Futuretail: The Retail Technology Weblog

CVS offers "one time use" digital video cameras

In what they claim in the press release to be the " world's first single-use point-and-shoot digital video camera" (despite the fact that Ritz Camera has already introduced them), CVS has taken the disposable camera digital and video. For $30, consumers can buy a video camera that they bring back to CVS for "processing" that extracts 20 minutes of video and burns it onto a DVD. It's a cute idea, but note to CVS: it's already being hacked for reuse...

Best Buy in more customer unfriendliness

It appears that in addition to refusing to take $2 bills, Best Buy is bound and determined to annoy even more of its customers (even those of us who are "Angel Customers" who do a lot of business with them and actually use BestBuy.com). According to Gizmodo, Web prices shown in Best Buy stores are sometimes $20 to $50 higher than the Web prices shown when customers access bestbuy.com from outside the store. Now, different Web-store prices are nothing new... but actually implying that a Web price isn't a Web price is deceptive. C'mon Best Buy... take the $2 bills and show us honest prices...

RS2005 Update: Notes from Gartner/RIS

No BIG suprises at the 15th Annual Retail Technology Study presentation today, but a few interesting notes:

• only 18% of respondents valued "a focus on revenue generation" as a skill for CIOs. This is abyssmal; WAY too much focus on a shrinking bottom line and little on increasing the top.
• out of the top 10 technologies for 2005, less than 5% difference between all ten, so the "usual suspects" become even more usual
• finally, retailers are realizing ROI from that bugaboo of infrastructure investments: faster network connections: 47% anticipate ROI in a year from faster bandwidth investments, and 16% more anticipate ROI within two years
• 22% have either deployed or have deployment underway in wireless POS.
• Self-checkout is still not spreading outside grocery; Jeff referenced Home Depot, but other that that... nothing. No surprise; it's not the panacea the vendors keep pitching.
• 6% of retailers claim to be "up to date" with their RFID technology investment. That's funny... unless Wal-Mart got to vote a bunch of times, which 6% could that possibly be? The joys of self-reporting.
• Education and training are big opportunities in the store. With all those kiosks and open POS systems (read that as "screens") in the store, there are all kinds of new opportunities for electronically delivered training, and the flexible interfaces of next-gen POS lends itself VERY well to performance improvement theories.
• 13% of retailers claim to be segmenting customers by "need." More crack-smoking here: they may possibly have a centralized model for that, but virtually no one is executing on the segmentation.
• One thing Jeff kept repeating was "if RFID works..." My comment: it's not an issue of the technology works or not; it's whether or not retailers can create a compelling applications using the technology. Keep in mind, Wal-Mart's RFID trials are still several orders of magnitude more inaccurate than current "middle of the pack" manual processes.

Some things that (once again) weren't really covered:

• offshoring vs. packaged apps
• granularity of "kiosk" and "wireless device" categories
• NOTHING on customer-owned technologies like PDA and cell phone

Live from Retail Systems!

Well, I'm trying something new. In addition to posting blog entries from the show floor, I'll be posting Audioblog entries as well. You can listen to the intro below, and let me know what you think.

WiMax banner day: now coming to a Space Needle near you

As if Sprintel wasn't big enough WiMax news for one day... a WiMax setup was installed on the Space Needle, offering 6 MBit/second speed for $800 per month. Since that's four times faster and only slightly more expensive than a landline T1 (plus, it's... ahem... wireless!), it will be quite appealing for businesses that don't want to deal with local telco installation... such as (drum roll...) retailers in malls.

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.

SMART cars coming to the US

OK, I'm literally giddy with joy about this. SMART cars, those tiny little two seaters that are so much... "fun"... to drive around the M25 in London, are coming to the US! So why am I posting this here? Remember those Q1 2005 Wal-Mart results that were a little less than spectacular? Well, though Wal-Mart blamed "poor Easter weather" or some other such nonsense, the truth is that driving the old F250 pickup truck to the Wal-Mart twenty miles away is putting a serious dent in some people's pocketbooks, with gas prices the way they are. While I can't imagine the regular SMART car appealing to the same demographic as monster truck rally, when they start shipping THIS beast to the US, I'm buying one. It gets 60 MPG and looks hella cool and who cares if the F250 can out accellerate me...

WiMax progress: high speed Internet on commuter trains

Don't get too excited yet, Northeasterners... we can add the UK to the list of countries eclipsing the US with wireless access and gadgets. T-Mobile is now offering 802.11b WiFi service on selected train lines between London and Brighton. The service is poised to use WiMax to connect to the trains and WiFi within them, meaning consumers will be able to connect just as they would any other T-Mobile hotspot. Think we'll get it here? Unlikely, with Amtrak bankrupt and no one else stepping up to take its place.

Shameless self promotion

OK, so it's not really retail technology news, per se... but I've got a BUNCH of upcoming speaking events, including a really cool series on multi-channel retailing. Check out the "Speaking Engagements" section on the lower left.

Man arrested at Best Buy for using $2 bills

OK, so it's not strictly speaking "technology news," but apparently a disgruntled customer at Best Buy was arrested for using $2 bills to pay for an installation he wasn't happy with. Any of you who have heard me speak in the past year may have heard the story about how an alert Wal-Mart cashier (Janice Sanders) called her manager when a customer tried to pass a (fake) $1 million bill. Note to Best Buy's HR department: please tell your cashiers that $2 bills are REAL (albeit unusual)... I'd hate to be arrested when I bring my penny collection in to buy a new ink cartridge...