I remember when I switched from Blockbuster to Netflix so movies could be delivered to my door. What a great concept. Then I started streaming shows to my PC, and before long I got a Roku device so I could stream to the family room TV.

Self checkout is the norm for gas stations, and its seems well-accepted at my local Home Depot too. But I haven't seen it many other places, which is too bad because its usually faster for shoppers and cheaper for retailers. AisleBuyer recently unveiled their innovative approach to self checkout, and it involves your mobile phone.

The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) has been establishing standards and best practices for the retail industry since 1993. This includes data models (there's two now), peripheral integration specs, XML schemas, RFP templates, and more recently several informative whitepapers. The retailers and vendors of the various committees meet 3-4 times per year to produce these works, then once a year we meet with our user community to inform, listen, and discuss.

My last few posting have focused on the social side of commerce, and the sites that enable shoppers to share information. Swipely, a social network for shoppers, just unveiled their site to the public today so I took it for a spin. The concept, which is similar to Blippy, allows shoppers to register a credit card to automatically broadcast purchases.

Social media is really just a way to accelerate the social interactions amongst people that have always been occurring. "Accelerate," in this case, meaning reaching more people in less time. For retail, an important interaction we want to capture is that of product recommendations. We started doing this online by letting customers rate their purchases, then Amazon threw science at the problem and added dynamic product recommendations to their website.

One of the most fascinating emerging technologies has been augmented reality because it combines the physical and digital worlds in a useful way. I can easily see AR being the future for digital signage in stores, and it could replace electronic shelf labels before they get a chance to go mainstream. Why invest in new hardware for the store when your customers are walking around with a capable computer in their pockets?

Location-based social networks are the latest fad to hit mobile phones. Foursquare seems to be getting most of the attention even though MyTown, Brightkite, and Loopt actually have more users. The concept has mobile phone users using GPS to "checkin" to establishments, including restaurants and retail stores. Checkins are rewarded differently by each system, but some benefits include getting location information (maps, hours, description), reviews, find nearby friends, or receive coupons.

Blippy is an interesting concept but I found the stream of purchases, well, a little mind-numbing. Jane bought this and Joe bought that. It was helpful to see what iPhone apps people were buying, but there are better ways to get that sort of information (App Store Top 25 for example).

Just back from speaking at Crosstalk, Duncan Angove, General Manager & Sr. VP of Oracle Retail, gave an interview to InformationWeek as part of a series of interviews with Oracle executives.

Social Media Middlemen is a blog posting that discusses the fact that employees need to be trained regarding their company's social media programs.

The software industry has been using XML for quite a while since it carries meaning along with the data. But websites are written in HTML, not XML, so all the information is hard for computer programs to understand. Over the past few years the W3C has been pushing something called the Semantic Web, an approach to adding metadata to websites so that computers can find meaning more easily.

The Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), a division of the National Retail Federation (NRF), has been developing retail technology standards in cooperation with retailers and vendors since 1993. After creating many retail-specific XML schemas, retailers began to ask how these standards fit with SOA so ARTS decided to create the SOA Blueprint for Retail.

Most people in the retail business have heard the lore of the tire return at Nordstrom. Even though Nordstrom is a high-end department store that has never sold tires, they accepted the return in order to please the customer. Although there were some odd circumstances, the tale is nevertheless true and serves as an important example of going the extra mile for the customer.

At our recent Crosstalk event, Dave Sikora from Digby talked about mobile commerce and its importance to the retail industry. He started by noting several key trends:

Its often been said that retailers need to go where their customers are, and these days that seems to be on popular social sites. An awful lot of people are spending time playing games on Facebook, and the clear leader in gaming is Zynga. Their Farmville and Mafia Wars games, to name two, have an incredible following.

At this year's Oracle Retail Crosstalk user conference the theme was "retail redefined," and Duncan Angove wasted no time looking backwards. He began by describing now as an "inflection point" where in the future we will look back and realize this was the point when our industry underwent massive changes. He then went on to showcase innovation and customer success stories.

In the article 14 Sites Changing the Way We Shop, Mashable's Stephanie Marcus describes how online sites have changed the way we shop. She organizes the sites as follows:

I've been on vacation and preparing for Crosstalk, so its been a while since I've posted. I've seen the agenda, and I can assure you Crosstalk will be lots of fun. In addition to hearing from lots of retailers, we'll also be doing a little bowling and racing on the track. I'll be around for the sessions, the ORUG meetings, and our Customer Advisory Board so please be sure to say hello.

The UPC you find on packaging is a one-dimensional barcode that's been in use, in one form or another, since the 1970s. While its a good symbology to encode numbers like a product identifier, its not really big enough to hold much more. It also requires a barcode scanner (like those connected to the POS), although iPhone apps like RedLaser have proved a mobile camera can be made to work in many situations.

I've written about various breeds of social shopping in the past, so I decided to give some thought into a categorization with examples. Below I've listed the different types of social shopping I've observed and some companies that support them.

In his blog posting titled "Why Each Facebook Fan Is Worth $2,000 to J. Crew," Joe Skorupa lays out a simplistic calculation for assigning a value to social media efforts within Facebook. While I don't believe the metric, at least its a metric that can be applied consistently. Trying to explain the ROI to management to start a program, then benchmarking to show progress isn't straightforward at all.

Step aside Google. While search will always be a huge part of the web, I can see a day in the not-too-distance future where search takes a backseat to the social graph. Links between pages will give way to relationships between people, including context like location.

Location was the first "killer-tech" for smartphones, and innovators have found several ways to use it. For retail, apps exist to find nearby stores, provide coupons, and give directions to the front door. But once you enter the store, location-finding ceases to work. That's because your location is usually found by finding GPS satellites in they sky, and the store's roof blocks the signal. But it won't take technology long to solve that problem.

Mobile phones allow consumers to receive coupons in context, which increases their relevance and therefore redemption rates. Using your current location, you can get coupons that can be redeemed nearby for the things you want now. Receiving a coupon for something you wanted last week or something you might buy next month just isn't as valuable.

For retailers, social media is all about B2C2C. That is, Business to Consumer to Consumer, or more specifically, retailer to influencer to consumer. Traditional marketing targeted mass media, trying to expose the message to as many people as possible. While effective, this approach has never been very efficient, with high costs for relatively low penetration.

In the book What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis outlines ten "Google Rules" that define how Google acts.  These rules help define how Web 2.0 businesses operate today and into the future.  While there's a chapter in the book on applying these rules to the retail industry, it wasn't very in-depth.  So I've decided to more directly apply the rules to retail, along with some notable examples of success.  The table below shows Jeff's Google Rule, some Industry Examples, and New Retailer Rules that I crea

Fashion retailers such as H&M, Zara, and Wet Seal have perfected the fast fashion retailing model. The concept requires no replenishment in order to maintain assortment freshness and to create a sense of urgency for the consumer to purchase now.

Think about this: By reading this blog, you and I are connected. We have this blog and its topics in common, so there's a chance we have other things in common as well. In any relationship there is a degree of trust and influence. If you trust me, at least in terms of particular subjects, then I have some influence over you. If I buy an iPad, then there's an opportunity for me to influence your possible purchase of an over-hyped tablet that you don't really need.

The Webby Awards were created back in 1996 when the internet was just a baby. This is their 14th year of highlighting excellence on the Web, and there are lots of great nominations. Its quite amazing to see the rich content and interactivity of today's websites. Some interesting nominees for this year are:

I saw RedLaser on the latest "Shopper" iPhone commercial on TV. Works great for consumers, but retailers will be more interested in a true barcode reader from someone like Infinite Peripherals, which also comes with a magstripe reader.