Tag Archive for: stores

Apple stores redefining mall economics

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If you’ve visited an Apple store at your local mall the chances are good that you’ve visited a crowded Apple store at your local mall.

And, not surprisingly, those crowds don’t necessarily get right back into their cars after buying their iWhatevers. They do more shopping. In fact, an Apple store alone can boost overall mall sales by 10%, says one research firm, and Apple is using that clout to its advantage.

From a Wall Street Journal report:

In the past, malls typically operated according to a straightforward bargain. Department stores that anchored the ends of the malls either owned their own stores or paid almost nothing aside from fees to maintain common spaces in exchange for drawing much of the traffic, while specialty retailers in the smaller spaces between the anchors typically paid the bulk of a mall’s rent.

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Network World Paul McNamara

Black Friday traffic brings down Web stores of HP, Best Buy, others

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They don’t call it Black Friday for nothing. And as shoppers increasingly use websites and mobile apps to do their shopping—even as they brave the crowds in brick-and-mortar stores—some retailers are finding it hard to handle demands.

While content delivery networks (CDNs) have made it possible to push static content out closer to Web and mobile shoppers and reduce overall traffic hitting e-commerce sites, the load on the sites is still causing some to buckle and break, albeit briefly.

Even Hewlett-Packard has gotten a bit of a bloody nose as HP Shopping went down around midday Eastern Time. And Best Buy’s website went offline briefly—though by noon those who had left their browsers pointed at the website were switched back to the electronics store. The trials and tribulations of major retailers’ websites are being live-blogged by David Jones of Dynatrace, an application performance management subsidiary of Compuware.

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Ars Technica » Technology Lab

Ray Ozzie’s Talko app stores calls in cloud, lets you search them

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Ray Ozzie – the father of Lotus Notes – has launched Talko, a smartphone app that records group phone calls, stores them and makes them searchable so group members can go back and listen to key parts of the call and lets participants shoot and insert photos into the call stream in real time.

(Read our Hands-on Review here)

The company says the target for the free app and an associated for-pay cloud-storage service is corporate work groups that want to hold team discussions and be able to go back and determine exactly what was said.

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Network World Tim Greene

Grocery stores in multiple states hit by data breach

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A data breach at Supervalu Inc., one of the largest grocery wholesalers and retailers in the U.S., could affect thousands of people who shopped at the company’s stores between June 22 and July 17.

The breach may also affect customers from several other major grocery store chains for which Supervalu provides IT services as a third-party provider.

The stores affected by the breach include 180 Supervalu stores operated under the Hornbacher’s Shop ‘n Save, Shoppers Food & Pharmacy, Farm Fresh and Cub Foods banners. Customers of all Jewel-Osco stores operating in Illinois, Indiana and Iowa were also affected. Supervalu offered up a list of the stores it believes were affected ( download PDF) and has posted a FAQ about the breach..

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Network World Security