Evan Schuman

The managers at one of the nation’s fastest-growing ice cream chains pride themselves on customers who know exactly what they want sweet-wise when given the tools to make it. The 1,200-store chain opened its first franchise store 10 years ago and has been gaining momentum ever since. It plans to open 400 stores this year […]

SAP AG officially made its countermove to Oracle Corp.’s retail efforts on Monday with the announced purchase of Canadian POS player Triversity. Not coincidentally, the deal—which had been in the works for almost two months—was announced the day Oracle’s OpenWorld conference opened. Financial terms of the deal were not announced, nor were the revenues of […]

The software industry has for years had a proud tradition of announcing product long before an actual product existed—vaporware, in other words: software specs and capabilities that didn’t really exist but might exist in the future. There were many thought-leaders in vaporware production, but Microsoft was always my favorite. When it announced nothing, it was […]

When leading RFID chip manufacturer Alien Technology announced this week that it was cutting the price of its 96-bit Gen 1 RFID labels some 44 percent to 12.9 cents apiece, it was more than a typical price cut. It pushed the industry tantalizingly close to the much-ballyhooed 5-cent RFID tag. Today, RFID chips are overwhelmingly […]

Pity the poor penny, the neglected nickel, the despondent dime and the queasy quarter. The times are changing and for change, it’s for the worse. Credit cards, debit cards and contactless payments are all making major inroads into what was once the solid territory of clanking pocket change. Tollbooths, parking meters and quick-serve restaurants are […]

A U.S. Court of Appeals panel this week issued a ruling in a long-running patent infringement lawsuit that threatened retailers using bar-code readers. The panel affirmed a lower court ruling that the patent infringement case should not go forward. The case involves several bar-code system manufacturers—including Symbol Technologies, Accu-Sort Systems, Intermec Technologies, Metrologic Instruments, PSC, […]

The concept of e-commerce micropayments—small Web purchases typically less than $2—is nothing new, but it has never gained widespread acceptance among e-retailers because credit card fees took too much of a bite out of a micropayment to make the exchange profitable. eBay’s PayPal payment service, on the other hand, is restructing its fee structure to […]

The most altruistic gift is an anonymous contribution, in which a giver wants to help but does not want to benefit from the donation. Sometimes, though, anonymity is not possible, and that’s where things can get dicey. Last week, for example, a Fort Lauderdale authentication firm announced that it was offering its service free to […]

When Emcor Group CIO Joe Puglisi recently decided to upgrade his company’s version of Lotus Notes, he quietly “pre-deployed” it with a cross-section of his company’s business managers. He plans, he said, on using the favorable comments from that group to act as a sort of viral marketing to make the upgrade come as more […]

When credit card processing firm CardSystems announced Thursday that an independent auditor had declared its systems sound, one CardSystems executive said he now wants Visa and American Express to take it back. CardSystems Inc. was at the center of the nation’s largest known data security breach back in May, when it reported that someone had […]

Yahoo Inc. has gone into beta on an enhanced version of its e-commerce hosting service, which is positioned for the small business that can’t justify its own Web team nor the time to outsource it to programmers and Web designers.Although Yahoo’s dominant service is its search engine and the associated advertising revenue, it has built […]

It has been said that CIOs at large companies today have limited direct power and—more than almost any other C-level executive—need to push the IT/business agenda by persuasion and by maintaining good relations with other stakeholders. Taking that to heart, the CIO of Overstock.com recently sent off a note to key business partners taking the […]