SmartStores The future of retail

The mobile phone will inevitably be an important component for smartstores.

Stores that in build intelligence in their infrastructure using RFID with hardware such as smartshelves and smartcarts will need to embrace smartphones to take full advantage for servicing their customers. If customers are carrying around a communications device that can display information, images, and video, then why not use it?

In the smartphone market, it could turn out to be a three way race for platform choices. i.e., the iPhone, Windows Embedded, and Android.

This looks very similar to another three way race that has already taken place in the console market. i.e., PlayStation, Xbox, and Wii.

Using the lessons learned from that market, could we predict the outcome of the smartphone platform market? If we assume that Windows Mobile is most like the Xbox, the iPhone like the PlayStation 3, and Android as Wii, then it would mean that the smartphone platform with the most users will be Android.

Windows Mobile is like Xbox because apart from being the creation of the same company, they are both proprietary and similarly priced around the middle of the market. I liken the iPhone to PlayStation3 because they are both highly polished and proprietary, but both are at the higher end of the market. Lastly, I compare Android and Wii similary because they are both the lower end of the market with less hardware features needed to run them. In other words they are both the lighter of the 3 options in their respective markets.

So my money in the smartphone platform market is on Android. I think it will take the lion share of the market just as Wii has taken the biggest slice of the console market.

Android also has other big advantages, listed below:

• It is free.
• It is open.
• It is friendly toward developers with great tools and emulators.
• It is extremely light, so that it can run on medium end cellphones and scale up to laptops.
• It has the biggest Internet brand promoting it, (Google).

With this prediction coupled with developments in retail and smartstore technology, it is a good bet that Android will feature many apps that interact with smartstores to enable all kinds of services and information to make the shopping experience one of interactive services, better communication, greater service, quicker purchasing time, and a more efficient way to hunt out bargains and specials. Supermarkets could get involved and create their own Android apps with names like “Specials of the week” to attract customers into their stores.

Keep an eye out for Android over the coming years. Perhaps in about 5 years when you find yourself scanning
a product in your local smartstore with your Android smartphone, you will be able to think how much the retail experience has changed in such a short time.