As retailers debate how much they truly want to embrace mobile payment efforts, the Mercator Advisory Group is reporting that the tide will soon become unavoidable.

Mercator is now forecasting that smartphone-based remote mobile payments will reach $389 million in 2009, $1.7 billion in 2011 and $8.6 billion in 2014.

The story of the technologist who crafted an elaborate RFID poker table, complete with an HD camera to stream real-time games globally, is interesting mostly in how he attached ultra-thin and extra-flexible RFID tags to each playing card in such a way as to make it not interfere with the way the cards felt.

The details of how he did it aside, the concept is interesting in potential future retail uses, assuming that the per-tag price can be brought down low enough. For a grocery store’s greeting card section, what if the store—and its suppliers—could know which cards were picked up and which ones were opened? Read more.

Payments for taxis, parking and movies may prove less patient in waiting for new technologies than E-Commerce, a move that could be a bad sign for once-promising mobile payment method Near Field Communication (NFC), according to a new report on Tuesday (Dec. 9) from ABI Research.

With a headline “NFC No Answer for Mobile Payments,” ABI reported that “once, NFC was the leading contender among technologies that could enable mobile payments. But NFC has developed more slowly than anticipated and will not offer viable large-scale mobile payment solutions for at least six years.” That will open the door for SMS, mobile Internet and downloadable mobile applications, the research firm wrote. We should add that 2-D barcode was once seen as a placeholder for NFC, but unexciting trial performance for 2-D has increased support for alternative alternatives.

In a trial initially limited to the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Israel and Italy, Visa Europe is starting a trial this month of a card with an 8-digit alphanumeric display, 12-button keyboard and a long-life battery, according to a report in The Nilson Report, a respected credit card industry newsletter.

The card has the ability to offer reciprocal authentication, which is designed to allow consumers “making transactions via phone or the Web a way to identify the party on the other end before transmitting identifying credentials,” the report said. Such a card could be extremely useful to E-Commerce efforts to thwart phishing sites set up to harvest credit card data from unsuspecting consumers visiting look-alike fraudulent Web sites.

Amazon.com, which arguably has one of the most extensive retail CRM databases and purchase recommendation engines, envisions a Catch-22 future for gift cards. The key is making them more personalized, more customized. And yet, anything that hints of privacy violations is off-limits. It’s like a starving man being given the keys to a well-stocked food locker as long as he agrees not to eat anything.

Such is the plight of Michal Geller, Amazon’s director of consumer gift cards. Down the road, Amazon is toying with other ways to truly customize cards. But avoiding privacy issues, Geller said, is non-negotiable. “Anything related to privacy is off the table,” he said, forcing Amazon to focus on “some creative ways (that are) not creepy.” Read more.

A loyalty card that consumers can turn on and off could potentially usher in a consumer revolution of sorts, allowing the majority to punish merchants they see as misusing CRM data that has been entrusted to them. At least that’s one scenario painted by the president of the company that is pushing the card.

Beyond the simple fact that a consumer with such a card could decide to cut off a particular chain’s access to the CRM data juice to which they have grown addicted, Equifax President Steve Ely argues that his firm could leverage the masses of consumers. In so doing, he could tell consumers which retailers have been disappointing a certain percentage of their fellow consumers. Read more.

Wal-Mart will insist that its Chinese suppliers comply with RFID tagging by January 2009. And given various recent safety problems reported from China, Wal-Mart is also requiring sub-contractor information be included with every tagged product. The move, according to this nicely detailed piece in RFID News, “is expected to cost the suppliers roughly 20 times more than the bar-coding system now in place.” But China Retail News is quoting Chen Chang’an, general manager for the Shenzhen-based RFID provider Invengo Information Technology, as saying that the move will save Wal-Mart some $8.35 billion. No problem, given that Bentonville always passes such savings along to suppliers, right?

That China Retail News story also quotes Wal-Mart VP Mike Duke confirming that Wal-Mart would “not only ask its Chinese suppliers to report the name and factory location of their products, but also require them to take the responsibility for their subcontractors’ work and products. Suppliers who failed to meet these standards would be dropped from Wal-Mart’s Chinese supply chain if no improvements were made. He said the new standards would be put into effect in the apparel sector from November 2008 and gradually cover all products in its stores.”

MasterCard’s PayPass is ramping up its mobile program with an over-the-air provisioning service to supposedly make it easier for consumers to personalize their payment data on their mobile devices.

As long as a consumer has a phone using Near Field Communications (NFC), MasterCard says the program should work. “First, the PayPass application is securely transferred onto a secure area of the consumer’s mobile phone via the mobile network. Next, the PayPass application is personalized with the consumer’s individual payment account details,” a MasterCard statement said.

RFID sales globally will be more than $5.3 billion this year, with supply chain management, ID documents, ticketing and contactless payment drive shipments leading the way, according to a report released Monday (Nov. 3) by ABI Research.

If you take automobile immobilization out of the picture, RFID is slated to grow at a 15 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2008 through 2013, and ABI projects the market will be worth about $9.8 billion in 2013. Said Research Director Michael Liard: “To a casual observer, the five-year CAGR for the RFID market as a whole may not seem impressive at face value. In this case, however, traditional applications with single-digit and low-double digit five-year compound annual growth rates continue to dominate current and near-term RFID market revenue share. If these traditional applications—access control, automatic vehicle identification, automobile immobilization and ID documents—are removed from the equation, the 2008-2013 CAGR for total RFID systems revenue exceeds 20 percent.”

Although there is little doubt that the United States is in for a very rough economic period over the next half-year or more, there is ample reason to believe that retail IT may escape mostly unharmed.

Let’s not get too optimistic here. “Mostly unharmed” doesn’t mean escaping untouched. But it does mean that when large companies—especially retailers—have to suddenly make do with a lot fewer people, they need that good ole IT magic more than ever. They need the efficiencies that IT promises and the employee-replacing devices that IT enables. Read more.

Pet product maker Normerica opted for an unorthodox combo of smart boxes with embedded RFID tags and a mobile reader to comply with Wal-Mart’s RFID requirement. The application, described in wonderful detail in this RFID Update story, was attractive because it reportedly involved “no significant retooling of its packing or shipping lines.”

“If you compare the print-and-apply process at consumer goods manufacturing with eight packaging lines, you’d have to have eight applicators and printers,” said Paul de Blois, HIDE-Pack vice president and general manager. “We can produce the boxes on flexo-folder-gluer at a speed of 300 per minute, which is much faster than the throughput of a typical print-apply system.” A story worth checking out.

A Hong Kong RFID vendor is boasting about a new $1,950-$2,500 handheld UHF reader “with a read range exceeding 25 feet with standard dipole passive tags and a throughput reaching 400 tags per second.” That claim is usually reserved for fixed readers, a very sharp claimed performance boost.

Convergence Systems Limited has dubbed it the CS101, and it eked out an endorsement from the normally publicity-shy folk at Boeing. Boeing Research Engineer Steve Villa praised Geiger counter mode. “In this mode, the reader’s ability to singulate and locate tags, even in a highly reflective environment, is excellent.”

Technology that has been deployed to digitally watch—and analyze—how consumers interact with digital signage could also be used to interpret what they are doing while looking at a cereal shelf.

Are they ignoring the product or are they picking it up, reading the label and then quickly putting it back? Does the timing and eye movement indicate they were repulsed by the sugar content (near the bottom) or the low fiber count? Read more.

Australia’s Woolworths, which runs the country’s largest supermarket chain, has given thumbs up to one RFID trial and thumbs down to another, according to a wonderfully detailed story in RFID Journal.

“The retail giant tested UHF EPC Gen 2 tags at selected supermarkets and supplier distribution centers to determine the economic viability of a wider rollout,” the story said, quoting Wayne Ellison, Woolworths’ RFID project manager, and pointing out that Woolworths “intends to extend its temperature-sensing pilot but has abandoned plans to roll out RFID to track and trace produce crates for now because it still sees the technology as being too expensive. The current economic viability is also a challenge, with the overall cost of the solution—including tags, casings and infrastructure—still quite high. The overall cost for a company the size of Woolworths is still too high, and the return on investment for track and trace is just not enough for us to race ahead.”

It’s hardly a new payment card security threat, but what has become known as differential power analysis (DPA) is still very much a threat on most payment smart cards, according to a report in this week’s Nilson Report, a well-respected newsletter covering payment issues.

A DPA attack, as described in the report, takes advantage of the electrical impulses inherent in any smart card. “The silicon chips embedded in smart cards consume power whenever they process payment data and it is possible for criminals to measure these power fluctuations surreptitiously and then analyze them to decode the secret keys that secure the data,” the report said. Read more.

Home Depot and McDonald’s are both in the middle of non-traditional kiosk trials. McDonald’s is on its fourth such trial, after having concluded that the first three simply didn’t work well. Not too many retailers would opt for a fourth trial after three unsuccessful attempts.

The non-traditional Home Depot kiosk trial is based more on the units themselves—small mobile units, some as tiny as 5-inches tall—and the size of the chain’s planned kiosk commitment: Well north of $100 million for full deployment, according to the technology consultant handling one of the trials. Read more.

The new Home Depot CEO is trying to tackle the chain’s supply chain challenge, which he pegged mostly as a regional issue. “The systems were very poorly adjusted to reflect differences in locales,” said CEO Frank Blake. “We are the single-largest less-than-truckload shipper in the United States. A lot of trucks are going to stores that aren’t full. It’s not efficient.”

In a wonderful profile in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the story illustrates the bottom-line impact of even the smallest supply chain adjustment, pointing out that, for Home Depot, “one-tenth improvement in turning over inventory equals about $150 million in cash.” Definitely worth a read.

RFID tracking firm IDTechEx sees the demand for RFID slowing down sharply, but even those reduced increases will still deliver more than 20 percent annual growth. “It is old news now that orders for UHF for retail mandates have been limp due to technical and infrastructure issues. These applications will eventually prevail, but probably not fast enough to create a profitable business for tag makers in the short term,” the report said, before adding that 2008 will still see “approximately 1 billion UHF chips” manufactured.

“The largest single order is by Marks & Spencer for 150 million tags for apparel, but the number two behind that is much less. Indeed, it is still rare to hear of orders of more than 1 million UHF tags. In other words, the applications of UHF RFID are many and small, reaching a wide range of different markets. Almost all are closed loop applications,” the report said. It projected that some 2.16 billion tags will be sold in 2008 versus 1.74 billion in 2007 and 1.02 billion in 2006, across all frequencies, passive and active. “By value, we forecast that in 2009 the value of the RFID market will grow by 23 percent over 2008, and in 2010 it will grow by 25 percent over 2009, which is not exponential, but still very strong growth.”

If you’re going to be in New York City on Wednesday (Oct. 15), you might want to drop by the StorefrontBacktalk panel on strategic kiosk use (yes, there is such a thing) at the Javits Center during the KioskCom/Self-Service Expo show.

We’re going to start things off by examining Home Depot’s kiosk approaches and concerns (one of our panelists has been working on it for months) and then debate the security risks of kiosks, the difficulties of POS (and back-office) integration and—for laughs—talk about some of the more futuristic robotic kiosks in the wings. It’s from 3:15 to 4:15 PM and we’d love to have you join us. Someone needs to ask probing questions. If you don’t, I’ll have to, and what fun would that be?

Japan’s NTT and three large Japanese retail chains—Bic Camera, Nojima and Runsystem—confirmed Thursday (Oct. 9) a trial that the group says will “securely integrate the reward cards of more than 100 retailers into a single mobile phone.”

NTT will run the contactless card trial—called Gyazapo—from February to June 2009. “Once a dedicated application is downloaded into the phone, (the system) enables loyalty points, ID photos and other membership information of multiple retailers to be registered under a single platform,” according to an NTT statement.

The Staples Canada trial with re-usable RFID active tags has worked out well and will be expanded to 10 more stores by the first week of December, but it’s the security arrangements around the devices attracting the most attention.

In an attempt to minimize fraudulent removals, the software has several rules. First, a button on the POS must be accessed to disassociate the tag from the item. Second, the tag cannot be disabled more than one foot from that POS unit without setting off an alarm. Read more.

A U.S. Patent for a payment card that can be turned on and off was issued last year with little fanfare, but its owners are now starting to shop it around to retailers and banks. The premise is that when the consumer turns off the card, neither the card nor its associated numbers can be used for any purchases.

If it works, this could represent a different payment data strategy, because it would make the card data useless to a thief. The full Patent description also discusses how a mobile phone can be integrated into the process for additional payment authorizations. That phone would alert the consumer if someone tried using the card. Read more.

Visa is running a mobile phone trial where consumers will be able to transfer money using their phones to any other Visa user. “The pilot, which is intended to begin by the end of 2008, is the first U.S.-based trial testing mobile money transfers between Visa accounts,” Visa said, but it has already been doing it in 13 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Visa also said it will be working with cell phone maker Nokia to create a contactless payment phone that will include discounts and other ads from retailers and that it will be working to create mobile payment services for Google’s Android platform. Not all observers are favorably impressed.

After a one-year trial, Walgreens has now officially committed to making its 600,000-square-foot distribution center in Anderson, S.C., fully RFID automated with a system that alerts employees before they load a shipment on the wrong truck bound for retail locations throughout the Southeast.

The setup also automatically sends ASNs out as products leave the center, according to this wonderfully detailed RFID Journal story. “The RFID system is designed to alert employees when a tote has been moved to the wrong dock door, and when it is being loaded in the incorrect order. For instance, often a truck will transport multiple shipments to several stores and needs to have the goods loaded in the order in which they will be delivered.”

A California startup is touting technology that it argues will make RFID chips that can’t be cloned. Verayo’s approach is based on a circuit-building approach called PUFs (Physically Unclonable Functions), which uses subtle chip differences to fuel a challenge-and-response system.

“There is a slight difference between your Pentium chip and my Pentium chip, even if they were produced next to each other in the fab,” Vivek Khandelwal, Verayo’s director of marketing, is quoted as saying in RFID Update. “PUFs capture the unique fingerprint of each chip by sending current through the circuit and measuring the path it takes. Verayo’s technology uses the measurement data to create a 64-bit challenge that is unique to the chip,” the story said. Verayo has made its case in a technical white paper on its site.

Security is nothing if not filled with seeming contradictions, and the latest version of PCI—slated to be officially unveiled next month (October)—is highlighting a beauty: To most effectively protect payment-card-related systems, protection must be focused on anything that is not related to payment card data.

How so? PCI’s jurisdiction is limited to payment data and, therefore, it phrases most of its guidelines and requirements in those terms. So a retailer that uses appropriate encryption, firewall and intrusion detection systems only on systems that directly handle payments would be compliant and praiseworthy. But with today’s networked systems, cyberthieves seek out soft spots in the network just so they can somehow get inside. Read more.

When the PCI Security Council this week detailed a bunch of changes it will include in PCI 1.2, what might be more worthy of note is what they didn’t address.

There were technical issues—such as segmentation and tokenization—that didn’t get referenced, but also policy issues. Why isn’t there a more clear-cut appeal process, for retailers who believe their assessor is improperly interpreting the rules? Today, the council will try and address technical questions, but that rarely involves overruling an assessor. Visa has been known to get involved with a retailer who has an assessor complaint, but that’s a very rare occurrence. Read more.

The new version of PCI due out in October will let the outdated WEP wireless security standard stick around for almost two more years, while also reducing the required frequency of firewall rule reviews.

But the changes confirmed by the PCI Security Standards Council this week—which have been circulated among members for the last few weeks—provide few other substantive changes besides delivering the mild tweaks and updates the council has publicly promised. The document lists some 30 changes to the current PCI Version 1.1, and PCI officials promise that the official and final version—now slated for release on Oct. 1, a few weeks earlier than originally expected—will include yet more changes. Read more.

It’s late on a Friday night and as Jane Smith walks into her local grocery frozen food aisle, she notices a neighbor walking away carrying a frozen pizza, right near a digital advertisement for 20 percent off of a Budweiser six-pack. Jane reaches into the freezer to grab her favorite Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream but notices that the digital ad instantly changes to hawk 40 percent off fresh apple pie in the bakery section.

This concept is being trialed right now by Germany’s $81 billion Metro Group, in a project with Procter & Gamble. Read more.

After years of trials with only the rarest evidence of CFO-friendly RFID ROI, shelf stock monitoring is quickly emerging as “the first major application of RFID in retail with a strong business case,” according to a new report from London-based RFID analyst firm IDTechEx.

“Numerous apparel companies have reported increased sales of as much as 20 percent using RFID to monitor shelf stock levels,” the report said. “In 2008, IDTechEx research finds that 38 percent of the money spent on RFID in retail is specifically for apparel tagging.” Read more.

While North American retail execs are planning for trivial—if any—IT investment increases this year, with “more than one-quarter of retailers expecting lower IT spending,” more than half of their Asia Pacific counterparts are preparing for significantly higher IT spending, according to new Forrester numbers released this week. A bit of the Tortoise and the Hare perhaps?

In North America, “the mean estimate for share of IT budget devoted to innovation in 2007 was 35 percent,” the Forrester report said. “But a lower median at 30 percent and mode at 20 percent suggest that a few retailers planned heavy funding of innovation, while most planned much less investment.” Read more.

These days, when U.S. government officials want to ask questions about privacy and data security, it’s never clear if they want to protect consumers’ privacy or learn the best way to violate it themselves. But retail execs who want hints can drop by a Sept. 22 hearing at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. Those who can’t personally attend can do so virtually.

“Workshop participants will discuss the increasing prevalence of contactless payment devices in everyday consumer transactions, including credit card purchases and public transit, as well as the growing use of item-level tagging in the retail sector,” said an FTC statement. “The workshop will examine consumer awareness and education initiatives regarding these developments; security and privacy threats and proposed solutions; and emerging technologies and practices that may shape the marketplace in the coming years.” True enough, but there’s a reason these D.C. sessions are called “hearings” and not “listenings.”

Retailers who are worried about RFID security problems will have more details available to them now that a federal judge has killed a gag order on MIT students who had identified flaws in Boston’s contactless RFID subway cards.

Ten days ago, a judge ordered three MIT students to not discuss research they had done about RFID security problems with the Boston subway system. On Tuesday (Aug. 19), U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr. killed that order, ruling that discussing the papers would not violate computer fraud laws. “The MBTA ultimately is trying to silence some uncomfortable truths that these students uncovered,” Cindy Cohn–one of the attorneys for the students–told The Boston Herald. “They brought an action against three college kids rather than address the problems in their own house.” Countered an attorney for the Boston subway: His organization merely ” wanted the students to refrain from revealing details about the security problems publicly until the MBTA has time to correct the flaws.” How long did he think that would take? Five months.

Have item-level RFID trials become the industry’s Roach Motel? A place where trials check in but they don’t check out?

On Monday (Aug. 11), the $3.8 billion Jones Apparel Group became the latest retailer to launch an RFID item-level trial, albeit a conservative one, testing it at “a couple” of the 221 stores it operates under the Nine West name, said Norm Veit, executive VP of Management Information Services at Jones. Read more.

At least one RFID vendor is arguing that they are. That vendor, SimplyRFID, is arguing that read distance targets that used to be 10 feet are today as far as 40 feet.

“In the last year or two, RFID performance has definitely gotten a lot better. It used to be 10 feet [read range] was the goal, and you’d be happy to get 12,” Simply RFiD president Carl Brown was quoted saying in an RFIDUpdate story. “Now we’re seeing 20 feet without any issues at all. You can even have the tag in strange orientations and you’re still going to get the read. This technology is moving fast. Antenna, readers, cables, tags are all changing every six months.” The story details how they arrived at their figures. Not so sure it’s all realistic, but the details make for some interesting reading.

Before federal authorities cracked down on a multi-national 11-person cyber-crime ring, the group created its own VPN to, ironically, protect their stolen data as it was transmitted from Florida to Latvia.

But now, the security of the accused thieves’ data loot is the least of their problems. Indictments and informations released Tuesday (Aug. 5) charge the 11 conspirators with stealing 41 million credit and debit card numbers from major retailers including TJX. Read more.

The more RFID-tagged items retailers place on Z-bars or shelves, or in boxes, the lower the read rate will be when those items are scanned, according to a study out of the University of Arkansas. By setting up store-like scenarios in a university lab, researchers conducted three feasibility test scenarios of RFID tagged apparel and shoes.

What they found was that when an associate scanned items, the number of items scanned affected the read rate. For example, researchers scanned RFID items hung on a rounder. When there were 97 items, they found a 99.38 percent read rate. Compare that to the 89.89 percent accuracy of 180 items scanned.

As retailers struggle to figure out the proper role for PDAs and cellphones in their merged channel and marketing strategies, it’s good to know that there’s strength–well, comfort at least–in numbers. An ABI Research report released Friday (Aug. 1) projected that “location-based mobile social networking revenues will reach $3.3 billion by 2013.”

The service is defining that market as one that “allows users to share real-life experiences via geo-tagged user-generated multimedia content, exchange recommendations about places, identify nearby friends and set up ad hoc face to face meetings.” As marketers fund such deployments, opportunities for helping consumers find storefronts and turn those locations into desired meeting places soars. Privacy concerns and licensing/revenue-sharing issues aside, this is something few retailers can afford to not watch closely–and creatively.

An EU undertaking called the SMART project—set to start widespread testing in October—is getting good support with some creative efforts. It’s looking at scenarios such as “if one product is selling well at store A but selling badly at store B, RFID-powered inventory systems could initiate the transfer of the product from one store to another,” according to this ComputerWeekly story.

The project Web site goes into some other interesting possible directions, such as smart-shelves that tell consumers “whether the product is available in the back-room or whether there is a joint/ personalized promotion” and “shelf replenishment practices that change based on real-time information about availability and product shortages.” One of the tests includes “automatic discounting system for products–specifically, meat–that is nearing its (expiration) date.”

When two unrelated IT disasters hit a major retailer and a major consumer goods manufacturer, executives for both firms this month pointed fingers at the two software companies involved: Microsoft and SAP.

But the comments made by top brass from Hannaford (hit by a 4.2-million-card data breach) and Levi’s (a troublesome ERP rollout suspended lots of shipments) have raised the question of where the responsibility line should be drawn. At what point is the software company responsible for doing what it has billed itself to do? And at what point is the CIO supposed to deliver, no matter what? Read more.

A Dutch court has given the go-ahead for a university to publish research about security flaws in the RFID chips used in as many as 2 billion smart cards, despite resistance from a semiconductor company, according to a story in Computerworld.

NXP Semiconductors manufactures the MiFare Classic RFID chip, which is used in government buildings and to board public transportation systems. They had filed a lawsuit in Court Arnhem in The Netherlands against Radboud University Nijmegen in an attempt to stop the university from publishing a paper that reportedly reveals flaws in that chip. That paper is scheduled to be unveiled in October at the ESORICS security conference in Malaga, Spain.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A semiconductor company is suing a Dutch university to keep its researchers from publishing information about security flaws in the RFID chips used in up to 2 billion smart cards, according to this intriguing Computerworld story.

NXP Semiconductors filed suit in Court Arnhem in The Netherlands against Radboud University Nijmegen. The company is pushing the courts to keep university researchers from publishing a paper about reported security flaws in the MiFare Classic, an RFID chip manufactured by NXP Semiconductors, the story said.

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.

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.)

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.”

MasterCard Canada this summer will start a 4-month NFC-phone trial, with the backing of some of Canada’s largest retailers, including Loblaw, Petro Canada, Tim Hortons’, Pioneer Petroleum, Rabba Foods, a major NHL arena and McDonalds.

One unusual aspect of the trial is that it will eventually support more than one payment card on each phone, said MasterCard Canada’s Nagesh Devata.

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 preci