Artificial Intelligence

Quincy, Mass. - Ahold will install KeyMe retail key-making kiosks at select Super Stop & Shop locations in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York. The kiosks enable customers to safely store a “digital copy” of their keys in the cloud and create a spare copy at their local Super Stop & Shop in less than 30 seconds.   

Washington, D.C. - The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), a division of the National Retail Federation (NRF), has announced two major additions to the ARTS Standard Request for Proposals (RFP) library on selecting payments solutions and video analytics solutions. These standardized RFPs will help retail companies research software applications ahead of time.

Conshohocken, Pa. -- Ikea announced plans to install a fuel cell system at its location in Emeryville, California. Consistent with the retailer’s focus on emerging energy technologies, is the first Ikea in the world to convert biogas into electricity through a clean electro-chemical process. The fuel cell system will be installed, commissioned and activated by this summer, 2015.

Ikea contracted Bloom Energy, Sunnyvale, California, for the design, development and installation of the fuel system.

New York -- Facebook hopes to transform the way  customers communicate with retailers by re-inventing the customer service platform. Facebook and its partner Zendesk, a customer service platform firm, are teaming up to allow businesses to provide scalable and responsive customer service to the more than 600 million people worldwide who use Facebook's popular Messenger app. The social media giant is inviting retailers and other companies to develop software that allows customers to communicate instantly with them through Messenger.

By Neil Axler

“You can’t get your nails done online, you can’t get dry cleaning done online and you can’t eat the Internet.” These are the dominant themes from retail clients (property owners) over the last few years. Today’s shopping center acquirers are looking for “necessity centers” with a stable rent roll. These centers consist of restaurants, nail salons and other destination retail that is not competing with e-commerce.

The e-commerce world in which Deliv CEO Daphne Carmeli lives is one where the fastest delivery method is also the least expensive. How can that be?

San Francisco – Sephora has chosen Vector Security as its partner while it focuses on technology upgrades to enhance loss prevention in its North American locations. Those upgrades include migration from analog to IP cameras, as well as conversion to newer alarm panels and electronic article surveillance (EAS) technologies.

By Todd Weller, Hexis Cyber Solutions

For retailers, it’s now no longer a matter of “if” you will be compromised by a cyberattack, but “when” you will be. But they can mitigate the impact of attacks now and in the future by preparing a response plan with policy-based automation.