Retail Boom Forecast

Phoenix historical economist forecasts surprise retail boom in 2009
A combination of legislative mandates, the Stimulus Plan, reduced competition and new consumer savings and income could result in surprisingly robust retail sales by the Fourth Quarter of 2009.

H.L. Quist says, "I'm not an expert on retail but I do have an excellent track record of analyzing economic and political trends and forecasting future events. An unusual confluence of factors are coming together which could bring a pleasant surprise to the devastated retail industry."

H. L. Quist is the author of "The Aftermath of Greed: Get Ready For The Coming Inflationary Boom."

Read full press release:

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/03/prweb2220824.htm

This news was also posted on the company’s new Twitter account: http://twitter.com/onestepretail

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Retail Store Making Right Decisions

In a recent case study by One Step Retail Solutions on Pump Station in Santa Monica, CA, the store increased its sales 20% in the last three years. A second store opened up 3 years ago in Hollywood, CA, watching sales go up 83%. Two more stores are being planned to open up this year, 2009.

Pump Station COO Cheryl Petran attributes their growth and continued success to point of sale technology which allowed them to forecast sales and manage inventory better.

With better financial planning and profit goals, Pump Station owners have been able to gain insight into what is going on in their business and use the reports to make the right decisions.

Ms. Petran feels they are out-pacing the economic downturn by forecasting smart and managing the inventory to her forecast. “Being proactive means forecasting, facing the reality of it and dealing with it,” said Cheryl Petran, COO of Pump Station.

“If you can really look at where you think you’re going to be and be realistic about it, then you can survive. I have a POS system with history that I can use for expansion. With our POS system we can quickly evaluate if our decisions were good or bad. I learned many years ago to manage your inventory smart and manage your vendors smart.”

Pump Station is continuing to expand their retail business, despite the changing economy.

Note: One Step Retail Solutions installed Retail Pro point of sale software, robust POS hardware, and hand-held scanners. The system is integrated with POS QuickBooks.

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Pidgin 2.5.5 RPM for Ubuntu 8.10 (x86)

As of today no pre-built binary for the Instant Messaging client Pidgin 2.5.5 for Ubuntu 8.10 was available on the internet.

A colleague of mine just compiled the latest release of Pidgin and published a RPM.

Download it here: pidgin-2.5.5-0.i386.rpm

Install it with rpm -i pidgin-2.5.5-0.i386.rpm

Enjoy!

P.S.: No guaranties, no warranties, no support. Download at your own risk only.

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Lost Privacy?

Compared to the remaining entries of this blog, this one is completely off-topic: it covers the Google service Web-History, Google's Chrome browser and privacy.

Personally, most of the time I am using the Chrome browser and I am logged on with my Google account. At some time in the past I have decided to try Google's Web-History service (in German it is named Google Webprotokoll).

A few days ago I checked the entries in the web-history service. Surprise, surprise - the service works as expected ;-). Google lists each search term I have entered in Google. Thousand of entries were stored for my account - back till 2007.

Because of this huge amount of search terms I decided to delete them. I also found time to check out Google's privacy policy regarding the Web-History service in detail. Unfortunately the privacy policy of Google provides no details - it is quite unclear:

"You can delete information from Web History using the remove feature, and it will be removed from the service. However, as is common practice in the industry, and as outlined in the Google Privacy Policy, Google maintains a separate logs system for auditing purposes and to help us improve the quality of our services for users."

What does this mean? Is Google able to rebuild my search data from the mentioned log services? Is Google able to assign such a reconstructed search history to my Google account (and thus to my person)?

If the answer is NO: everything is fine because I am in control of the data. But what if the answer is YES?

Now to the second point. Chrome is the name of the superb browser from Google. It was already blamed in the past for sending data home (the data you enter in the address/search field of the browser).

Upon installation Google Chrome gets a unique ID. That means that Google is able to learn that this is your personal Chrome installation (e.g. by using Google Chrome to log on with your Google account).

What is the problem with this? Because of the unique ID Google is able to know that YOU are using the browser. This is possible at any time - even if YOU are not logged on at Google. If this knowledge is used by Google, YOU (and me too) should be quite uncomfortable with this situation.

So my question: Does Google ensure that data entered in Chrome will NOT be assigned to me (better: my personal google account) if I am not logged on?


This entry was not written to blame Google. I am fine with their services. But there are huge possibilities to misuse the logged data. And any inside information is of high interest.

P.S.: You can remove the unique ID of Chrome with the small software utility KillID (use at your own risk, maybe you are violating Chrome's license agreement!).

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Technology Pavilion at MAGIC

One Step Retail Solutions was in the Technology Pavilion at MAGIC in February. The pavilion offered free cappachino and a Wifi center. See photo montage:

Here are some photos:

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The Specialty Retailer Advantage

With the recent government numbers showing specialty retailers down 19 percent, the focus for these retailers has shifted to being more promotional, buying smarter and not piling up on inventory. They are also making deals with vendors to get flexible deals. And they are moving toward improving their retail management technology in an effort to re-organize and become more efficient.

In all the changes an independent retailer faces, bringing customers to their store is the primary goal. Obtaining loyal customers is bringing them back. When people walk into a store, they want to know the people at the store. It's about relationships and that is what separates the independent specialty retailer from the big-box retailers.

In a recent Webinar with Kevin McAdam of One Step Retail Solutions, he talked about what a retailer should know about in surviving the current economy. He discusses retail Key Performance Indicators and how to read and interpret them, the various ways to use technology to increase profits, decisions a retailer has to make about their inventory, and how to overcome obsctacles during a recession.

Watch Webinar "The Truth All Retailers Should Know About Surviving in the Economy in 2009".

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Free Online Label Printing

Are you working in the automotive industry? Maybe in the area of supply chain logistics? If yes - chances are high that you are in the need for printing barcode labels like VDA 4902 Warenanhänger, Odette, Galia and AIAG labels.

For all other readers I'll describe how to print QR-Code business cards for private use in a future post.

Free Online Application for Barcode Label Printing!

This online label generator provides pre-defined label templates. You are not forced to design a label, start immediately with one of the available templates instead. 

The generated labels are perfectly suitable for production use - no demo restrictions whatsoever are applied.

Especially for low-volume label printing or for testing purposes this free online application is valuable. No additional software is needed, just select the required label and you are finished.

For those looking for custom labels TEC-IT also offers a solution. Download the demo of TFORMer Designer (TEC-IT's barcode label printing software), design your label and upload the templates to tec-it.com. Ready.

This online label generator is:
1) free for testing purposes (please contact TEC-IT for production use or high-volume printing)
2) not limited to industry labels
3) available as a web-service for portal integration

Enjoy!

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ShopSavvy Impressions

ShopSavvy is quite an interesting application available for Google’s Android mobile phone G1. Since a few weeks I use such a G1 and I gave this application a try.

What is ShopSavvy?

ShopSavvy is some sort of shopping assistant: It enables you to compare prices of products quickly.

The most interesting feature is that such comparisons are based on the product barcode (e.g. an EAN code). The barcode is decoded with the built in camera of the G1 (no manual key-in required) - and ShopSavvy then digs the deep wide web for identical products, their pricing - and possible shopping alternatives.

Great idea and quite funny for some minutes. I imagined myself standing in front of some product, decoding the bar code and thereafter bargaining with the seller (and using the G1 as the perfect discussion base).

Because price comparison has never been easier I can also imagine that some shop owners will hate this application. Especially for highly-priced products such an online price comparison makes sense.

But let me come to my point: The idea "ShopSavvy" has really potential. Pricing is just one aspect. Product discussions and customer feedback ("What does other customers think about this product") may be the next step.

Finally, a world-wide product database (based on product barcodes) is not far away (idea copyrighted by TEC-IT ;-)): G1 users use ShopSavvy world-wide, they enter missing products (like a ProductWikipedia.com), entries are corrected and extended by other users - and voila: all products world-wide are available via bar-code. International pricing included.

Before I forget: The company NeoMedia claims (or at least tries to claim - I am not sure if this patent was rejected shortly) a patent (#6,651,053) which may cover parts of the original ShopSavvy idea.

Let me know what you think.

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QR-Code Tags in Action

The site www.mobyware.ru tags its download pages with QR-Codes created by the web-based barcode generator of TEC-IT.

This QR-code tags makes downloading and sharing of software really easy: Just decode the barcode with reader software for your mobile phone (e.g. barcode Scanner for Google G1) and navigate to the URL which is encoded in the symbol.

Never type URLS again ;-)

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Freeware: 100% Free From Barcodes!

Check out freeware from TEC-IT: This social bookmarking webcontrol (ASP.NET 2.0 / C#) is available for web developers for free. Source-code is included!

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