Joel Rubinson

BrainTrust Query: 2012 Predictions for Retail Technology

January 4, 2012

FROM RETAILWIRE:
In past years we've seen the rise of Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon, lots of new alternative payment types, more engineered systems, better social analytics, more 2-D barcodes, greater adoption of cloud services and improved f-commerce. Which technologies mentioned in the article do you see gaining significant ground at retail in 2012?      [more...]

The big thing is the use of mobile to transform the physical shopping experience (more so than online replacing physical shopping). As such, I think Apple and Google are higher on the list than Amazon. Facebook is the dark horse. They want to create the unified profile for people that could include frequent shopper and check in data but I haven't seen them move effectively in this way. but they could. The could even dominate TV (wouldn't a FB log-in be the easiest way to surf the impossibly high number of choices?) the alternative to execute that plan could be Google who has profile info via gmail and google+. I guess net/net, I would bet on Google first.