Evan Schuman

As the IEEE prepares next week to start focusing on the RuBee standard, the metal-and-water-penetrating RFID alternative is faring well with government and medical trials, said the executive primarily responsible for its launch. Ironically, when RuBee first started getting attention about seven months ago, it was partly because of strong support from leading global retailers, […]

For retail RFID observers, the comment Feb. 9 from U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that his department was abandoning radio-frequency identification for one aspect of border protection should have been big news. Upon closer examination, its really not. The saga started Feb. 9 when a major wire service reported that Homeland Security was abandoning […]

In the roughly three weeks since $16 billion retail chain TJX announced it had suffered a major data breach, there has been no shortage of people eager to jump on the “beat up the security victim” bandwagon. Of course, TJX seems to have gone out of its way to invite abuse, whether by sitting on […]

The Massachusetts Attorney General is heading up a group of more than 30 states trying to force answers to how the massive TJX Companies data breach happened. “The scope of this is very broad,” Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said in an interview Feb. 7, a few hours after her office announced the multi-state probe […]

On Feb. 5, the Rhode Island attorney generals office confirmed that it is launching a formal investigation of TJXs data breach, including what caused it, why it wasnt detected more quickly and why the announcement of it was delayed. The investigation—technically, a Civil Investigative Demand on the authority of both Rhode Islands Deceptive Trade Practices […]

When Overstock.com reported a weak earnings fourth-quarter earnings report on Feb. 5 (revenue down 6 percent, gross profits down 16 percent, a $97 million loss for the year), top management pointed the finger squarely at IT. Its unusual for a company to blame a loss on technology management, but Overstock has done it before. “We […]

Some of the nations top retailers—including Rite Aid, Harry & David, Ikea, KB Toys, Disney, Regal Cinemas and AMC Theaters—are named as defendants in lawsuits stemming from inconsistent point-of-sale deployment. The class-action lawsuits accuse about 50 retail chains of violating a provision of the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act that makes it illegal for […]

An innovative RFID trial in Tokyo is using RFID-tagged lipstick to record when various products are sampled and to give store clerks a full customer history of products purchased and tried. The trial—involving retail chain Mitsukoshi, cosmetics company Shiseido and RFID vendor Fujitsu—also offers consumers a “virtual real-time makeup” session featuring a camera-equipped kiosk, display […]

When TJX Companies—the $16 billion global retail chain that owns T.J. Maxx and Marshalls, among many other brands—disclosed on Jan. 17 that it had “suffered an unauthorized intrusion” into its computer systems in December, it seemed to be forthcoming. After all, the chain issued what appeared to be a detailed statement about the incident. Detailed […]

While walking the aisles and hitting the parties at the National Retail Federation annual show in New York this week, I did what I normally do, which is to beg CIOs to tell their thoughts and observations. I tried to hit as many of the most important topics as possible before the CIOs extracted themselves […]