Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Pureplay RFID vendor Alien Technology’s S-1 filing delivers few surprises beyond the required candid lawsuit-avoiding language so popular in SEC filings. Still, Alien statements such as “Both we and other industry participants have overestimated RFID market size and overall growth rates” are noteworthy. Is Alien’s IPO a test of the whole RFID market?

The IPO reports that Alien has “had limited success in accurately predicting future sales of our RFID products.” Is that like my saying that I’ve had limited success in making billions of dollars as the world’s ugliest male model? That is suddenly my favorite new phrase. When my wife asks me if I’ve finished cleaning the kitchen, I’ll tell her that I’m enjoying limited success in that endeavor.

This year, some 1.3 billion RFID tags will be sold, a number that will top 2.2 billion next year, according to figures released Wednesday by European market analyst firm IDTechEx. Those figures are noteworthy in the sense that they show particularly steep growth in the immediate future.

But the most interesting detail in the new figures is an estimate that 200 million of those tags to be sold this year will be used for item-level tagging, which is the same problem the firm is projecting will be sold this year for contactless smart cards. Let’s put those figures into startling context: the 400 million for item-level and smart cards is merely 20 percent less than the 500 million IDTechEx expects to be purchased for the traditional pallets and cases of supply chain drudgery.

More than a quarter-of-a-million Hotels.com customers are now at high risk for credit card theft after a password-protected laptop computer containing their credit card information was stolen from an Ernst & Young auditor’s locked car in what appears to be a “randon petty theft,” a Hotels.com spokesperson was quoted as telling the Associated Press. The Seattle incident at Hotels.com, a subsidiary of Expedia.com, is just the latest in a series of data-identity cases recently centering not around criminal hackers but around the garden-variety thug breaking into locked places.

Just as E-Commerce players are getting used to the idea of people buying products using their cellphones, whether in a physical location beaming right to a POS or making purchases online, the cellphone wants to make the next leap forward. Nokia has ported the Apache webserver to Symbian, which will theoretically allow cell phones to directly serve Web content.

According to a report in LinuxDevices.com, Nokia installed its experimental port, initially, on a Nokia 6630, which it then accessed over a Bluetooth PAN (personal area network). This proved somewhat useful, in that it brought “the possibility of accessing functionality on the phone using a big screen and proper keyboard.”

However, the project’s goal was to enable access to the phone of the cellular network, the story said. This proved challenging due to firewalls explicitly deployed by operators to prevent such access.

This is the logical next step with the growth of the Web. The Internet’s early days were made powerful because of the networking of millions of PCs around the globe. The potential to expand that now with the networking of huge numbers of connected cellphones is, to say the least, powerful.

MasterCard today tolled out its PayPass watch in Taiwan today, allowing consumers to pay with contactless without having to take out a credit card. The watch comes with some small retail discounts, but Taiwan consumers are expected to show minimal resistance.

Would this catch on in the United States? Not likely, unless the discounts were a lot more generous than the 10 percent discount in one chain being offered with today’s promotion.

But it’s hard to beat the sex appeal of a lime-green watch with a vendor’s brand on it. Rolex, watch out.

As retailers find dollars in having certain stores specialize in various Ethnic or lifestyle segments, they are often neglecting to update their store data to match, so finds a new Forrester Research report.

This is a matter of frustration among some consumer goods manufacture suppliers who now need to know more about those customers. A product that appeals to only two percent of shoppers should be viewed very differently, for example, if it happens to be appealing to 85 percent of Hispanic shoppers or 86 percent of vegetarian shoppers or 89 percent of senior citizen shoppers.

The vision of convergence circa 2000 was a remote control influencing live network broadcast action. That never happened, but BET has gotten close, But BET’s executives found the profit rested in knowing the particulars of its large niche audience. What will this mean for E-Commerce? Will broadcast, cable, cellphones and PCs finally learn to play together, with smart advertisers along for the ride?

Joel Hansen, a 45-year-old Texan, was visiting his local Wal-Mart to purchase some food at about 5:30 p.m..

After what everyone seems to agree was an unpleasant human-computer interaction, the self-checkout terminal had a smashed-in monitor, courtesy of the fist of the consumer.

As one of the newest members of the Fortune 500, Standard Pacific Homes has seen more than its share of growth and, accordingly, small companies that it acquired to fuel its growth.

When Rob Kelle, the CIO of the $5 billion home builder, began his CIO tenure about 18 months ago, he says he knew the company had a California culture and that acquired companies needed to be left alone as much as possible.

Although the market for content for cell phones and PDAs is still in its infancy, the two applications that are expected to seize major market-share the fastest are reservations for airplane seats and hotel rooms.

Like every major sales and communications advance that preceded it, e-commerce’s 12-year existence has moved along in phases, as it slowly abandoned earlier methods to accept the new reality.
Offline and online brands were initially kept distinct, then they were awkwardly merged. Initial e-commerce efforts were flashy brochure sites, with rudimentary shopping carts and checkout.

It was apparently a coincidence that two of the biggest names in contactless payment today, Exxon Mobil’s Speedpass and credit card leader Visa, both announced changes to their contactless payment system on the same day.

The changes were definitely minor tweaks, with Exxon Mobil deploying a much faster way to sign up for Speedpass (taking a weeks-long process down to a few minutes) and Visa rolling out a much smaller form factor, specifically a mini-card suitable for hanging on a keychain.

With more home deliveries and installations, retailers and restaurants are facing the point-of-sale challenge of verifying payments away from the POS while paying higher credit card fees for card-not-present purchases.

At Todd Pacific Shipyards in Seattle, management knows that accurately tracking employees, including the hours and projects they’ve worked, and assessing daily staffing needs is often the difference between running a tight ship or sinking it.

Wal-Mart isn’t the only major early RFID backer to have cooled its RFID enthusiasm lately. One of the most anticipated RFID trials was at the Department of Homeland Security, which last year made a move to use super-beefed-up RFID devices track all U.S. ports of entry.

Breakthrough technologies invariably require some IT executive somewhere to have the guts to deploy when no one else is seriously doing so.

That’s a bold and dangerous move, given how many technologies fizzle and die after an impressive beginning.

Joe Chiavetta was facing a potentially huge hardware purchase to keep his always-on-the-road sales force current with pricing, orders and customer backgrounds. It’s not what a food distribution company’s chief financial officer likes to think about.

It then struck Chiavetta that the device the reps were already using to check voicemail—their cell phones—could also include small customer databases for the 200 or so prospects that each rep works.

As retailers and manufacturers start bridging the gap between passive and active RFID chips, one RFID consortium is cautioning vendors to watch their mouths when talking about sensors.

The self-appointed sensor censor is the nonprofit SAL-C (Smart Active Label Consortium), which has about 20 members from the RFID manufacturing community.

The Virgin Entertainment Group is trying to push the envelope on kiosk use, with plans to use the multimedia machines not just to play video clips, audio samples and game demos but to identify customers and to handle payments.

“Our minds are racing where we can go with this,” said Robert Fort, the CIO for the 17-store chain with some 1,600 employees and $225 million in annual revenue. “Virgin is definitely a company known for innovation and our demographic may indeed be much more willing to participate in all of this stuff.”

TMasterCard International Inc. Vice President Oliver Steeley is working to make contactless payment available to millions of Americans. Contactless payment is where a customer authorizes a charge to a credit card without the credit card being touched, often by using a key fob, a smart credit card or a chip embedded in something else (such as a cell phone or wristwatch).

The authorization is sent to a reader wirelessly, from which it is then communicated to a POS (Point of Sale) unit, which might be a significant distance away.

Bar code pioneer and scanner manufacturer Intermec Technologies Corp. planned to unveil a new generation of bar code readers that rely on pure silicon to read bar codes, rather than mechanical means. Intermec predicted its readers would be 80 percent more accurate with the new approach to scanning.

Traditional bar code readers use several lasers set at different angles, and mirrors to direct light from the laser across the whole bar code, even when it’s on a product that is cylindrical or irregularly shaped.

A U.S. Court of Appeals panel this week issued a ruling in a long-running patent infringement lawsuit that threatened retailers using bar-code readers. The panel affirmed a lower court ruling that the patent infringement case should not go forward.

The case involves several bar-code system manufacturers that were sued by a foundation that owns the patents from an early bar-code inventor named Jerome Lemelson.

With almost 3,000 stores in all 50 states, the Rent-A-Center retail chain needs to be able to expand quickly and easily.

But its business model allows customers to rent and return merchandise with little notice, forcing store layouts to be flexible. What if 30 customers return mattresses to the same store tomorrow?

A major regional fast-food chain—with 433 restaurants in the Southeastern United States—is going to offer free wireless connections to anyone who wants to surf while sitting in a burger joint.

The Krystal Co. (the nation’s second-oldest fast-food restaurant chain, founded in 1932) is clearly hoping that a lot of customers will be intrigued and will munch on a burger and fries while gulping from its unlimited refill 802.11 fountain.

Typically, a CIO arguing for a $30 to $40 million IT investment for new payment systems has to answer a lot of questions from a skeptical CEO, chief financial officer and board members. But that wasn’t the experience of Canadian Tire Corp. CIO Andrew Wnek.