retail

A New Look At Retail Surveillance With Axis Communications

What if you could implement a modern, state-of-the-art surveillance system that enables you to: • Improve the profitability of your retail outlet • Significantly reduce shrinkage • Improve staff security And at the same time provide even better service for your customers? With an Axis network video solution, you can do all of this and more. Axis is the market leader in network video and a driving force behind the shift from analogue to digital video surveillance, which paves the way for a more secure, smarter and safer world. Axis offers network video solutions for professional installations featuring products and solutions that are based on innovative and open technical platforms. Products at RBTE AXIS M30 Network Camera Series – High-performance fixed mini domes AXIS M30 Series offers affordably priced, highly discreet and easy-to-install fixed domes with HDTV performance and 360°/180° panoramic views. They are ideal for retail stores. Models are available in both indoor and outdoor-ready versions. AXIS M30 cameras are vandal- and dust-resistant (except for AXIS M3007-P), and can be mounted on walls or ceilings. AXIS M3007-P is highly discreet with its smoke-detector look. AXIS M3014 is also available for recessed mounting in drop ceilings. AXIS P85 Network Camera Series – Eye-level mounted cameras for reliable identification AXIS P85 Network Camera Series is designed for eye-level placement and the pinhole lens provides a depth of field at 2 m (6.6″ ft), which makes it suitable for identification of close-up shots. The camera’s height is optimized to look straight […]

3xLOGIC Lands Leading Talent In Business Intelligence Arena

WESTMINSTER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– 3xLOGIC, Inc., a leading provider of advanced video surveillance and video-enabled business intelligence , announced today that Dan Zoeller has joined the Company as Director of Engineering, Business Intelligence Division. This announcement reunites two of the leading masterminds in Business Intelligence (BI) software development. Charles “Charlie” Erickson joined the Company as EVP of Product Management in 2013. Erickson and Zoeller are recognized as the principal architects behind one of the most robust and widely deployed, intelligent video analytic solutions to date. Their handiwork serves as the Business Intelligence platform for the nation’s largest convenience store retailer. “Dan and Charlie represent the pinnacle of accomplishment when it comes to Business Intelligence software development,” says Matthew Kushner , 3xLOGIC’s CEO. “Their commitment to a design theory that software should be engineered around rapid prototyping and short feedback loops with actual customers is fundamental to the success they have achieved. Their track record speaks for itself.” 3xLOGIC has long been on the forefront of intelligent video analytics. The Company’s VIGIL Video Management System (VMS) was engineered from its inception to capture data from a variety of data sources, including audio data, video data and transactional data. Erickson and his team have been tasked with developing a BI reporting framework, able to capture and disseminate data from a multitude of sources, forming an information infrastructure delivering the data necessary for users to make informed, effective and timely decisions about their business, their assets, and their employees. The challenge faced is […]

Progress Made On Freeport IL Public Safety Plan

FREEPORT – Thirty-two gas stations and retail shops that sell tobacco have installed video cameras in an effort to help police reduce crime. The surveillance camera initiative is among several public safety initiatives rolled out last year by Mayor Jim Gitz’s administration. Aldermen discussed progress that’s been made and remaining goals to tackle in the year ahead at a Committee of the Whole meeting Monday. The public safety plan aims to reduce crime by creating safer neighborhoods, promoting personal accountability, developing stronger community relationships, creating safe housing, fostering interdepartmental cooperation in distribution of city resources and making sound, data-driven decisions. Aldermen raised the majority of their questions Monday about the safer neighborhoods goal, which involves tobacco licensing, street lights and pole cameras and a K-9 program. The Police Department has implemented a program for licensing of tobacco merchants in order to hold them accountable for maintenance and operation of security cameras in their stores. "The program that we’re implementing does two things: it gives us a licensing framework in which we can say, ‘Look, this isn’t working. You need to fix it,’ the same way we do with liquor," Gitz said. "The second thing it does is give us – finally – a tool that we also can utilize for the surveillance cameras. Most of these stores, they don’t have good surveillance, which is a far bigger problem than who has what cigarettes." Deputy Police Chief Jim Drehoble has visited retail outlets throughout the city to ensure the video […]

3VR Welcomes Jeff Karnes As Its Senior Vice President Of Marketing

Published on 22 Jan, 2014 3VR appoints Jeff Karnes as its Senior Vice President of Marketing Karnes previously held executive and senior leadership roles at Yahoo!, WebEx, Virage, and Cinebase Software 3VR , the video intelligence company, recently announced that Jeff Karnes has been named Senior Vice President of Marketing and will spearhead the company’s retail analytics initiative. "Jeff joins 3VR at an important time," said Al Shipp, CEO of 3VR. "His impressive background in video technology and ability to work across a range of industries will be tremendously valuable as 3VR pursues new opportunities in the retail and security segments." 3VR is now leveraging the same video-mining technology that has delivered proven ROI for retail loss prevention to improve marketing, merchandising and store operations. Brick-and-mortar retailers can glean real-time, actionable insights from the Big Data from in-store video to create a personalised, omni-channel experience, increasing conversions and spend rate. In addition to the retail initiative, Karnes will drive 3VR’s marketing efforts in the video surveillance industry. Most recently, he was CEO at Pixel Forensics , a company that provides solutions to rapidly triage and analyse video, images and audio for forensic and investigative applications for U.S. Government clients. "3VR is at the forefront of delivering solutions that allow companies to search and gain insights from the growing amount of video," said Karnes. "Joining 3VR at this moment in the evolution of video and Big Data is an incredible opportunity and I’m thrilled to be part of the company." […]

Panasonic Highlights Retail Technology Solutions To Enhance Operations, Reduce Shrinkage And Improve The Customer Experience

Nuheat SIGNATURE Gear Diary Nuheat Launches North America’s 1st WiFi Floor Heating Thermostat photo When we bought our house, one thing the builder was proud of was radiant heating installed throughout. One downside it is slow to respond – so when the temperature here went from +50 to -30 back to +40 within 5 days our house seemed to always be too hot or too cold. The upside? The floors were never cold! Now Nuheat, a maker of electric radiant heating systems, is introducing Nuheat SIGNATURE – the first WiFi controlled floor heater thermostat. The Nuheat SIGNATURE will give homeowners full access to all thermostat settings with wireless remote access through a smartphone app (iOS or Android) or a web browser. Changing the temperature or schedule, or viewing energy usage will all be at the homeowners’ fingertips. The Nuheat SIGNATURE is like no other in our industry,” said Wally Lo, Nuheat’s Product Manager. “It has been designed and developed exclusively for Nuheat by OJ Electronics and after over a year of development, we are extremely excited to bring it to market. Extensive market research from homeowners and contractors alike confirmed the market is expecting connectivity for remote access. A myriad of household products ranging from locks to lights to heating systems offer the ease of on-the-go control. Our new thermostat allows the user to activate the floor heat for vacation properties or, to simply turn up the heat for a cozy return home.” Here are some of the features: […]

ImageWare Systems To Showcase GoMobile Interactive Multi-Modal Biometric Cloud Identity Management Services For Mobile Retail Payment

01/10/2014 | 08:30am US/Eastern Recommend: SAN DIEGO, CA–(Marketwired – Jan 10, 2014) – ImageWare Systems, Inc. ( OTCQB : IWSY ) (IWS), a leader in mobile and cloud-based, multi-modal biometric identity management solutions , will showcase its next-generation cloud identity management and authentication service, GoMobile Interactive™ (GMI), at Retails BIG Show, the National Retail Federation 103 rd Annual Convention & EXPO. The event will be held at the Jacob Javitz Convention Center in New York City on January 13-14, 2014, and ImageWare will be in the Fujitsu booth 3319. "In 2012, the United States saw more than 12 million identity fraud victims at a dollar cost of $21 billion, with the average financial loss per identity theft totaling $4,930," said Jim Miller, chairman and CEO of ImageWare Systems. "Worldwide mobile payments are expected to become a $400 billion market by 2015 and retail businesses will be at the forefront to protect themselves and their consumers. We are pleased to demonstrate such an important service and technology at Retail’s BIG Show with the IT security industry’s most reliable form of identity theft protection for accessing their gateway accounts via desktop and mobile devices." GoMobile Interactive (GMI) is a cloud-based, multi-modal biometric mobile identity management solution that enables messaged based unparalleled identity verification for existing and new mobile banking, mobile wallet, and other mobile applications that require a next-generation method to automate and verify the identity of the customer. GMI ensures fraud protection now at risk though legacy services and verifies […]

Store Mannequins With RFID Tracking Now Recording Everything You Do

A well-dressed, picture-perfect  mannequin  stands still in a middle of a department store. She looks like any other life-size figure you’ve seen,  except she can see and hear you . It has cameras for eyes, audio recording capabilities, an embedded computer to analyze shoppers’ faces, and a modem to upload the data to a server. Called the EyeSee Mannequin , it’s meant to provide more data to retailers and department stores about shoppers, says its creator. “The EyeSee can tell if a shopper is male or female, his or her age range, how much time you spent looking at it and its outfit,” Max Catanese, the CEO of Almax, told ABC News. The EyeSee can also tell the ethnicity of shoppers. The goal, as you might assume, is for stores to know more about who is shopping and looking at the displays. How long you looked at one mannequin versus others, how many types of shoppers come into the store, etc. Video Store Mannequins With RFID Tracking Now Recording Everything You Do “The potential is huge. A store can really know who their client is. Let’s say you have eight floors and six floors are for women and two are for men, but you find out 80 percent of the shoppers are male. You want to change the ratio and switch it,” Catanese said. The computer inside the mannequin captures data about each of the shoppers it sees and then uploads that to a portal, so that the store can […]

How In-Store Analytics Is Changing The Way You Shop

Apple’s Latest iPhone Models Go On Sale Across U.S. Andrew Burton/Getty Most of us have accepted the fact that when we log on to a website, web cookies are tracking our every click. That’s how sites like this can tell what people are reading and what they’re ignoring, which all helps inform what those sites publish next. The same goes for e-commerce sites. If you click a pair of shoes at Saks.com several times, maybe even drop it into a virtual shopping cart, it’s likely you’ll see ads for that exact shoe hours, even days, later. Whether or not you bought the shoes only matters a little. Cookies allow e-commerce sites to track consumer behavior, which in turn better informs what each site looks like, what kinds of products it offers and where else on the web it buys ads. Retailers want to be able to gather the same data that they gather online at their brick-and-mortar stores. Until recently, that hasn’t been possible. The advent of smartphones, however, means that retailers are increasingly able to track your every move. And just like there are multiple analytics platforms on the web — from Google Analytics to my particular favorite, Omniture — there are dozens of in-store analytics programs, too, many of which have received millions of dollars in venture capital funding over the past couple of years. The one you’re most likely to encounter initially is iBeacon, which was developed by Apple . It works with your iPhone’s Bluetooth […]

Retailers Snooping On Holiday Shoppers Raises Privacy Concerns

PHOTO: A “heat map” shows items in a store, color-coded by how much time customers have spent looking at a given item. Only Santa, maybe, knows if you’ve been naughty or nice. But management at some 1,000 retailers this holiday season knows where you’ve been standing, how long you’ve had to wait in the checkout line, and which sweater or necktie or shovel you admired most while shopping. New technologies for tracking shoppers in-store, in real time, make this possible. Some rely on signals emitted by customers’ smart phones. Another uses images from store security cameras. Prism Skylabs’ technology analyzes security camera images to give retailers “heat maps,” on which hot colors such as red or orange denote the items customers are finding most desirable. The colors are determined, say, by how long a customer has stood in front of an item or how many times the item has been handled. Jules Polonetsky, executive director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a think tank in Washington, D.C., tells ABC News that the past few years have seen more retailers adopt customer-tracking technology. Everyone from malls to big-box vendors to small coffee shops is testing some sort of system, he says. He thinks the situation has reached a turning point this shopping season with Apple’s introduction of customer location-sensing iBeacon technology, which can send a variety of information—including details on products, special offers and events—to shoppers standing near new iBeacon transmitters. Whether a tracking technology qualifies as “creepy” (Polonetsky’s word) […]

Facial Recognition Software Changes The Face Of British Retail And Advertising

Tesco’s have revealed that it will be installing facial recognition software in 450 of its petrol station forecourts. This software, displayed as a digital screen, will be located by the checkouts and aims to identify whether individuals in the queue are male or female, takes a rough estimate of how old they are and how long they have been looking at the displayed advertisements. The information gathered is thought to be around 97% correct. The overall aim of this is to process the details in real time and send the information to advertisers so they can tailor the adverts to appropriate times of day. For instance, coffee could be advertised in the morning and then the ads can switch to other relevant products throughout the day. This software is also advanced enough to monitor who is in the queue and who isn’t. If it detects that the majority is female then the adverts being shown will switch to adverts tailored to women. The same goes if there were mostly men detected. This technology is being provided by Amscreen, Lord Sugar’s company. The system is called ‘Optimeyes’ which is from a French company known as Quividi. Tesco aims to install this software in their stores as soon as possible. This can seem quite alarming, however according to an article in the Telegraph no video footage is actually recorded. Once your face has been scanned for its information you as an individual are erased. So no facial database is stored, only […]

RetailNext Invests In Rapid Global Expansion Bringing In-Store Analytics To Retailers In 33 Countries

RetailNext Invests In Rapid Global Expansion Bringing In-Store Analytics To Retailers In 33 Countries vertmarkets.com 2013-11-01 11:32:23 Expands Operations, Leadership Team, and International Partner Base in EMEA, APAC, and LATAM San Jose, CA /PRNewswire/ — RetailNext, Inc., the in-store analytics market leader, today announced additional investment in global expansion Follow-up report to me Any reported complete Just news photo Just video . The company grew its operations and leadership teams outside of the U.S. and acquired UK-based consultancy Illogik Ltd. in 2013 to expand its technical presence in EMEA regions. RetailNext brings e-commerce-style measurements and analytics to physical stores and shopping centers. With technical support, business development, engineering, and sales teams now based in several countries, including the U.K., Switzerland, Russia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia, RetailNext is a rapidly growing global brand. Today, more than 100 retailers globally are using RetailNext to optimize marketing and increase profit per shopper in their stores. Global Growth Highlights “As global retailers are rapidly embracing advanced shopper analytics, we are seeing significant growth in the number of multinational retailers who have deployed RetailNext solutions in their stores in the U.S. as well as overseas. RetailNext’s ability to scale and deliver valuable store insights across internal departments, and provide localized solutions and support to many regions, is helping drive sales with both global and local retailers.  We expect to see 200% year-over-year revenue growth this fiscal year,” said Michael Manlapas, VP of International Sales at RetailNext. RetailNext growth highlights include: Currencies – Platform and data reports now support 164 currencies Global Deployment Locations – Deployed in 33 countries including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, Colombia, Dubai, France, Germany, Hong […]

Shoppers Getting Ripped Off By Tiny, High-Tech Cash Register Spy Device

6 hours ago Police Picture # 2 Crooks who steal credit and debit card numbers have found a devious new way to snag this information. They’re using a small and relatively cheap piece of off-the-shelf technology to compromise computerized store cash registers. We know about this because a band of brazen thieves was caught on security cameras installing these high-tech skimmers on cash registers at the Nordstrom store in Aventura, Fla., two weeks ago. The skimmers are built into standard Ps2 cable connectors that plug into the back of a computer where customers can’t see them. They’re only about an inch long — and look so innocuous that even if employees saw them they might not suspect anything.  “It’s a little piece of plastic, usually purple, that fits into the port where your keyboard connects to your computer,” explained security analyst Brian Krebs, who first reported this story on his KrebsOnSecurity blog. “It intercepts any data that is sent on that communication channel, whether it’s keystrokes or somebody swiping a card through a terminal.” Ps2 Keystroke loggers have been available for years. They sell for as little as $40 and are marketed as “professional surveillance products.” Krebs said this is the first time he’s ever heard of them being used to skim card information from a retailer. Nordstrom confirmed that it had found and removed “unauthorized devices on a small number of cash registers” at their Aventura store.   “We take this situation seriously and have been working closely […]

Grocery Store Shelves Could Soon Watch While You Shop

Supermarket Decision Supermarket giant Mondel?z  International is developing “smart shelves” to identify consumers’ age and gender while tracking their shopping habits.  The company (formerly Kraft Foods), which makes Oreos, Trident gum, Wheat Thins, and a host of other snack foods, wants to use the technology —  expected to be on supermarket shelves by 2015 —  to better target their advertising, The Wall Street Journal’s Clint Boulton reports .  “When people walk by, it’s a missed opportunity,” Mondel?z CIO Mark Dajani told the Journal. “We must know how the consumer behaves in the store.” Here’s how the technology would work: Sensors would be placed in the aisles where Mondel?z  products are displayed. Using facial recognition technology provided by Microsoft’s Kinect , the devices would identify the age and gender of consumers perusing the aisles and track which people are most likely to purchase certain products. The data collected would be sent to Mondel?z  in real-time. “Knowing that a consumer is showing interest in the product gives us the opportunity to engage with them real-time,”  Mondelez spokeswoman Valerie Moens said in an e-mailed statement. The company plans to use the d ata collected to better target its advertising and discount offers to the groups most likely to buy certain products. The technology could also be used to alert the grocer when it’s time to reorder certain products. The sensors would not collect any photos, video or other personal information regarding consumers, according to Moens. “Privacy is of utmost importance, so Smart […]

Retailer Strategies For Loss Prevention

In the increasingly competitive retail space, there is a constant need to implement, expand and improve loss prevention programs to secure assets, decrease shrinkage and increase customer safety. With that, budget cuts in the manned loss prevention (LP) staff industry in all store ranges ? from mom and pop shops, to big box retailers ? […]

Video Surveillance And Business Intelligence: A Growing Trend In Retail

Video footage doesn?t lie. Why do you think NFL football teams gather every Monday morning and break down game film from the previous day? They do it to learn what they did right and what they did wrong in order to ensure success for the next game. So why can?t retail stores do the same? […]