Data & Analytics

Washington, D.C. -- The U.S, Department of Commerce will reportedly start meeting with companies including Facebook, Apple and Wal-Mart in February 2014 to create voluntary guidelines for the commercial use of facial recognition technology. According to Bloomberg, the Department of Commerce plans to have formal guidelines ready for release in June 2014.

Washington, D.C. -- According to NRF’s latest holiday survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, nearly half (49.9%) of holiday shoppers indicate they plan to do the remainder of their holiday shopping online, the highest percent in the survey’s 11-year history. As of Dec. 9, before the most recent weekend, 32 million holiday shoppers had not even started shopping.

Corte Madera, Calif. – Restoration Hardware grew its net income an impressive 389% to $13 million from $2.7 million in the same period a year earlier. Net revenues for the third quarter of fiscal 2013 increased 39% to $395.8 million from $284.2 million, while same-store sales increased 29%.

Gary Friedman, chairman and co-CEO of Restoration Hardware, credited net revenue growth and advertising savings as factors driving the company’s net income increase. The strong quarterly financial performance exceeded Wall Street expectations.

Pleasanton, Calif. -- Safeway has made its online grocery shopping website more accessible and usable for Safeway shoppers with visual impairments.

Safeway collaborated with its visually impaired customers to make the necessary changes to its website. As such, the company has adopted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0 level AA as its accessibility standard.

Safeway has made enhancements to its online grocery shopping website to make it more accessible and usable for Safeway shoppers with visual impairments.

Safeway collaborated with its visually impaired customers to make the necessary changes to its website. As such, the company has adopted the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.0 level AA as its accessibility standard.

RadioShack is taking its concept store to Fairfax, Va. The new store is the first concept store in this area and opens its doors Dec. 14.

All concept stores in the company's portfolio feature an upgraded shopping experience, which showcases the company's new look, and incorporates interactive areas designed to help shoppers improve their technology profile. Some features include:

Montreal, Quebec -- Multidev Technologies, developers of the ChainDrive multichannel retail platform, have developed a brand new POS software by completely redesigning its interface and adding dynamic omni-channel features. The ChainDrive POS software offers a unified system that provides a single transparent version of transactions, CRM, fulfillment, inventory and all back end operations.

ChainDrive POS has a touch-screen interface, is flexible and has customer service enhancing capabilities, such as its ability to be used on a mobile device.

Boston – Eight-in-10 (77%) consumers would be willing to share their smartphone location data as long as they received enough value in return. A new study from in-store mobile marketing platform provider Swirl also revealed that consumers are much more likely to entrust their location information to their favorite retailers (65%) than to shopping/deals apps, Google or Facebook.