It’s become all the buzz in the mobile payments world: ISIS. But what is it? And how did it get where it is today?

Rumors first started flying about a joint venture between AT&T Mobility, T Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless to create a nationwide mobile payment infrastructure back in August, 2010.

No specifics were yet available, and no one knew what this venture would be called or how it would work, but that didn’t stop bloggers and reporters from speculating about what it would mean for the industry. And universally, they thought it would shake everything up.

The official announcement of the venture – and its name, Isis – came on Nov. 16, 2010. At that time, the company also revealed that Michael Abbott, who had previously worked for GE Capital, would be named CEO.

Over the next few months, Isis executives traveled the country to speak at conferences, conventions, and summits about the company’s mobile payment system plans.

On April 6, 2011, Isis announced that Salt Lake City would be one of its first trial markets, and that it would be working with the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) to allow payments for public transportation using mobile devices. By June, Austin, Texas had been added to the list of early launch markets.

On July 19, 2011, a partnership was announced between Isis, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express. “Since the formation of Isis in November, we have been committed to building a mobile commerce platform that aligns and advances the interests of consumers, merchants and banks,” Abbott was quoted as saying in the press release. “By working with the nation’s payment networks – Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express – we significantly advance the vision of an open and secure platform that provides banks and merchants with a new and highly relevant way to connect with consumers.”

Selling the Public

In August, 2011, Isis ramped up its public relations, releasing a brochure explaining how the Isis Mobile Wallet would allow consumers to make payments, use loyalty cards, and redeem coupons.

In late September, 2011, Isis made another big announcement: HTC, LG, Motorola Mobility, RIM, Samsung Mobile and Sony Ericsson would introduce NFC-enabled mobile devices implementing Isis’ NFC and technology standards.

“Isis’ technology standards provide the direction and certainty needed for the development and deployment of NFC devices and the mobile commerce ecosystem,” the company’s chief technology officer, Scott Mulloy, said in a press release. “Working together with the device makers and our founding mobile carriers, Isis can provide the consumer choice and scale necessary for widespread adoption of mobile commerce.”

There you have it: a brief history of the company that promises to change the payments world forever. Thanks to Isis, 2012 promises to be the year when a wallet filled with credit cards will become, finally, a thing of the past.

Vivian Wagner is a freelance writer in New Concord, Ohio. Vivian blogs via Contently.com.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Advantages of a point of sale system for your gift shop.

• You will be able to control all inventory in real-time and keep hot selling items readily available.
• Track customers – helps you send out promotional coupons or discounts to bring customers back.
• Save time and reduce errors by entering the price of the item directly into the POS.
• Never have a pricing discrepancy
• Fast checkout lines
• See if you have an item in stock or do a special order right at the register.

Take time to consider the right Gift Shop Point of Sale Software. Find one that is affordable, easy to use and has readily available technical support. There are many options when choosing a POS. You could host your own software and database or find a web based company that handles all that for you.

Read the article below for more information on Gift Shop Point of Sale.

Show Me the Money! Saying Yes to POS

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The Retail Software Advice site is a new service helping retailers selecting the right retail point-of-sale software. According to the owners of the site, they have developed a very smart matching algorithm that matches buyers with the right software, much like Google matches you with web pages relevant to your keyword searches.

To search for software, you select one of the 22 retail verticals, the size of your business —strangely enough expressed in annual revenue, which is rather insignificant for POS selection, and check some of the optional features such as Inventory Management, CRM, accounting or e-commerce.

The search results are presented in a clear table with the main characteristics for each product found. There are also two handy buttons for requesting a free demo or pricing information.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Dell will team with SAP to offer an integrated point-of-sale (POS) store solution, enabling retailers to utilize SAP for Retail software solutions on Dell’s Retail OptiPlex 745 POS systems and Dell PowerEdge servers. The alliance, which brings together the world’s biggest business software maker and the No. 2 PC maker, promises to deliver systems that help retailers run their business more cheaply and efficiently.

Enhanced POS features — including accurate and timely customer demand data, real-time inventory visibility and integrated returns processing — combined with seamless connections into core merchandising and supply chain processes, will help enable retailers to better track purchase behaviors, identify buying trends and process customer transactions more rapidly.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

New York Times runs a story about the success of OpenTable, which wasn’t exactly an overnight success. The thing that pushed OpenTable over the edge toward acceptance wasn’t so much the public-facing business —let your customers make reservations online— but the software that the restaurants were provided to keep better track of their customers and their habits. It used to be a big deal that Four Seasons Hotels tracked the preferences of all their customers but now any restaurant with the OT system can easily do the same.

Doug Washington, a co-owner of Town Hall, said the notes were not just helpful, they are occasionally indispensable. Next to the name of one regular, who has a habit of bringing in women he is not married to, is an instruction to make sure the man’s wife has not booked a separate table for the same day.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

For years several manufacturers have tried to sell web-based POS systems, but until now with limited success. The benefits of a web-based solution are clear: lower maintenance costs, easy to upgrade and above all accessible from anywhere.

But the downside of a internet based solution is equally clear: What happens when the internet connection fails? Yes, you’re out of luck, and have to fall back to pen & paper. This disadvantage has kept many retailers from going web-based, and rightly so, as internet connection do fail once in a while.

But now Google presented Google Gears. Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using the following JavaScript APIs:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

In short, Google Gears allows software manufacturers to create web-based applications that can be used off-line. Although Google Gears is still a beta product, there are already a number of sites using it. Now just wait until a Point Of Sale manufacturer implements Google Gears…

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Market Basket Analysis is a modelling technique based upon the theory that if you buy a certain group of items, you are more (or less) likely to buy another group of items. For example, if you are in an English pub and you buy a pint of beer and don’t buy a bar meal, you are more likely to buy crisps (US. chips) at the same time than somebody who didn’t buy beer.

The set of items a customer buys is referred to as an item-set, and market basket analysis seeks to find relationships between purchases.

Typically the relationship will be in the form of a rule:

IF {beer, no bar meal} THEN {crisps}. The probability that a customer will buy beer without a bar meal (i.e. that the antecedent is true) is referred to as the support for the rule. The conditional probability that a customer will purchase crisps is referred to as the confidence. The algorithms for performing market basket analysis are fairly straightforward . The complexities mainly arise in exploiting taxonomies, avoiding combinatorial explosions (a supermarket may stock 10,000 or more line items), and dealing with the large amounts of transaction data that may be available.

A major difficulty is that a large number of the rules found may be trivial for anyone familiar with the business. Although the volume of data has been reduced, we are still asking the user to find a needle in a haystack. Requiring rules to have a high minimum support level and a high confidence level risks missing any exploitable result we might have found. One partial solution to this problem is differential market basket analysis, as described below.

How is it used?

In retailing, most purchases are bought on impulse. Market basket analysis gives clues as to what a customer might have bought if the idea had occurred to them.

As a first step, therefore, market basket analysis can be used in deciding the location and promotion of goods inside a store. If, as has been observed, purchasers of Barbie dolls have are more likely to buy candy, then high-margin candy can be placed near to the Barbie doll display. Customers who would have bought candy with their Barbie dolls had they thought of it will now be suitably tempted.

But this is only the first level of analysis. Differential market basket analysis can find interesting results and can also eliminate the problem of a potentially high volume of trivial results. In differential analysis, we compare results between different stores, between customers in different demographic groups, between different days of the week, different seasons of the year, etc.

If we observe that a rule holds in one store, but not in any other (or does not hold in one store, but holds in all others), then we know that there is something interesting about that store. Perhaps its clientèle are different, or perhaps it has organized its displays in a novel and more lucrative way. Investigating such differences may yield useful insights which will improve company sales.

Note that despite the terminology, there is no requirement for all the items to be purchased at the same time. The algorithms can be adapted to look at a sequence of purchases (or events) spread out over time. A predictive market basket analysis can be used to identify sets of item purchases (or events) that generally occur in sequence — something of interest to direct marketers, but also to many others.

[Source: Wikipedia]

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Customer Pole Devices (CPD’s) have long been considered merely bells and whistles at the Point of Sale (POS). They were seen as nice to have if extra money allowed, but were often the first item to be eliminated from the POS station when the budget limits were reached. Their main function was to display to customers information that was being displayed elsewhere and the redundancy was what made them seem to be superfluous. Note that they do not always stand on a pole, but sometimes can be incorporated in the EPOS terminal.

Recent developments, and increased competition among retailers focusing on providing better customer service to gain an edge, have led to a re-evaluation of the role of the customer display. Applications that communicate in a more direct and useful manner with the customer are the future for these useful devices. An example of an application that has won customer approval is displaying a running total of the sale at a grocery market check out. Although most applications displayed the item and the price as the product barcode was scanned, there was always that sudden shock when the last item was scanned, and the total displayed. The ‘running total’ eases the shock and allows the customer to pull out some items before scanning if the expected figure is being exceeded, and even better, to add some impulse items if the total is lower than expected.

With the increased use of debit cards and in store credit cards, the customer display in the future will be even more customer friendly. Displays that greet the customer by name, and even suggest special offers specifically geared to the customer’s sale patterns are examples of how the Customer Pole Device can serve to increase customer identification and satisfaction. There is no limit to the possible uses that may be found for information displays at the Point of Sale, but there is also no question that in the future they will be an expected and necessary part of the overall POS package, and not the frill they have been in the past.

The traditional customer display has two lines of 25 characters, which is of course insufficient for for modern day communication with customers. The first POS solutions have entered the market using a normal TFT monitor as customer display. Having 1024×749 pixels available for full colour communication with your clients is a huge step forwards. Think about all the possibilities such a display offers: you can show them product advertisements in movie format, while reserving part of the screen for traditional price information.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Now that Point Of Sale systems collect more and more information about the customers, retailers are able to optimize their marketing and inventory in ways that were not possible before. But the collected data is not only helpful for the retailer; manufacturers love to get access to shop-level data as well. eWeek published an article about a report conducted by Forrester:

“Syndicated POS data supports strategic marketing, not field execution. Traditional syndicated data has defined data hierarchies like account or channel that facilitate strategic planning and reporting,” the report said. “This data can take days or weeks to prepare, and manufacturers can’t easily use it to make ‘in-flight’ adjustments to trade promotion and replenishment activities.”

Manufacturers “haven’t gotten this information back from the retailers,” Overby said. Why? Ahhhhh, that’s where things get a wee bit political.

Some of the reasoning is indeed technical, with the expected difficulties in associating so much additional data with customers and products. But a more significant issue has been a political hesitation to share too much information with a supplier that is also sharing data with direct rivals. The retail-manufacturer relationship is not exactly overflowing with blind trust.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Researchers at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam gave a live demonstration of an RFID virus at the Fourth Annual IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (IEEE PerCom) in Pisa, Italy. The attacks exploit the same software weaknesses that PC viruses and worms do and can have the same devastating consequences.

Melanie Rieback, a Ph.D. student supervised by Andrew Tanenbaum, showed that an infected RFID label can infect a middleware database, which could potentially trigger the middleware to produce more infected RFID tags. The group set up an informational web site about RFID Viruses and Worms to give information about their work on RFID malware.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.