Holiday Web shopping looks brighter than last year

The great abilities of the home computer. I'm going to go right out there and say it, shopping for presents online is way easier and much more cost efficient for both parties then having to go to the store to buy presents. After working in retail for 4 years I can vouch for anyone and say I have seen some crazy things happen in the retail stores over the holidays. The holidays are already stressful enough, why not just do your shopping at home.

The great thing is that most of the normal retail stores are giving you the option to do your shopping online and they will ship the products right to your door step. It's no wonder that online sales are increasing and retail sales are decreasing. There is no reason to go out to the store and deal with traffic, parking, lines, and most importantly people when you can do it all from the comfort of your own home.

Shame and Shoplifting at Wal-Mart

This article elaborates on how a judge from Alabama was trying to find ways to discipline shoplifters. He had realized over time that the usual fine or small amount of jail time didn't really scare people from repeating the same crime. He has found a great way to discipline these offenders through humiliation. The judge has been sentencing the offender and their sentence is to stand in front of the store they stole from with a sign on that says, "I stole from Wal-Mart." These stores may not be able to control them from shoplifting with their retail theft systems, but this judge has definitely put a stop to repeat offenders. Humiliation is a great weapon to use against people. Wal-Mart losses about 3 billion dollars a year to shoplifters and the number is rising due to the state of our economy and the unemployment rate being so extremely high. Shoplifting is something we're never going to be able to stop, but this judge sure has made a point to cut down on repeat offenders and the I believe this a great way to punish people. Hopefully once word gets out this will strike fear in people and prevent future retail theft problems.

Going Green With IT

Data collection has long been an issue with a lot of companies. Many retailers use data to track spending habits of their customers, when they spend, and what kind of customers are doing the spending. Typically data is stored in what are known as data warehouses which are buildings who purpose is to look up data for its company or has a service to another company. These first began as an "easy to use, easy to analyze" form of data collection but over the years demand for data and the amount of date has been ever increasing.

"Data warehouses, and the data centers that house them, require an enormous amount of power, both to run legions of servers and to cool them... In 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that data centers account for 61 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually and cost $4.5 billion a year."

Not only is there an area of opportunity here for money to be saved in data mining, there is an opportunity to get on board the recent "going green" trend a lot of consumers are expecting businesses to be on. There has been little change to Data Warehousing in the last years and it seems now is the time for that change. With the addition of e-commerce and e-retailing business now more so than ever are having a greater demand for data collection and analyzing.

Open Source Software the the rescue!

"How does data warehousing address the challenges involved in "going green"? The answer is a combination of new database technology designed for analysis of massive quantities of data, with open source software that leverages commodity low-cost, energy-efficient software and hardware. Together they reduce the need for expensive hardware infrastructure and the energy required to power it."

These databases enable efficient data compression because each column stores a single data type (as opposed to rows that typically contain several data types). This allows compression to be optimized for each data type, significantly reducing the amount of storage needed for the database. Column orientation also greatly accelerates query processing, which significantly increases the number of data warehouse transactions a server can process.

There are a variety of column-oriented solutions on the market. Some explode and duplicate the data and require as large a hardware footprint as traditional row-based systems. Others, however, have combined the column basis with other technologies, eliminating the need for data duplication and massive hardware footprints. What this ultimately means is that users don't need as many servers or as much storage to analyze the same volume of data. In fact, these column-oriented databases can achieve compression ranging from 10:1 (a 10 TB database becomes a 1 TB database) to more than 40:1 depending on the data. With this level of compression, a distributed server environment can be reduced by a factor of 20-50 times and be brought down to a single box, significantly slashing heat, power consumption, and carbon emissions. Open source products, specifically designed to serve a broad community of users, take this a step further as they do not require proprietary hardware or specialized appliances. This offers open source users the ability to leverage simple, lower-cost commodity servers and reduce their hardware footprint. Open source software such as Linux can also extend the life of hardware components by allowing older servers to be seamlessly integrated into a single virtual machine. This keeps older servers out of landfills and reduces the demand for new machines to be built.

Cost, image, and regulatory concerns are compelling more businesses to explore how they can make their operations and their IT infrastructure greener. At the same time, many of these same organizations are struggling to keep up with overwhelming data access and management requirements that are burning through energy and resources.

The combination of new database technology with open source applications solves both of these challenges.

How Firms Use Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence is the skills, processes, technologies, and practices used to support decision making. This article talks about what is going to happened in the near future with business intelligence. With everyone in the world converting to a PC life there is an abundance of information floating around out there on the web. This article goes on to talk about data explosion and how this problem is going to come about here in the near future maybe as soon as 2010. This is where there is too much information out there and they figure that the abundance of information may reach a point where the amount of information out there doubles every month. This would be data explosion. In my opinion a huge problem arises at this point in time. Business Intelligence gives you the ability to forecast or predict future moves by looking at complex models. The issue with this and the data explosion is that there is so much information out there at this point. Are you actually using correct information to create your models? I feel that there is going too much information out there. This is going to make it difficult to make sure the information you are using for forecasting is legit and accurate information. The data explosion is going to make this extremely difficult as time goes on and computers find their way into every household all over the world.

Augmented Reality!!!!!

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/next/archives/2009/09/augmented_reali.html

The concept of Augmented Reality, or overlaying the real world with text or images see via a mobile phone's camera or a Web Cam on a PC, is gaining attention from a few big name companies.

What will technology think of next?! Hard to believe that that 20 years ago we barely had the internet, yet programs that could break down a neighborhood like this. The video at the webpage really gives you a good example how this technolgy can be favorable for not only the consumer, but as well s the consumer. The convenience factor is huge for the consumer and the less spending of labor for the business is a great way to keep the company from going into the red.

Now how does this help the retail market you ask? Where do people get these phones from? Usually at small retail stores of the cell phone providers. With the many new applcations that have been made available for such phones as the iphone and the droid, has made the demand for these high-tech items larger and larger. Usually these stores can barely keep these items in stock and with programs such as augmented reality eventually becoming available for the common person, most people are going to have these phones so they can keep up to date with the world.

The Computer Revolution

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Computer_Revolution/Effect_on_society/Business

I think that this piece here really lays out the overall impact that computers are having on businesses today. Not only are computers helping to keep better records of employee purchases, their ability to help manage thousands, if not millions of inventory items is incredible. With a simple check, computers are able to record and log information about a person such as their age, sex, address and how much they have spent. That creates a huge advantage for retails to be able to more accurately tell not only what people are buying but who is buying it.

For Educational Purposes

This is just a check to make sure that it works.