Hasta La Gadget!

Best Buy is borrowing some Apple-style retail polish for its “Best Buy 2.0″ in-store experience, the company has confirmed, trialling a new approach to brick & mortar selling that it hopes will claw back from online sales. The test stores – described as part of the chain’s “catch-up” by interim CEO Mike Mikan – feature a “Solution Central” help desk in the center, similar to Apple’s Genius Bar, the WSJ reports, as well as increasing the options for paying for items in store.

“This is catch-up, if you will, but there’s much more to come,” Mikan insists. Best Buy has suffered considerably from what retail experts call “showrooming”; where potential customers uses the physical store to check out products, but then complete any actual sale with online merchants where prices are often more competitive.

Just as Apple Stores have mobile payment terminals with which employees can charge cards no matter where they are, Best Buy is introducing more points around its prototype stores where transactions can take place. There’s also a greater emphasis on accurate and knowledgeable advice, with the retailer scaling back on the raw number of devices on-show and instead focusing on having a team that can talk about the virtues of a smaller selection.

Meanwhile, rather than focusing solely on the bottom-line, stores will be judged using various metrics including customer satisfaction, with those locations doing well at pleasing shoppers getting bonuses. The aim is to create retail locations where it “will be a place where customers want to congregate and learn how to get more out of their gadgets” and hopefully turn around the decline in average annual visits.

Best Buy has already featured a little slice of Apple retail in its stores, in the shape of dedicated areas where the Cupertino company’s merchandise takes pride of place. Now, it seems, the retailer is hoping those areas will act as seeds and spread the sales success throughout the chain.

Best Buy borrows Apple Store strategy for retail relaunch is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

From the same company that brought you the ThinkPad and the tank of a keyboard known as the Model M, today IBM is demonstrating its latest consumer development: a mobile shopping app. As odd as that sounds, it’s no secret that Big Blue employs some rather brilliant folk, and now the company is looking to combine augmented reality with your everyday shopping habits. While still merely a prototype, the app will allow consumers to pan product aisles with their smartphone camera and view additional details on the screen. As IBM puts it, shoppers may input their own needs and preferences into the app, which can accommodate a wealth of information such as allergens, sugar content and bio-degradable packaging. Through partnerships with retailers, IBM also hopes to integrate promotions and loyalty schemes into the app, which it states will help stores better understand the buying habits of individual consumers. So there you have it, the future of shopping, as brought to you by IBM. As for the full PR, you’ll find it after the break.

Continue reading IBM Labs pitches the future of augmented reality shopping with mobile app prototype

IBM Labs pitches the future of augmented reality shopping with mobile app prototype originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fed up with wandering through supermarket aisles in an effort to cross that last item off your shopping list? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University‘s Intel Science and Technology Center in Embedded Computing have developed a robot that could ease your pain and help store owners keep items in stock. Dubbed AndyVision, the bot is equipped with a Kinect sensor, image processing and machine learning algorithms, 2D and 3D images of products and a floor plan of the shop in question. As the mechanized worker roams around, it determines if items are low or out of stock and if they’ve been incorrectly shelved. Employees then receive the data on iPads and a public display updates an interactive map with product information for shoppers to peruse. The automaton is currently meandering through CMU’s campus store, but it’s expected to wheel out to a few local retailers for testing sometime next year. Head past the break to catch a video of the automated inventory clerk at work.

Continue reading Carnegie Mellon researchers develop robot that takes inventory, helps you find aisle four

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop robot that takes inventory, helps you find aisle four originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jun 2012 19:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The PC versus Mac user divide could see users sleeping apart, if online travel agency Orbitz has its way. The site is testing tailored recommended travel options based on what type of computer users are browsing from, having discovered that Mac users apparently spend up to 30-percent more per-night on hotels than their Windows counterparts. In a new trial, the WSJ reports, Orbitz will promote more expensive options to Mac-using customers in the hope of cashing in on the trend.

Orbitz system is in its early stages, the site has said, but the experiments have already gone live. In our own testing today, we could see no difference in the top search results produced on a Mac or on other platforms, suggesting the trial is not being pushed to all shoppers.

Of course, the final – and full – list of possible hotel options will be equally accessible to users whatever machine they’re browsing on. What will differ is the default view Orbitz first shows: that of its “recommended” or “suggested” hotels. Usually all users would see the same promoted options, but those on a Mac may have more costly picks filtered through to the top.

Importantly, the price any user pays is always the same; Orbitz execs confirmed that it is only tweaking the order of recommendations, not the actual cost of each hotel stay. It’s unclear what metric the site is using to identify users, whether it’s the (default) Safari browser ID or something else, and Orbitz may not necessarily continue using the system.

Orbitz cashes in on Mac users’ looser spending habits is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We are currently living in the digital age, where seemingly advanced technologies from the past are slowly being rendered obsolete. One such technology includes those from the payments industry, where advancements in mobile wallets, which takes advantage of Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.