The new proposed law—which passed both the House and Senate this week and is awaiting President Bush’s signature—essentially removes the expiration date requirement of the law. So assuming the president signs it into law, the bill just got a lot easier to navigate. Read more.

Germany’s METRO Group is experimenting with RFID inserts to track meat and to immediately locate any product that is about to expire or that has expired.

METRO is placing the inlays into the foam meat packing trays used in their Future Store. “RFID has a key role to play in quality management for fresh food,” said Gerd Wolfram, managing director of MGI METRO Group Information Technology in a statement. “This automatic product identification technology will contribute to product quality and efficiency in our stores.”

The Blockbuster movie-download kiosks–slated to start their trial in June–will download movies directly into consumer-owned portable devices in about two minutes, according to a demo at the company’s shareholder meeting Wednesday (May 28).

Blockbuster officials want the NCR-developed kiosk to be able to download films in about 30 seconds “as Blockbuster is striving for an ATM-like experience,” said Blockbuster CEO James Keyes, according to this report in The Hollywood Reporter. “Keyes later told reporters he could envision a monthly subscription fee of $10 along with a free device give-away down the line. Games would be ‘a wonderful addition’ to the kiosk service in the future as well,” he said. The trial will start at a few stores in Dallas and will initially only work with devices made by Archos.

Guest View Columnist David Taylor believes that Web application vulnerabilities make up more than 60 percent of all software vulnerabilities. “They are so well known that the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) has published a list of these vulnerabilities. They are so easy to exploit that even the most junior hackers can find lists of popular Web application hacks and use them to break into your Web store.”

PCI’s plan to address these vulnerabilities had been delayed for two years, which has crippled compliance efforts. As the requirement is about to kick in in June, merchants are not thinking so much about PCI, unless their annual PCI compliance review date happens to coincide with the PCI 6.6 effective date. Read more.

At $388 billion in annual revenue, handling Wal-Mart’s ERP financial application is nothing if not challenging. But when Wal-Mart last year turned to SAP to take over many of the financial functions that the chain had been handling with in-house software, it was a concession that it can’t push its homegrown apps as far as it used to. This is especially true as the company continues its aggressive global expansion.

Wal-Mart CFO Tom Schoewe said this month that the first phase of the global roll-out is expected to be completed in the next two years, with two remaining phases kicking in over the next five years, according to Wal-Mart spokesperson John Simley. “It is a departure for us to standardize on something (from a third-party) rather than homegrown,” Simley said.

Much has been made recently of TJX firing a store employee who posted public comments about weak security procedures that still exist at the retail chain that was the site of the worst data breach in credit-card history.

The employee has been dubbed a whistleblower and it’s been suggested that TJX was wrong to have terminated the guy. In this case, I have to stand up for TJX: They were completely within their rights to terminate this employee. As for the charges themselves, those are dramatically more troubling. Read more.

A handful of grocery chains—including PriceChopper and Wegmans—have started using CRM data to alert customers to product recalls. It’s an encouraging move to convince consumers that loyalty cards can be used to help them beyond taking 10 cents off a gallon of milk.

The program at PriceChopper—a 116-store grocery chain in New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Vermont–is especially interesting as it uses an automatic phone-calling system to instantly and simultaneously reach out to impacted customers. Last month, the system was used to reach out to some 12,000 customers about a recall of Samuel Adams beer due to glass fragments, according to this intriguing report in the Daily Gazette, a daily newspaper from Schenectady, N.Y..

What do you get when you merge a kiosk with a vending machine? I’m not sure. But whatever it is, Macy’s is putting it into some 392 stores right away, the chain announced May 22. That represents almost half of the chain’s 800 stores.

The new machines are called e-Spot automated retail shops and are designed to deliver consumer electronics—initially offering iPods, digital cameras, camcorders, mobile accessories and headphones priced anywhere from $15 to $350—as though they were candy, literally. The machines function just as a candy or sandwich vending machine does, in that they accept the payment (typically a credit card or a gift card) and then drop the product to where the customer can retrieve it. Read more.

Jane’s contactless loyalty card is detected as the Des Moines attorney approaches the self-checkout. The system knows the counselor’s shopping history and anticipates that the counselor likely has a dozen kiwis in her cart.

So when she places the barcode-less fruit on the scale, the first fruit it displays in its list is kiwi, followed by the four fruits and vegetables that Jane typically buys. Other fruits and vegetables follow alphabetically after Jane’s favorites have been displayed. Given how many fruits Jane buys each time, this shaves a precious 108 seconds off of her checkout. Read more.

The 59-year-old Mervyns department store chain, with 177 stores in seven states and about $2.5 billion in annual revenue, certainly can’t be accused of rushing into technological fads. On Tuesday (May 20), some 15 years after the World Wide Web launched, Mervyns announced that it would launch an E-Commerce site sometime “in the fourth quarter of 2008.”

The site—which a Mervyns statement said “could quickly grow into a $50 million business”—will be outsourced to an unspecified “nationally recognized provider of turnkey order entry and fulfillment services.” What’s next? Maybe next year they’ll explore these new-fangled push-button telephones.

Guestview Columnist David Taylor worries when he sees that more than 75 percent of enterprises are holding off on deploying server virtualization in the cardholder environment until PCI clarifies matters.

But there really is no reason to wait. Why? The proof is in the tracking tools. Whether the 1.2 release of PCI DSS in October 2008 specifically addresses server, network and desktop virtualization is less important than being able to provide proof to your PCI assessor that you can control, manage and track access to card data continuously. Read more.

The grocery challenge with the theft of moist, fresh products–such as cheese–has frustrated retail loss prevention managers because such products tend to react poorly with EAS tags. Checkpoint and Sealed Air Cryovac announced Wednesday (May 21) one possible way around this issue.

Cryovac has started to integrate anti-theft labels inside the vacuum shrink bags. “The first market request to Sealed Air Cryovac was for two million packs for the protection of Parmigiano Reggiano. In Italy, for instance, Parmigiano Reggiano has a shrink rate of about 9 percent,” said a joint statement. “Initial studies have shown that this RF-EAS source tagging program may cut down inventory shrinkage of dairy products from 9 percent to 1 percent.”

As more consumers use search engines to find products filtered by a single attribute–such as price–shopping cart abandonment rates are increasing, according to E-Commerce vendor MarketLive, which tracks such matters.

The shopping cart abandonment rate went up 2.7 percent, from 57.88 percent in Q1 2007 to 59.43 percent in the first quarter of this year, while “one-and-out” visits to E-Commerce sites jumped 18.9 percent, from 32.94 percent to 39.15 percent, based on MarketLive Performance Index figures that rely on activity from nearly 100 E-Commerce sites, according to this Internet Retailer story. The piece quoted Jaye Sullivan, senior Internet strategist at MarketLive, as saying that about two-thirds of consumers now start their research at search engines, “which means many visitors are new to E-Commerce sites and more likely to click off quickly if they don’t find what they want. More people are doing research and they’re price-sensitive, so they’re opening up more carts to check out the price.”