Mobile retail – its really here

Well there has been talk about it for years. Following the rise of online retail, the next step is retail on mobile phones.  Apparently it is already widely used in Japan.

Over here retailers are just beginning to make use of the new more sophisticated mobile phones such as the iphone.  It is a tricky decision for retailers though. There is no standard technological platform as yet. Develop an app for the iphone and it won’t work on the other devices which are out there.

Retailers such as Ocado and Oasis have developed iphone apps but perhaps the most savvy approach is that being adopted by Tesco. Tesco is opening an API up to developers and allowing third parties to develop apps for their faourite devices. This will allow both commercial organisations and enthusiasts to develop applications for any mobile device and interface with Tesco website. At the moment this includes searching for a product and adding it to a basket.

How great to be able to finish a packet of something, scan it with you phone and add the item to next week’s shop! People have been talking about this for a long time but finally it seems very close.

Is the recession just what your business needed?

One of the themes from number of speakers at the Future Focus was exactly that question and I thought that this was exactly the right time to stop and take stock. If you take the start of the recession from the collapse of the Lehman Brothers in September 2008, we are 9 months in now, time enough to review the success of strategies.

This is relevant to retailers, retail technology suppliers and consultants alike. In fact any business.

What are you doing differently? Is it working? Are you doing enough differently? What were doing before the recession which you look back on now as crass extravagance (you can rest assured that many consumers are doing this one!)? How can you make sure that when things pick up, you don’t become complacent again? Have you changed so much for the better that, the challenges of the recession have been valuable lessons which will stand you in good stead for the future?

Future Focus London… and WordPress

I attended the Future Focus event hosted by the Telegraph Business Club and IBM yesterday. Not surprisingly, one of the themes was DIY media, blogging, twittering and using social media. Twitter was monitored through the day and descriptions of the event were put up on the Future Focus blog as it happened. The url of the blog was given in the event and I looked it up today. I was most impressed to find that the blog is hosted here at WordPress.
Another theme was that of cloud computing. I was trying to think of cloud computing services which I use in my working day and I could only come up with this blog and Google Analytics. So well done, WordPress does it again!

Maybe Retail Answers could benefit from using the cloud a bit more? Or should we market our retail intranet Rapid as a cloud service?

By the way, the best bit of the event was the live voting on topics such as when will the recession end using hand held terminals and the results being displayed on screen immediately afterwards. It was great to have the interaction.