Futuretail: The Retail Technology Weblog

Sprintel WiMax news

Now that you've heard the stories about Sextel , get ready for Sprintel, as Intel and Sprint have joined forces to roll out WiMax based networking. I know we'd all been hoping WiMax would be free (which it WILL sooner or later...) but this news means that we're one step closer to a unified device that is: a) a cordless phone (running over WiFi) when someone is in their house; b) a connected PDA (running over WiMax) in urban areas; c) a standard cell-data phone (running over EDGE/3G) when not connected to an IP connection. Sooner or later... sooner or later.

The future of text messaging: Morse code

Hot on the heels of the announcement that carrier pigeons are faster than DSL at delivering information comes the bombshell result of a contest between a 93-year old telegraph operator and a 13 year old SMS text messager: Morse code is faster than text messaging. What makes this interesting is that it is a powerful story of the importance of interface. A simple telegraph key is much easier to operate than thumbpressing tiny buttons. If you're intrigued by this story, check out "The Victorian Internet", a wonderful book about the parallels between the telegraph and the Internet booms. You'll also note in the article above that the 13 year old was allowed to use SMSlish, while the 93 year old spelled out the entire message properly. So evn f u use bad speling to txt ur pals 2 tel thm wot u r up 2, it wont b ne fstr than ur grndads mrse cod. Damn, I'm getting 3L33T. Word.

An interesting use for item-level RFID

Though it costs about $16,000 (thanks, George W. for making the dollar equal to 50 pence), this device promises an unheralded degree of freedom for the blind. Ironically, the same thing could be accomplished if retailers just PUBLISHED maps of their stores, via Flash or Adobe vector format. C'mon folks... 65 million cell phone users... GIVE THEM SOMETHING in store!

Finally, a way to bypass customs (not US, of course)

OK, for any of you who have ever come back from Hawaii with orchids, Hawaiian flowers and seeds for birds of paradise and then needed to go straight to London... now you can send all that stuff from the airport easily, rather than cramming it all into a FedEx envelope. Also useful if you want to keep your lighter rather than ditching it at the TSA checkpoint.

Biometrics once again not-quite-ready-for-prime-time

One of the biometric apps I've often thought would work well in retail is signature verification. Unlike iris scanning (too "Minority Report" and also a dangerous place for enemy assassins to hide needles and poke your eyeball) and fingerprinting (face it, if you have to key your phone number in, why not just add four secret digits, call it a PIN, and save the cost of the fingerprint scanner?), people are accustomed to signing their name on checks and credit card receipts. Unfortunately, when put to the test, signature biometrics don't work as well as one would hope. Oh well, IBM's been working on it for years. Hopefully someone will finally make it work.