Futuretail: The Retail Technology Weblog

Mark Hurd to head HP

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that NCR CEO Mark Hurd has been selected to head Hewlett-Packard in the wake of Carly Fiorina's departure. This is a really interesting pick, since Hurd came up through Teradata rather than NCR's hardware side. It makes sense from a financial perspective: over the past two years, NCR has outperformed HP by over 6x... and of course, Wall Street likes it: HP shares up 5% on the news, NCR shares down 12%.

Merchandising goes 3D

I saw a couple 3D display vendors at GlobalShop last year, but the products just weren't that impressive. If you weren't in just the right place, at just the right time, the image wasn't that clear. Well, a Spanish company called Special Things has demonstrated a new system, complete with "research study" findings showing a 46% improvement in sales when products were shown on a 3d kiosk (note: page is a Google translation of the Spanish site). My favorite quote from the product's FAQ: "Is IMAGEPRO3D® based on a PC system? If." Spanish language ambiguity: 1, machine translation: 0....

How to cause mischief with RFID tags

OK, so with all the talk about RFID privacy, isn't it time to take a moment to contemplate the physical security of the RFID tag itself. Consider for a moment the hypothetical situation that your friendly neighborhood Wal-Mart has RFID tags on every product. What is to stop you from:

a) taking one of these into the store plugged into your PDA, walking through the aisles, and in about 10 minutes having an exact SKU by SKU inventory count for the store? (Remember, ePC is standards-based, so the same tag means the same thing in every store...)

b) taking one of these into the store, and walking through selectively (or indiscriminately, for that matter) zapping RFID tags on products, thus rendering the entire RFID-based check-out and security system inoperable and causing all the affected tags to have to be identified and replaced? (This form of sabotage would be EASY... responding to consumer pressure, the Metro Future Store installed an RFID-tag de-activator outside the checkout... why couldn't you simply do the same thing in the store?)

Consumer-facing RFID needs a little more thinking before it becomes mainstream.

I'd like an MP3 with my Slurpee please

7-11 CEO James Keyes announced that the company would begin exploring selling digital downloaded music, as well as iPods. This is a pretty cool idea, but once raises the problem of the interface in the store. Is a relatively fragile device such as a USB/Firewire iPod connector going to survive the average Slurpee-swilling patron (I include myself in that crowd, by the way...) plugging an iPod into it over and over? Oh, if only Bluetooth were easier to use. Or perhaps WUSB will finally catch on. Of course, 7-11 is no stranger to the music download biz, having already run a promotion with Apple's iTunes. This would be a really interesting play combining digital music sales with Intel's WiMAX solution. Imagine pre-paid/pay-as-you-go broadband Internet (WiMAX), "cell" service over UP (Skype) and downloaded music under a 7-11 brand. Watch out Tesco...

Wal-Mart extends RFID mandate to endagered wildlife

So, in a stunning development likely to anger both animal rights activists and privacy activists (and animal privacy activists), the government of China has apparently announced  plans to tag all the panda bears in captivity. I had never really thought of panda bears as particularly fast or prone to supply chain shrink, but then again, I'm hardly an expert.