“Going forward, shopping malls will be an area of important focus for DLF. This will help us to make the maximum leverage of the retail boom in India,” DLF Retail managing director Arvind Nair said.

He, however, did not divulge investment to be made in development of 22 million sq ft of shopping mall space. According to a company source, DLF is planning to develop around 20 large shopping malls in the next three-four years, which would entail an investment of Rs 16,000 crore.

Thousands of shoppers queued for hours in front of department stores across Japan on Friday to buy limited-edition, traditional New Year’s “goodie” bags in what has become one of the biggest events of the holiday season.

The so-called Lucky Bags are priced between 10,000 yen ($110) and 30,000 yen, and are completely sealed, with nothing to indicate the contents.

But experienced shoppers know that they are often filled with fashionable accessories and clothes at a substantial discount, which makes them especially desirable during the current financial crisis.

In Tokyo’s glitzy Ginza shopping district, excited shoppers dashed inside the Mitsukoshi department store to grab over 20,000 lucky bags.

“There’s this excitement before you open your bag, then comes the surprise and some degree of disappointment, but most of the time I’m happy with what I get,” said Hisayo Kuwabara, a 52-year-old part-time worker.

Some shoppers sought to banish the economic gloom with these festive bags.

“Though the economy is worsening, I wanted to buy some lucky bags because it is sold at a discounted price. I also wanted to get some luck in this recession,” said Eiichi Kakegawa, a 47-year-old businessman.

Takashi Masuko, director of “Lucky Bags” operations at Mitsukoshi, said the yearly shopping extravaganza is especially popular this year.

“People tend to buy more Lucky Bags during a recession,” he said.

“We’ve been preparing for this day since last August, and since we were expecting some recession ahead, we changed the volume and items of our bags to better satisfy our customers at times like this.”

The economy appears set for a gloomy 2009 in Japan, as firms cut their outlooks and industrial output slumps.

Most economists say a recovery in Japan will have to wait until global demand picks up. Some say that will not happen until the final quarter of next year, at the earliest.

The facility is complete with shopping carts, aisles stocked with goods, and Altierre’s flagship product—a wireless LAN based on a system of RF tags, LCD displays, servers, access points and wireless stations, which controls and updates prices for each item.

Replacing the low-tech paper display tags used by grocery stores to display prices and marketing messages with electronic shelf labels may seem at first glance like an unnecessary—and expensive—application of technology. But Altierre executives say supermarkets and other large retail operations invest thousands of man hours in the inefficient process of manually replacing paper tags on store shelves to reflect updated prices. Using Altierre’s platform, a supermarket employee can update prices throughout the store in a matter of minutes with a few keystrokes, according Sunit Saxena, the company’s chairman and CEO. He argues that the system saves time and labor costs, reduces human error and is “green,” saving billions of sheets of paper each year. Altierre has a shopping cart in the demo room overflowing with paper price tags, a compelling visual that attests to the amount of paper that can be saved in a single supermarket.

The system also brings a whole new potential for marketing advantages, according to Saxena. Pushing a shopping cart through the demo room, he notes that potential for a readout mounted on the cart which could display advertisements, alerts about what items are on sale or nutritional information about products in the immediate vicinity of a shopper’s current location.

“People today are so pressed for time,” Saxena says. “They are rushing through the store to pick up a few things for dinner on their way home for work. The system could give them the information they need to allow them to get in and out faster.”

With the ability to dynamically change pricing and sale information tags much more quickly, supermarkets could also run different specials on products in a store at different times of the day, enabling them to appeal to target demographics, according to Saxena. In the middle of the day on weekdays, when more senior citizens tend to shop, stores could run specials on items they tend to buy for a few hours, he notes as an example.

Altierre says it has been co-developing its wireless dynamic pricing solution under signed agreements with several of the top 10 grocery chains in the U.S., reportedly including Safeway Inc. Altierre has raised a total of $60 million in venture funding, including an $8 million Series C round last May that included the D. E. Shaw group and Labrador Ventures.

Saxena boasts more than 27 years of experience, much of it in the semiconductor industry, including high-level executive positions at Alliance Semiconductor and Sandcraft Inc. He co-founded Altierre in 2003 with veteran software engineer Anurag Goel, now Altierre’s chief technology officer and vice president of software development. But Saxena says the two men conceived of the idea years before.

Initially, the two men sought to purchase the hardware needed to implement their plan from third parties. But they quickly realized that the type of high-reliability, low-power, low-cost chips they required were not available as an off-the-shelf solution.

“We realized pretty quickly that we were going to have to make everything from scratch,” Saxena says.

So, tapping into his experience in the semiconductor industry, Saxena put together a design team to create Altierre’s own communications controller and display driver chips. Both devices are implemented in 0.18 micron CMOS with operating voltage of 3V and clock frequencies of less than 1 Mhz.

The chips were designed to require a minimum number of external components, resulting in lower bill-of-materials cost and smaller board area, according to Altierre. Using a mature process technology also saved costs and offered higher yield, the company said.

With a goal of five-year battery life for the devices powering dot matrix LCD display screens, the Altierre team applied power-saving criteria at all hierarchies of the design, including clock gating, dynamic voltage switching, dynamic frequency scaling, low-power SRAM compiler, low-voltage operation and low power standard cells, according to the companies. Clock frequencies were intentionally kept as low as possible, and Altierre uses a proprietary LCD addressing scheme that consumes very low power.

Saxena says the past five years for Altierre have involved a “steep learning curve and a lot of water under the bridge.” But, he says, the company is now poised to capitalize on the technology it has developed. It estimates that the potential market for supermarket chains alone could be worth $10 billion, and the company believes it will eventually garner interest from other verticals. Down the road, it plans to migrate its chips to 0.13 micron technology.

While online grocery shopping continues to grow at a rapid pace in the UK, it appears to be a different story across the Atlantic. In the past week the competitive UK market has digested the news that Waitrose is scrapping its delivery charges and Ocado is to sell 4,000 Waitrose own-label products at a cheaper price than is available in the grocer’s own stores.

The former is bound to have repercussions, as the other major grocers take a close look at their delivery-charging models, and although the latter will have less impact on the wider market it does signify how desperate Ocado is to grow its share of business.

In contrast, in the US, Albertsons announced that it is to stop its home delivery for online orders in all its markets. The only thing it is retaining in certain areas is online ordering for collection in-store, which it says customers regard as a convenient way to shop.

The divergence in the two markets must largely be down to the high density of delivery drops achievable in the UK whereas the vast distances between shoppers in the US does not justify the cost to retailers of offering home delivery services for low margin grocery products. This is undoubtedly why it is still viable in higher density conurbations like New York where FreshDirect is a popular service.

This is at the heart of why Tesco is the world’s biggest online grocer and the significantly larger US market has nothing that comes close to comparing with it.

“We want to ramp up the volumes,” said Mark Price, managing director of Waitrose. “Delivery charges are a real irritation for customers when they’re spending £90 on a shop.”

Britain’s worst recession in more than two decades has heaped pressure on supermarket chains to pitch their pricing strategies correctly as customers tighten their belts.

Waitrose, with 200 branches across the UK, has benefited as people eat out less, according to Mr Price. The chain, which recorded a 6pc jump in sales over Easter compared with last year, said it was winning customers from rivals such as J Sainsbury.

Owned by The John Lewis Partnership, Waitrose is betting that its move will help prise shoppers away from rivals in the online grocery market, which it claims will enjoy sales of £13bn within four years.

The charges will cease from Wednesday although the Waitrose Deliver service will still require a minimum order of £50. Waitrose Entertaining, its service for party food and drink, does not have a minimum order requirement.

The decision to scrap the charges comes in the same week that shoppers at online delivery service Ocado will be able to buy Waitrose food cheaper online than from the supermarket for the first time.

John Lewis Partnership has a stake in Ocado but does not fully own it, so the internet delivery company is able to charge what it likes for Waitrose products.

Mr Price has said there are many promotions that Waitrose runs in store that Ocado does not offer. The free delivery is not being offered by Ocado.

Mr Price said trading in the first three months had been better than expected and he was in the optimists camp regarding the rest of 2009.

The free application, available to any Sortprice.com enhanced merchant with an existing Facebook account, works hand-in-hand with their product listing on Sortprice itself and allows them to build a virtual store right on Facebook. Merchants can have their full inventory available to Facebook users for shoppers to peruse and compare prices on, complete with photos and direct links to their own Web sites, according to Sortprice.

The tools give retailers complete control over the ‘look and feel’ of their stores, with dozens of choices for color schemes, an option to upload category images, and the ability to add a slogan to their page as well. Sortprice also included an extensive FAQ section to guide merchants through the process of configuring their stores while offering tips for promoting the application to internal and external audiences.

On the user side, Sortprice’s unique Drag & Drop feature for the merchant pages is now compatible across all web browsers, facilitating each user’s visit. Shoppers can now quickly and easily compile a “wish list” of desired items from a particular merchant’s store. These lists are viewable to all users and are the foundation for a truly interactive shopping experience. Visitors can comment on other users’ wish lists, indicate particular items that they “like”, and even invite friends and family to check out wish lists or specific products.

To learn more about the Facebook store application, visit http://www.sortprice.com/facebook_store

The Future of Shopping: An Avatar Lets You Find the Perfect Fit

A Me-Ality body scanner at the North Point Mall in GeorgiaPhotograph courtesy Unique Solutions.

For anyone who loathes trying on clothes, there are no good options. The fitting room can seem like a torture chamber—harsh lighting, the walk past other customers to the three-way mirror. Online, you can avoid the horror of asking the sales person to bring you a bigger size, but you may end up returning four out of five items because nothing fits properly.

Farhad Manjoo recently wrote in Slate that Amazon’s move to same-day shipping may doom physical retailers. But another technology could hasten the demise of clothing stores in particular: body scanners, like the one I saw recently in Seoul’s T.um Museum, which is dedicated to futuristic technology. Pairing customized avatars with technology similar to that in some airport security scanners, the machine could make the process of trying on clothes obsolete.

The Me-Ality machine, made by a North American company called Unique Solutions and modified in Korea, runs radio waves over a fully clothed person who is scanned standing up. The radio waves send and receive power signals that reflect off the water molecules in the skin, picking up more than 200,000 points of measurement. From these, the machine creates a 3-D image, then extracts more than 100 measurements, according to Bob Kutnick, the company’s chief technology officer—not just the circumference of your waist but the gradation from your knee to your ankle, for example.

Currently found in common areas of about 70 malls in the United States, the Me-Ality is free for shoppers to use. After a 10-second scan, software compares the individual’s measurements to those provided by partner manufacturers and then recommends items that are guaranteed to fit: Old Navy’s Sweetheart style jeans in a size 10, say. The clothes it recommends are all (of course) available in shops at the mall, so customers can stroll in and pick them up, or head home and order online.

While knowing which mass-produced clothes fit you right now is a convenient time-saver, the scanner’s true potential lies in perfectly tailored clothes for everyone, and the extinction of size eights and size 12s. Ordering well-tailored clothes online is certainly possible, as Manjoo has written, but it still involves taking your own measurements, a visit from a consultant, or mailing the company a piece of clothing you already own. These are time-consuming, and even a thorough shopper won’t be able to take as many measurements as the body scanner does.

Visualization is, of course, an integral part of the process—consumers want to see how their clothes will look on them before they buy. In the technology museum, a program created an avatar that bore a remarkable resemblance to the man scanned. His digital doppelganger tried on different items of clothing and told him how they fit (“a little tight in the thighs”). He could even make the avatar walk up and down a virtual runway to see how the clothes looked in motion.

Body scanning also has tremendous potential to lower prices—for consumers and manufacturers. In the short term, returns will drop sharply, and data from the body scanners will allow shops to stock more of the sizes found in their locality. In the long run, consumers will finally stop visiting clothing stores in person—a huge savings in overhead for manufacturers. And when you take returns out of the equation, costs go down even more.

Gimmicks meant to make shopping easier, from doorstop-sized catalogs to X-ray machinesthat showed how well your shoes fit, have come and gone. There are lots of variations on the avatar idea popping up these days, from using the sensors on a Microsoft Kinect to submitting photos to websites. But while these might seem attractive, they’re just stopgap measures on the way to the ultimate goal—infallible fit with minimal effort. The possibilities for body scanning are nearly limitless, whether it’s used to make online clothes shopping work efficiently or to create one-of-a-kind apparel. Kutnick told me that the technology even exists to infuse man-made fabrics with dye in real time using radio waves. One day, quite soon, we’ll be able to pick the exact colors we want—matching our shirts to our eyes, for example—and machines will produce them on request, making clothing that’s truly customized. For now, though, most consumers would probably settle for clothes that fit—minus the fitting room.

By Nell McShane Wulfhart

source: http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/19/me_ality_body_scanner_creates_an_avatar_to_make_clothes_shopping_a_breeze_.html#article_comment_box