Technology expert Evan Schuman takes an authoritative look at the faults and foibles of enterprise IT.
Some former Amazon managers are fine-tuning an app that, in effect, becomes shoppers' personal CRM profiles. Today, shoppers interact with specific retail sites and, maybe, develop a profile with that retailer. But every time that shopper visits....
There is arguably little that is more fundamental to the e-commerce experience — and triply so with mobile shopping — than price comparisons. This is important to remember when looking at the announcement that Connexity is buying PriceGra....
The slowest ketchup in the west, east, north and south may have retained the slowest domain renewal unit, too, and Heinz learned a painful lesson involving QR codes, Germany and a porn site. The lesson, though, is serious business. As companies use m....
When Target announced this week that it was selling its pharmacy business to CVS, it was good news for CVS, which will add more than 1,660 pharmacies to its network. But lost amid all of the mega-drugstore talk are some extremely likely data security....
When retail research house IHL published its report in June on retail inventory losses — which is simply a combination of overstocks and out-of-stocks — it estimated an industrywide loss of $1.1 trillion. But IHL is not limiting itself to....
When security consultants speak of the huge internal threat against retailers, they are generally talking about rogue employees. They fear the people on the inside of your firewalls who might exceed their level of access/authorization to steal data f....
In a five-store trial, F&F, the apparel unit of Tesco, has robots roaming the floor, continually scanning tens of thousands of passive UHF EPC Gen2 tags, strolling up the aisles at about one meter/second on three sets of wheels, reading tags from....
The next step in mobile marketing will involve IT starting to leverage all — or at least most — of the datapoints mobile already collects and making use of that integrated data. Magical things become possible when mobile CPUs start crunch....
When Amazon this month said that it would start offering same-day delivery for free, it seemed to make perfect sense. If you've got a new service that customers are reluctant to try, making it free is a good come-on.
When the FTC recently cracked down on a vendor that tracks shoppers' movements via their mobile devices and sells the data to retailers, it could have made a statement about what limits and notifications need to be in place. Instead, the FTC, as....
It's great when retailers bring new technology innovations to the market. It's even pretty good when they adapt not-so-new innovations to their processes in ways that help customers and/or the bottom line. What isn't so great is taking....
Ordering a pizza via Twitter isn't faster or more convenient than submitting the same entry through the company's mobile app. But it does have one huge advantage — enjoyed almost entirely by Domino's.
Beacons — those little ad-beaming mechanisms littering storefronts today — have been heralded as the ultimate mobile app partner for retailers. But as they exist today, they do little more than make Madison Avenue come-ons, teasing shoppe....
As companies become used to the Internet of Things, they are assigning IP addresses to everything from printers and watches to refrigerators and garbage cans. We're going to be needing a lot more IP addresses. That's exactly what IPv6 has i....
The best retailers have spent years — often decades — cultivating their brand. But they can get into trouble when they look at today’s technology and try to envision ways they can leverage programming magic to boost margins. The pro....
It's becoming increasingly clear that what all mobile wallets have lacked so far is a good reason for anyone to use them.
For the bulk of the last decade, Amazon.com has been the bogeyman of every brick-and-mortar retail chain. Sales dropping in-store? Amazon's fault. Sales dropping online? Mobile sales lower than we had projected? Amazon's to blame. What brin....
Non-IT C-levels love absolutes on security. They want to know that if they approve those 50 more security staff and $200 million in additional equipment and software, breaches can be blocked. IT knows that it's a silly question, that the best on....
The essence of security is not trusting that people will do the right thing. Firewalls, deadbolts and armed guards exist to slow down or stop bad guys, not to encourage good acts from good guys. With that in mind, let's look at how companies tod....
In retail—and especially in E-Commerce—there's a nuanced distinction between having a very popular sale and arranging for far too little merchandise. It's like those hold recordings that say the lengthy hold time is because of h....
When Amazon recently filed a Patent application to make retail payments absolutely transparent to shoppers, it suffered from the same fate of so many IT projects: Having too much faith in bits and bytes doing what they are supposed to do.
The potential of facial-recognition biometrics is huge and new marijuana-dispensing kiosks could push it into the mainstream. But a look at the iPhone's biometric efforts could signal the path forward — and some side roads to avoid.
When Macy's this month upgraded its mobile app to allow shoppers to theoretically limit searches to a particular store, it illustrated how different such efforts can be. When we tried to use the service, it blew up at almost every step.
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