Technology expert Evan Schuman takes an authoritative look at the faults and foibles of enterprise IT.
When BJ's Wholesale Club on Thursday (May 3) said that it would leverage machine learning in its mobile app, it joined the crowded club of companies boasting A.I. capabilities while remaining vague on the details.
One of the longest-running retail problems involves loyalty points and gift cards and the fact that shoppers tend to either forget about them or find them too much of a hassle to redeem.
In-aisle checkout gets a big push from the world’s largest retailer.
Texting confirmation numbers is a very weak link; texting them to my landline is just dumb.
Researchers from Purdue University and the University of Iowa have found quite a few new security holes in the popular 4G mobile networks.
With a smartphone and an RFID tag on the window, shoppers may be able to forgo using plastic at all gas stations and drive-through restaurants. But will they?
The PCI Council is allowing the most sensitive part of a payment card transaction to happen on a device that it acknowledges is highly dangerous and unstable.
Now comes yet another reason to respect the heck out of your privacy policy: The U.S. Supreme Court is considering making it a determining factor for whether your customers have an expectation of privacy.
Visa has learned this lesson, but Kroger is still resisting.
What Apple did not choose to say is far more illuminating than what it did say.
A U.K. firm is pushing mobile software that watches you while you fill out a form and tries to determine truthfulness and emotion. George Orwell would be proud.
AR is a nice retail mobile add-on, but what Williams-Sonoma needs more is to address retail fundamentals. W-S, look to Amazon for an example.
Instart Logic wants to help publishers get around ad blockers with its ad-blocker blocker and serve up ads though people don't want them. But is that wise?
Made with Apple’s ARKit, Amazon's new augmented reality (AR) mobile app shows you can do AR sizing without needing depth-sensing camera. Sorry, iPhone X.
Will forcing shoppers to use a different payment mechanism for every retailer be a good thing? Or will it just dampen mobile payment enthusiasm overall?
Amazon’s car trunk delivery system, which uses a mobile app from a smart lock vendor, sounds convenient, but it raises security concerns.
MasterCard's new effort in VR purchasing takes the worst aspect of in-store shopping and skips the best of online. And they throw in easy unintended purchases.
Veteran chief information security officer Barak Engel blasts the mobile community for torpedoing enterprise security in his new book, "Why CISOs Fail Security."
Walmart is setting itself up for trouble with a mobile app that lets employees into your home unattended to put away groceries you ordered.
One longtime Wall Street financial analyst tracking retail says Amazon may be positioned to disrupt mobile payments just as it has disrupted retail.
To make sure companies use Face ID in their apps, Apple simply didn't give them any practical choice.
IT is seeing a very dangerous collision of two trends: BYOD and mobile apps. IT's job is to protect corporate data — and it's an app download away from failing.
The LAN infrastructure may not be with us for much longer, and that's due to cloud and mobile changes. Nonetheless, authentication needs to be changed immediately.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology is trying to bolster ecommerce authentication on desktops and mobile devices.
Being able to track shoppers as they move from online to in-store has been a marketing goal for years. Google says it has an answer. You just have to trust it blindly.
What does it mean that users of the Amazon app were less likely to venture into a physical store on the day of Amazon's big sale?
A group of Swiss researchers has developed an approach to limit how much of your data you need to share. And they are offering it to companies for free.
Amid reports that Apple is preparing to abandon fingerprint biometric authentication in favor of 3D facial recognition coupled with iris scans, the mobile industry is preparing for authentication upheaval.
While other retailers hide their phone number, Zappos encourages its shoppers to call. There are good reasons to remember that a mobile device is still primarily a phone.
A ruling favoring law enforcement’s argument that it should have access to information such as geolocation data would have implications for companies facing civil complaints.
Mobile-accessed video analytics could be a wonderful retail technology, but only if it’s used to attack the right problem.
One of the first things retail executives learn is that shopper surveys are horrible indicators of what shoppers will do in stores.
One big downside of the plethora of e-commerce shopping bots out there today is that they create the impression of a difference when there may not be one. If I may give my two cents’ worth, is a two-cent difference meaningful, especially when s....
BusinessWeek's look at how Jet.com is doing in its effort to transform Walmart.com leaves the impression that the biggest obstacle to Walmart.com being successful is Walmart itself.
With recent reports that Amazon is preparing to make a major play in custom clothing — as well as apparel in general — clothing chains are panicking.
There's a massive difference between retailers using technology to free up associates to do more hands-on work and using that technology to replace those associates.
There has been a wide range of thoughts about the meaning of physical store closings, coming from some major retail thinkers and various major media news outlets. But the underlying assumptions in almost all of these arguments are flawed.
The interplay between store associates and in-store technology has always been a delicate balancing act. When the tech helps the associate be an all-knowing partner to the shopper, it's a great thing. But when the tech is deployed so that the as....
Leveraging the advantages of brick-and-mortar over online seems to baffle much of retail. Adidas joins the short list of merchants that have figured it out.
There is a security ROI dance in retail today. Executives know that they can skimp on security and have a statistically decent chance the company won't get caught by a cyberthief before someone else has their job.
With so many retailers being impacted by cyber attacks, it’s easy to conclude that thieves are necessary for data breaches. Not necessarily. Saks last week made clear that it can breach itself quite efficiently.
When JPMorgan Chase acquired MCX’s payment technology to help with Chase Pay, it likely received a bargain. But a bargain is a bargain only if the value is greater than the cost, no matter how low that cost.
Some highly sensitive data is going to be set loose.
At best, a properly integrated CRM program is complex, given the huge number of systems it touches, or at least should touch. But what happens when a $16 billion, 37-year-old chain wants to tackle CRM for the first time? Whole Foods is about to find ....
The U.S. retail payments space seems to be built on a series of increasingly massive unintended consequences, with moves and rules put in place before anyone has considered what is likely to happen next.
Panera Bread found that mobile payments significantly helped recruit drivers. Why? Digital purchases meant they didn't carry cash, which in turn meant fewer robberies.
For decades, merchants have signed agreements that force them to blindly trust their processors, to a degree they would tolerate in practically no other business relationship.
When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) hit Mastercard and UniRush with a $13 million bill on Feb. 1, it was sending a message that even a temporary denial of consumers' access to their money is unacceptable. In a heads up for IT, C....
When Elias Chavando launched his startup, Rentus.com, last year, his sole major differentiator was simply technology. He knew that there are many businesses in the rental business, but they're overwhelmingly antiquated, with many still using pap....
Holiday stats from Slice Intelligence gave Amazon an amazing 46% of all U.S. e-commerce dollars, which is three percentage points more than the prior year.
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