Next Generation of Loyalty & Customer Relationship

Unified Grocers, Inc. Introduces Next Generation of Loyalty and Customer Relationship Software to Its Members Through Accelitec | interact

Unified Grocers, Inc., one of the largest member-owned grocery cooperatives in the western United States,
has begun introducing a next generation software service offered by Accelitec, Inc., to its members.

Accelitec | interact is an innovative software service that helps retailers move beyond the traditional way of discount pricing to improve customer retention and store profitability.

As the challenges of the current economy continue, the importance of delivering ongoing value, convenience, and relevancy to existing and new customers remains very high for Unified Grocer, Inc.’s independent retailers. Introducing Accelitec | interact to its independent retailers is an important way for Unified to help bolster the competitive advantage its members have in their local communities. Accelitec | interact enhances the shopping experience with a range of customer communications, including targeted marketing promotions,
recall notifications, and other unique value added services.

The RFID-enabled program can also be used to motivate specific customer behavior, such as driving sales of particular products, increasing per-trip spending and accelerating the rate of return trips. In an industry where pricing wars and perishable inventory are the norm, Accelitec | interact provides a way for independent retailers to differentiate their business without compromising lean margins or creating unsustainable customer expectations.

Source: Reuters

Tesco customers shop from iPhone

UK grocery giant Tesco is developing a mobile application to allow customers to manage their shopping though Apple’s iPhone.The new software will be produced to work with Apple’s iPhone, allowing users to search products by category or through simple text search, and to manage their shopping basket through the Apple phone.Source: Sky News

SmartShopIt.com Adds Smart Compare Feature

SmartShopIt.com releases its Smart Compare feature that provides valuable nutrition and price comparisons for grocery products nationwide.

SmartShopIt.com is a free site that helps its members eat healthier, shop more effectively, and save money at the grocery store. They have incorporated a new Smart Compare feature which helps their members by allowing them to easily and quickly compare grocery products. The Smart Compare feature leverages its database of price, nutritional information and ratings on over 90,000 products. The Smart Compare tool can be accessed on the desktop and mobile web device interfaces.

SmartShopIt.com

Polaris Retail launches Smart Store for SMEs

Polaris Retail Infotech Ltd. (PRIL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Polaris Software Lab Limited, has announced the launch of Smart Store, a retail software product for small retail businesses. Smart Store is the first packaged retail software for the small retail segment.Smart Store will help retailers to automate vendor, purchase and stock management functions, maintain accounts and tax, host customer loyalty program and help in other day-to-day services.Commenting on the launch, Mohit Oberoi, Business Head, PRIL, said, “Smart Store will help small retailers drive efficiencies in their business on all critical fronts to gain a competitive edge.”Source: expresscomputeronline.com

InSync Software & IBM to improve food safety

InSync Software,has announced it is licensing software from IBM. InSync will integrate the IBM software into its food safety and asset-management products. Under the licensing agreement, InSync Software will offer IBM’s InfoSphere Traceability Server software as part of its food safety solutions for customers worldwide. IBM’s software is compatible with EPCglobal’s Electronic Product Code Information Services (EPCIS) standard, and has passed the EPCglobal EPCIS Conformance Test.The software is designed to help companies share product data among partners in a supply chain, and includes enhanced reporting tools and alerting capabilities enabling companies to access and analyze data using browser-based reports. InSync Software’s products employ sensor technologies, including RFID, to locate and track assets and processes, report on an item’s location and its condition in real time, and automate time-consuming and error-prone manual processes. InSync indicates its agreement with IBM will enable it to offer its customers a standards-based food-traceability solution they can use with their trading partners.Source: rfidjournal.com

NTT combines Java & RFID, for loyalty cards

NTT Communications has begun trials of a high-tech alternative to loyalty cards that promises to simplify their use.

Loyalty cards are big business and are often handed out to customers when they have made a purchase. Consequently, people end up with wallets stuffed with too many cards.

When cell phone carriers began rolling out electronic wallet services a few years ago some retailers offered shoppers the ability to keep their points in a Java applet inside their phones rather than a physical card. But this too has led to clutter in the form of a phone full of applications, one for each store.

The NTT technology, called “Gyazapo,” hopes to simplify this by bringing together loyalty cards in one application. It too is a Java applet and can be used in phones that also include short-range RFID technology. Most current phones support the technology.

Trials began this week at major Japanese electronics retailer Bic Camera and will also be tried over the next few months at two other retailers.

Nokia Announces App ‘Smart Store’

Nokia kicks off the 2009 Mobile World Congress in Bacelona with the announcement of the Ovi Store, an application store that blends media with social networking and location-based services, akin to Google’s Latitude application. Ovi already boasts partners such as Facebook, MySpace and game publisher Electronic Arts.

Nokia Executive Vice President Tero Ojanperä used a keynote address to do just that, with the announcement of Ovi, an application store that “learns” users’ preferences and uses location and social networking to personalize the experience. Nokia says Ovi will be accessible to about 50 million people immediately upon its launch in May.

Source: eweek.com

SmartStore Helps Mobile Operators

Mobinex, in cooperation with Turkcell Teknoloji, announced SmartStore solution for mobile operators to enable delivery and management of applications on mobile phones.

Mobinex and Turkcell Teknoloji combined forces to provide an innovative mobile application storefront technology; SmartStore, which will help operators to increase their revenues from application downloads. The integrated offering will benefit Mobinex’s user experience technology and Turkcell Teknoloji’s expertise on carrier grade platform delivery and integration services.

Mobile operator branded SmartStore mobile client simplifies the discovery of mobile applications dramatically. One-click purchase and installation, community interaction features such as commenting, voting, and customized user interface make SmartStore a compelling super store for mobile applications. SmartStore may include operator specific mobile widgets, which are deployed by Smartface Platform’s rapid visual development environment, or any other mobile applications from third party developers.

Mobinex, as the leading provider of on-device software solutions, is dedicated to increasing revenues of mobile providers with innovative user experiences. Along with customers and partners including Vodafone, Zain, Turkcell, KKTCell, Neustar, Gemalto, Ericsson and HP, Mobinex products reach to a subscriber base of 120 million globally.
For more information: www.mobinex.biz

Turkcell Teknoloji has been established as a 100% subsidiary of Turkcell which is a GSM Network Operator with more than 36 million subscribers. Turkcell Teknoloji grew from the development group within Turkcell to provide solutions for mobile operators all over the world. Turkcell has benefited a lot from the products developed by Turkcell Teknoloji aiming to achieve 100% customer satisfaction at the operator’s site.
For more information please see: www.turkcelltech.com.tr

Shopping with Google Android

ShopSavvy, Barcode Scanner, and CompareEverywhere are three free shopping applications for Google Android poised to help you find the best deals in town and online.

At their core, they’re nearly identical, using the phone’s camera to auto-focus on a barcode. That barcode is then matched to a product using an open source decoding library, ZXing, that was developed by Google engineers last year.

These services are not perfect and there is much to say about what they don’t do, but what is impressive is that Android is hardly out of the door and there are already a plethora of competing apps. Even more impressive is the vision that developers are showing by putting in such services to phones. This is perhaps and endorsement of what retail in the future will become. i.e., a perfect storm of RFID, smart phones, Internet, and GPS with software and services using these technologies in order to help you make informed purchases at a price that is right for you.

With all this in mind, it isn’t hard to see a future for the likes of PayPal and Google Cart on mobiles. But the real interest for retail will be all the future smart ideas that will take advantage of the fact that their customers are carrying around the perfect communications device in their pocket.

Smartphones & smartstores

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.