Futuretail: The Retail Technology Weblog

New e-ink ESLs now available in Japan

OK, so it didn't quite round out our Japanese news this week... Finally, e-ink technology (using high-contrast black-and-white balls suspended between two sheets of plastic) rather than LCD technology has made it to commercial deployment in electronic shelf labels (ESLs) in Japan. Why is this news? Power consumption for one thing. A similar tag I was given by e-ink (different company) ran for two years on two AA batteries... Not bad for a constantly changing display visible from across the room.

New retail format - free vending

Japanese vending company Fuji Electric Retail Systems has introduced a new vending system that has the ability to switch to a free mode when the power goes off, thus providing emergency sustenance to patrons. Just think... if we'd had these in college... where all you had to do to get free drinks is unplug the darned thing... This may work well in Japan, where everyone is honest, but here in the good old USA, we know how to take full advantage of a retailer's civic-spiritedness.

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....