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Mavenir wins "Most Innovative Service Launch by IMS" and “Best VoLTE Product” in the Informa Industry Awards held at the 2013 IMS World Forum in Barcelona

April 25th 2013

PRESS RELEASE

Mavenir wins two IMS Industry Awards for Voice over LTE and RCS 5 Solutions and Launches

Mavenir's Convergence TAS is Best VoLTE Product

 

 

BARCELONA, Spain, April 25, 2013 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Mavenir Systems, a leading provider of software-based networking solutions, today announced that it had won two awards for its Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Rich Communication Services (RCS) Solutions. The company picked-up the awards for "Most Innovative Service Launch by IMS" and 'Best VoLTE Product' in the prestigious Informa Industry Awards held at the 2013 IMS World Forum in Barcelona.

The world's first launches of VoLTE and RCS 5 services with Mavenir's suite of RCS 5 application servers were recognized as 'Most Innovative Service Launch enabled by IMS'. Both launches were with MetroPCS including the VoLTE launch in August 2012 and the RCS 5 launch, only 90 days later, in October 2012.

Mavenir's 'Best VoLTE Product' award for the Convergence Telephony Application Server (TAS) that enables the transformation of mobile networks to all-IP LTE. As part of a highly integrated E2E solution, Mavenir's TAS is uniquely equipped to offer service parity and synchronization with the circuit switched network so operators can quickly and easily integrate new services while saving costs. It can be deployed in a standalone configuration with any 3rd party IMS core or bundled with Mavenir's IMS solutions to offer a cost-effective end-to-end IMS voice service.

"As a next generation player, we are very pleased to win not one, but two awards, especially against the traditional vendors," said Ian Maclean, Mavenir's Vice President of Strategy and Marketing, who received the awards. "Mobile operators worldwide have selected Mavenir for our innovation and leadership in the market so it was an honor to be recognized in front of many of them."

Mavenir's suite of application servers and recently announced Virtualized IMS solutions, including the Telephony Application Server, Presence Server, Content Server and Rich Messaging Server, are based on the mOne� Convergence Platform and are specifically designed to simplify mobile operators' network transformations.

About Mavenir:

Mavenir is a leading provider of software-based communications solutions that enable mobile service providers to deliver high-quality internet protocol (IP)-based voice, video, rich communication and enhanced messaging services to their subscribers globally. Mavenir's mOne� software platform has enabled leading mobile service providers to introduce the industry's first live network deployment of Voice-Over-LTE (VoLTE) and the industry's first live deployment of next-generation Rich Communication Services 5.0 (RCS). Our solutions deliver next-generation services such as RCS, VoLTE and Voice over Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi) over existing 2G and 3G networks and next-generation 4G LTE networks. www.mavenir.com

Contact:Maryvonne Tubb+1 469 916 4393pr@mavenir.com

SOURCE Mavenir Systems

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RelayRides - Carsharing catches on with Millennials

March 12, 2013

Fortune - Kurt Wagner, reporter

FORTUNE -- When RelayRides CEO Andre Haddad isn't using his 2006 Porsche 911, he encourages strangers to drive it.

This willingness to share -- even something as valuable as a sports car -- is the premise behind carsharing, a growing industry that connects car owners with renters seeking out a temporary set of wheels. What started with Zipcar's community car fleets in 2000 has expanded to include individual owners making their cars available to strangers over the internet. Carsharing, as a result, is threatening the long-entrenched structure of auto ownership.

The so-called sharing economy -- people rent out spare bedrooms (AirBnB), under-utilized conference rooms (LiquidSpace), and even their free labor (TaskRabbit) -- has grown substantially in just a few years. But the transportation industry has seen the greatest change. A 2012 study by Lacey Plache, chief economist at Edmunds.com, found that young adults aged 18-34 purchased 30% fewer cars in 2011 than they did in 2007. Now, carsharing may be a leading indicator for a much broader set of services.

Carsharing proponents argue that, for those who own vehicles, renting them out to strangers through services like RelayRides or FlightCar can defray car payments considerably (sometimes altogether). For renters, paying for a car only when it is actually needed can be much less expensive ownership, particularly in big cities. Carsharing -- along with a revamped take on carpooling, dubbed ridesharing -- has gotten a jolt from smartphone-wielding millennials in need of a ride. "For a long time the [car] was the symbol of freedom, the symbol of adulthood," says Haddad of RelayRides. "That's apparently been shaken up in a lot of younger people's minds."

MORE: How online ruined dating ... forever

How's it work? San Francisco-based FlightCar allows car owners to rent out their wheels while traveling. Users park at the airport, for instance, and let another traveler use their cars until they return. Ridesharing services like SideCar and Lyft, both headquartered in San Francisco, connect ride-seekers with local drivers who use their own cars to taxi people around; they require only an app to operate. Thanks to smartphone technology, even traditional taxi and limo services are working to get in on the action. Flywheel and Uber help passengers hail taxis or limo-type rides using GPS to find the closest possible driver.

Such services have been largely fueled by a growing number of American urbanites. In 2010, more than 80% of the U.S. population lived in urban areas compared to only 73% in 1980, according to census data. Cities provide car owners with financial challenges like higher gas prices, insurance, and difficult to find or expensive parking. These higher ownership costs have kept teenagers from rushing to the DMV. Roughly half of all 16-year-olds had their driver's license in 1978. By 2008, that figure fell to 31%; in 2010, it was down to 28%. For people who need cars only sparingly, renting from a neighbor is sufficient. For those without a license, bumming a ride has become easier. "We are moving from a product-oriented economy to a services-oriented economy," says Sunil Paul, CEO of SideCar. "We are going to turn transportation from a product (buy a car), to a service (download this app)."

Carsharing and ridesharing platforms have stepped in to fill the void. SideCar drivers had completed 10,000 rides in July of 2012; by December that figure rose to 100,000. RelayRides has cars for rent in more than 1,200 cities across the country, all of them added since last year. Flywheel's taxi hailing software is in 3,000 taxis across the country, and will soon expand into New York City when vendors begin using "e-hail" technology, possibly at the end of March. Zipcar has more than 760,000 members and was acquired by Avis for $500 million in January.

Of course, this stream of carsharing and ridesharing services that cropped up during the recession is also competing with a rejuvenated auto industry -- U.S. car sales were up 13% in 2012 over 2011. All three major U.S. automakers showed improved sales led by Chrysler's 21% jump last year. And sharing economy proponents aren't the only ones who have been trying to make car ownership cheaper the last few years -- during the recession, car dealerships worked hard to stifle ownership fears by offering customers lower interest rates on car loans than the banks.

MORE: Meet the 12-year-old who's pitching his app at SXSW

Ridesharing is also testing the bounds set up by state law. Last fall, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) levied $20,000 fines against Uber, SideCar, and Zimride, which operates the Lyft app. The CPUC issued a cease and desist to both SideCar and Lyft around the same time; Uber received its cease and desist letter in 2010. In October, Uber pulled out of New York City, citing "roadblocks" from the city's Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC). (The city approved "e-hail" apps in December, but the TLC is now being sued by Livery car groups in an attempt to stop the e-hail program, which could start this month.) In California, the CPUC fines for Lyft and Uber were suspended in January as the state began an "interim rulemaking period" to determine how best to approach this new avenue of transportation. The agreement specified that ridesharing was also temporarily legal. In a blog post, Uber, which currently only matches up passengers with commercially licensed taxi or town car drivers, announced intentions to join Lyft and SideCar in the ridesharing business.

According to Paul, taxi operators provide the majority of complaints to the state regarding competitor ridesharing services, and other established transportation players will soon take notice of these carsharing and ridesharing platforms if they haven't already. Avis (CAR) showed signs of adaptation when it purchased Zipcar, a carsharing veteran at just over a decade old, at the beginning of the year. RelayRides hasn't made contact with any rental services to date, says Haddad, but has gotten support from one major automaker: General Motors (GM). GM Ventures, the corporation's investment arm, is a financial backer.

Different sharing communities have begun to carve out their respective roles in the modern transportation landscape, and it appears as if there is room for everybody -- for now. "What we need to be focused on as vendors," says Humphreys, "is getting consumers around, getting them to not want to own a car, and getting them all the alternatives they want to get their hired rides."

 

RelayRides - Make Your Car Pay for Itself by Renting It to Someone Else

Wired

March 4, 2013 BY MARCUS WOHLSEN

A year ago, San Francisco-based RelayRides launched nationwide with the idea that, just like people are willing to rent their homes to strangers to make some extra money, they’d be willing to do the same with their cars.

Today the company says it’s proven its point, announcing that vehicles in its peer-to-peer car-renting network are now available in all 50 states.

The last states to fall were the Dakotas, says Steve Webb, a company spokesman. Though the Great Plains aren’t the geography most commonly associated with trendy sharing-economy apps,RelayRides likes to make the point that its service makes as much sense in a rural area as in a city.

Rent-by-the-hour car-sharing companies like Zipcar need the more frequent usage that comes with urban density to cover the cost of maintaining a fleet, Webb says. Peer-to-peer car-sharing doesn’t have that issue, since the cars’ owners would be paying for the upkeep of their vehicles anyway.

At the moment, RelayRides says vehicles in its network are available in 1,366 cities and towns across the country (see above). Though it won’t disclose an exact number, the company says thousands of cars are being rented to tens of thousands of drivers.

As with other digitally driven sharing-economy services, such as Uber for taxis or AirBnb for lodging, RelayRides runs on the realization that there’s money to be made in idleness. According to the company, most cars sit unused about 92 percent of the time. And while it sits, your car is doing one thing: depreciating.

RelayRides’ pitch to car owners is that now you can make your car earn its keep. The average monthly cost of car ownership is $233 per month. The average car owner who rents his or her vehicle out through RelayRides, meanwhile, brings in an average of $250 per month. That’s the equivalent of renting your car out just a few hours per week.

RelayRides depends on a fairly stringent screening process to weed out bad drivers from taking your car into a ditch. In addition to having cars in all 50 states, the company is also linked up to all 50 state DMVs. Too many moving violations and you can’t rent using RelayRides.

The cars themselves are screened by the drivers themselves, who leave feedback and star-ratings after they’re done driving much as they would rate a seller after buying something on eBay. And this isn’t surprising: RelayRides CEO Andre Haddad once worked as head of product for eBay’s multi-billion-dollar global marketplace.

That experience in managing one of the world’s largest platforms for peer-to-peer buying and selling makes Haddad a good fit for RelayRides, which he says is all about changing the way people think about their relationships to cars. Instead of a car being something to be owned, a car is something to used.

“The way people use cars hasn’t really changed much in the past century,” Haddad says. RelayRides wants to be that change.

“It’s a business model innovation,” Haddad says. “It’s the same car. We’re not changing car technology. We’re changing the way people use cars.”

Reputation.com - The price of reputation

The Economist

Feb 23rd 2013 | REDWOOD CITY, CALIFORNIA |From the print edition

Is the market for protected personal information about to take off?

EMBARRASSING pictures on Facebook show you dancing the hula naked at a frat party. A convicted bank robber in Texas has the same name as you—as every Google search makes all too clear. Such embarrassments would surely never befall you, dear reader. But they are common enough to spawn an entire business devoted to protecting and polishing people’s image online. Reputation.com, a Silicon Valley technology firm, is hoping that this year the market will finally fulfil its potential.

Reputation has 1.6m customers. For $99 a year or more they get a basic “reputation starter” package, which monitors when they are mentioned online and alerts them if anything sensitive comes up, such as “your real age, name, address, mugshots, legal disputes or marital problems”. For $5,000 a year, the firm will “combat misleading or inaccurate links from your top search results” (most people do not look at results much below the top page or two).

The problem has been to create a profitable business. Although there has long been evidence of growing unease about online privacy, getting anyone to pay for greater control of their image has proved difficult. “A lot of companies have started with idealism about empowering the online user, only to find that the user wouldn’t pay,” says Esther Dyson, a technology investor, who nonetheless remains optimistic that this will change.

Michael Fertik, Reputation’s 34-year-old founder, thinks the change is now happening, helped along by several recent deals. In January Reputation acquired Reputation 24/7, a British competitor. It also began a partnership with Equifax, one of America’s big three consumer-credit monitoring firms, offering Equifax’s customers free access to Reputation’s basic online identity-monitoring and clean-up services. TransUnion Interactive, a competitor of Equifax, will roll out a similar arrangement with Reputation in the spring.

The next step is to launch a data vault—like a bank vault containing all the data that constitute a person’s reputation. It is the most important step in Mr Fertik’s idea not merely to give people more power over their data but to “invert the basic business model of the internet”. The current business model, as he describes it, is that giant firms give customers something free, collect data on them without their knowledge and sell it to third parties to do with whatever they like. “We want to turn it on its head, by [letting] the consumer… decide if they want to sell information about themselves to companies that want to get to know them.”

The upstart firms face some technology problems. Reputation is making progress in some areas, such as how to ensure the person whose online presence is being monitored is actually the person you think he or she is. But the biggest challenge is to find enough buyers and sellers to create a marketplace potentially worth billions. Mr Fertik reckons critical mass will come at around 10m individual customers and around 50 companies keen to pay for access to their data vaults.

Not everyone is convinced consumers will go for this. One boss at Microsoft argues that most people will find managing personal data too complex and that in practice online privacy will be secured by regulation, not products. In the past couple of years more firms have started to accept that personal data will be protected more strongly than before, whether by regulation—which is likely to be tightened in Europe and America—or through market mechanisms like those envisaged by Mr Fertik. Indeed, the data vault may usher in the sort of market-based solutions that “might discourage heavier regulation by Congress, where protecting privacy is one of the few genuinely bipartisan causes,” says Jon Leibowitz, the (outgoing) chairman of America’s Federal Trade Commission. “Reputation.com is very far ahead of the curve in trying to give consumers some control over their data,” he adds.

Reputation is not alone, though. It competes with a host of start-ups, from personal.com to mydex. Another firm, Snapchat, is tackling the problem at its source by allowing people to send photos to friends that erase themselves shortly after being viewed. Some big firms, including banks and maybe even current internet giants, will probably enter the new market. Some may even offer to buy Reputation. Mr Fertik is not fazed. His firm has the advantage of that most valuable thing, which it must protect at all costs: a good reputation.

From the print edition: Business

 

 

Tegile - Wins Best in Class in Flash Memory Storage Array

February 20, 2013

2013 DCIG Best in Class (February 20, 2013)

Today, DCIG published their inaugural 2013 Flash Memory Storage Array Buyer’s Guide.
Tegile’s HA2800 is the only product in the group to achieve a “Best in Class” rating.

Tegile was recognized for the following:

• Best balance of strengths across all scoring categories.
• Achieved ranking of recommended or excellent in five of the six scoring categories.
• Support for all evaluated VMware vSphere VAAI features.
• Large RAM cache of 192 GB.

The report can be downloaded for review (registration required).....

 

Tegile – Wins Gold in Storage Magazine Product of the Year Award

Storage Magazine

February 13, 2013

Tegile Systems Inc.’s Zebi HA2800 Storage Array earns first place in the enterprise storage systems category in Storage magazine’s/SearchStorage.com’s 2012 Products of the Year competition...

	TEGILE SYSTEMS INC. ZEBI HA2800 STORAGE ARRAY
	NEXGEN STORAGE INC. NEXGEN N5-150 STORAGE SYSTEM
	NIMBUS DATA SYSTEMS INC. GEMINI FLASH MEMORY ARRAY
Finalists	Astute Networks Inc. ViSX G4
	Avere Systems Inc. FXT 4500 Edge Filer
	EMC Corp. VMAX 40K
	HDS Hitachi Unified Storage VM (HUS VM)
	Nasuni Corp. Nasuni 4.0
	Nimble Storage Inc. Nimble CS400 Series
	Pure Storage Inc. FlashArray FA-320
	Riverbed Technology Granite 1.0
	Starboard Storage Systems Inc. AC72 Storage System
	StorSimple Inc. StorSimple 7520
	Tintri Inc. VMstore T540
	Whiptail Technologies Inc. Invicta ISSA-12

 

Click to read Storage Magazine’s review of Tegile’s HA2800 

 

Virsto - VMware to Acquire Virsto

February 11, 2013

VMware News Releases

PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 11, 2013 – VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Virsto® Software, a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based provider of software that optimizes storage performance and utilization in virtual environments. 

“VMware is committed to continuing to deliver software innovations that bring significant efficiencies to our customers while simplifying infrastructure and IT,” said John Gilmartin, vice president of storage and availability, VMware. “We believe that the acquisition of Virsto will accelerate our development of storage technologies, allowing our customers to greatly improve the efficiency and performance of storage in virtual infrastructure.”

Organizations are looking for solutions to address the increasing complexity and cost of storage within virtual and cloud environments, particularly for virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI), large software development and test centers and to support business-critical applications.  Virsto provides breakthrough storage optimization technologies that improve storage performance and utilization in these environments. When implemented within a VDI, Virsto can reduce the cost of storage per desktop by as much as 70 percent. 

As part of its strategy to deliver the software-defined datacenter, VMware continues to invest and innovate to extend the benefits of virtualization to every domain in the datacenter – compute, network, storage and the associated security and availability services.  VMware has been at the forefront of innovations to storage in virtual environments, and the acquisition of Virsto will expand VMware’s storage portfolio, which includes the storage virtualization and management capabilities of VMware vSphere® and the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance™. In addition, EMC Corporation plans to license the Virsto technology, extending the cooperative efforts between the two companies in storage architectures.

“VMware and Virsto share a highly aligned vision to remove complexity and increase efficiencies through virtualization,” said Mark Davis, CEO, Virsto.  “We are excited to combine forces with VMware to provide customers a more cost-effective, efficient, and agile storage architecture.”

Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition is scheduled to close in the first quarter of 2013 subject to customary closing conditions.

Additional Resources

• Read VMware’s John Gilmartin blog “VMware to Acquire Virsto Software” here
• Read Virsto’s Mark Davis blog “I Have a Dream” here
• Connect with VMware on Twitter and Facebook

About Virsto 
Virsto® Software Corporation changes the economics of storage in virtualized environments by improving utilization, increasing performance, and accelerating VM storage provisioning. Virsto reduces the cost and complexity of storage for VDI, test and development, business-critical application virtualization, cloud computing and other virtualization initiatives. Founded in 2007, Virsto is backed by leading Silicon Valley venture firms. For more information, visit www.virsto.com.

About VMware 
VMware is the leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions that enable businesses to thrive in the Cloud Era. Customers rely on VMware to help them transform the way they build, deliver and consume Information Technology resources in a manner that is evolutionary and 
based on their specific needs. With 2012 revenues of $4.61 billion, VMware has more than 
480,000 customers and 55,000 partners. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with 
offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

The World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Big Data

February 11, 2013

BY: FAST COMPANY STAFF

1_Splunk

For deploying its data crunchers to improve operations for its 5,000 clients, from Zynga to Rutgers University to Comcast to the FBI.

2_Quid

For tracking emerging tech trends with trillions of data points. Quid funnels information from patent applications, research papers, news articles, funding, and others, to create interactive visual maps of current happenings in technology sectors.

3_Kaggle

For pitting data scientists from across the globe against each other to solve research problems for prize money. Since its founding two years ago, Kaggle posted nearly 60 challenges, from mapping dark matter for NASA to helping Drexel University predict HIV progression.

4_ZestFinance

For hacking a new credit rating system by analyzing thousands of variables to determine an applicant’s credit score, with the goal of providing better access to loans for those with poor credit.

5_Apixio

For curing data headaches by streamlining electronic health records. Clinical data is often saved in a hodgepodge of formats. Apixio’s data platform fixes the glitch, making different types of records universally searchable for doctors and nurses.

6_Datameer

For visualizing business intelligence by designing data sets into a spreadsheet-like interface, and then converting the analytics into stunning infographics and dashboards.

7_BlueKai

For leading the pack in marrying big data with marketing. With the recent launch of its Audience x Media analytics platform, BlueKai’s customers can measure the performance of online campaigns--by looking at attributes like demographics and shopping habits--and model the next campaign’s target audience more efficiently.

8_Gnip

For filtering distractions out of social media by letting users customize what they see--and what they don’t--from their incoming Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Wordpress, and YouTube data streams.

9_RetailNext

For hipping brick-and-mortar stores to e-commerce-style customer data. Thecompany integrates data from technologies like face detection and on-shelf sensors to help retailers know their customer as well as online counterparts do.

10_Recommind

For creating a better e-record-keeping system. Recommind recently helped the U.S. Department of Energy streamline its e-mail operations with a system that automatically copies and indexes files and then identifies documents that can be deleted.

 

We snoop to conquer

February 9, 2013

The Economist - From the print edition

Security cameras are watching honest shoppers, too

SHOPPING online is a revealing act. Websites know what catches visitors’ fancy, how long they linger and where to find them when they leave. Traditional shopkeepers are blind by comparison. Who enters their stores and how they behave are mysteries, which are only partly solved when someone buys something. A click from a finger means more than one from a stiletto heel.

Bricks-and-mortar retailers would like to change that. Stacey Shulman, technology chief of American Apparel, a clothes chain, craves “the same type of analytics in-store as I can get online”. In many cases the equipment is already there: security cameras watch out for thieves and Wi-Fi networks pick up mobile-phone signals. A “furious amount” of testing is going on to see whether such technology can help retailers understand customers better and thus boost profits, says Anthony Mullen of Forrester Research.

Cameras rolling in the aisles

Just knowing how many shoppers cross the threshold, and when, can be useful. American Apparel’s store managers thought they were busiest when sales peaked. They were typically off by two hours. Now the retailer gathers traffic data from cameras mounted above the doors and feeds that into its staff-scheduling software. When crowds come, the shops now have enough salespeople to serve them. As a result, sales are up “across the board”.

Traffic-counting is already fairly common practice. ShopperTrak has been providing that service to stores for 20 years. A newer breed of service providers, such as RetailNext, American Apparel’s partner, and Tyco, whose roots are in security, encourages retail chains to harness in-store hardware for more exotic purposes. Crime-fighting cameras guess shoppers’ sex and age and draw “heat maps” showing how they move around a store.

Gordmans, a Midwestern department-store chain, discovered via video that goods at a particular display sold especially well. It changed the wares from home furnishings to higher-margin fashion items. Mannequins made by Almax, an Italian company, look back at customers with camera eyes, noting sex, age and ethnicity. One noticed a contingent of Asian shoppers arriving at a shop at the same time every day, prompting the manager to post Asian salespeople to receive them.

Tracking mobile phones yields different nuggets: what share of passers-by enters a store, how many leave immediately (the “bounce rate”) and how many are repeat customers. At least half a dozen retailers are experimenting with tracking employees’ mobile phones to find out, for example, how long it takes to retrieve a pair of shoes from the stockroom.

Retailers need every advantage they can muster to cope with price-chopping websites and skittish rich-world consumers. But they risk giving shoppers the creeps. Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum in San Diego thinks using cameras for non-security ends “violates some very fundamental expectations and rights”. She fears that retailers will profile casual browsers by combining in-store tracking with data from outside sources. The risk will rise as the technology improves.

“There’s no expectation of privacy when you go into a mall,” retorts one shopper-monitoring executive. A better answer is that retailers like American Apparel are analysing groups, not identifying individuals. Cameras set up to do anything fancier than traffic-counting are confined to a few test stores. Mobile-phone trackers identify phones, not their owners, says Will Smith of Euclid Analytics. Still, Euclid recommends telling customers that tracking is going on. “Companies that succeed in this space are companies that address privacy correctly,” he says.

 

Future of Retail: How Companies Can Employ Big Data to Create a Better Shopping Experience

August 31, 2012

Time Business Online - Christopher Matthews - You don’t have to be a management consultant to know that we are all besieged by information, but it’s the consultant’s job to come up with a snappy buzzword to describe the phenomenon, and they have settled upon the catchall term “Big Data.” Everything from the most trivial details of our personal lives to highly sensitive information at work is now stored and catalogued in bits and bytes; Big Data refers to the deployment of these vast troves of information to make businesses more efficient and responsive to clients and consumers.

From healthcare to finance to professional sports, data is being collected and analyzed like never before — but much of it goes on behind the scenes where the average person may not even notice. The retail sector, however, is different. By definition it interacts with average folks in a way that few other industries do, and retailers are interested in learning as much about their customers as they can. In the process, they are radically altering the buying experience for customers — both online and, increasingly, also in the world of bricks and mortar stores.

If you’ve done any shopping online recently – you’ve probably already seen Big Data in action. We’ve all experienced it: You go shopping for a pair of shoes online, put them in your virtual shopping cart, but then for some reason change our mind. Afterwards, seemingly every site you visit features an ad for that very pair of shoes at that same online store. The reason? Online retailers can give you a virtual identification number and track you as you go from site to site, and purchase targeted ads for products they already know you’re strongly interested in.

Based on a user’s behavior, sites like Amazon can present special offers or alert users of products they might not have otherwise been aware. According to a report issued last year by McKinsey Global Institute, Amazon has had tremendous success by using data it has collected to discover what additional products its users are likely to buy. As the study noted, “Amazon reported that 30 percent of sales were due to its recommendation engine.”

But the proliferation and maturation of information technology hasn’t only aided business. According to Paula Rosenblum, a retail analyst at RSR Associates, the ubiquity of Internet access and smartphones has given consumers more bargaining power than ever. “I don’t think people realize how much the consumer is in control these days,” she says. Consumers are no longer bound by geography — the handful of stores offering a specific product within driving radius — when searching for the best price or service. Even when they are physically shopping in a store, smartphones allow them to quickly and easily check for better prices elsewhere.

In the era of Big Data, it’s those physical stores that seemed destined to be left out in the cold. But the vast majority of purchases  – somewhere around 90% — still occur in a traditional retail setting. And brick and mortar retailers are looking towards big data to help them stay relevant.

One company that hopes to give traditional retailers the kind of analytic tools available to ecommerce firms is RetailNext. The firm has developed a computer program that uses a store’s security cameras to give managers all kinds of information about how consumers interact with the store. Using this program, Retail Next can show exactly how many customers are in a given store at a time, which parts of the store they explore, which specific items customers spend a lot of time perusing — and which they do not. RetailNext can combine this information with other variables like staffing levels, weather, product assortment and placement to determine what does and doesn’t boost sales. Luxury retailer Mont Blanc has used RetailNext’s services to improve its staffing levels and its product arrangement within its stores, increasing same-store sales 20% in the process. Retailers like American Apparel and Family Dollar have also successfully utilized RetailNext’s services to improve the layout of their stores and increase same-store sales.

In fact, it’s possible that traditional retailers could one day have a better understanding of their customers than ecommerce firms do. That’s at least what Tim Callan, Chief Marketing Officer at RetailNext, argues. He says that for customers in physical stores the “decision making capability is infinite, while there are only so many things they can do online.” In other words, given the right tools, a retailer can glean much more about a shopper from watching her peruse a traditional retail aisle than he can watching her click through links on a webpage. His firm is working on computer programs that can accurately distinguish — through video cameras — whether a shopper is male or female, and believes in the future this sort of technology could interpret customers’ facial expressions and other gestures that will help retailers understand why someone did or did not buy a certain product.

Inevitably, as retailers use Big Data to learn more about their customers — especially through video — privacy concerns will be raised. But as Callan argues, “video surveillance has been around for thirty years, and people assume that it’s necessary for public security.”  Indeed, consumers have come to take it for granted that a camera is watching their every move in a store.

On the other hand, it’s one thing to for consumers to assume that cameras are watching, and another thing to have your every movement picked apart by a computer for marketing reasons. Pam Dixon, Executive Director of the World Privacy Forum, thinks that these types of methods are a breach of consumer privacy expectations, and that companies who use these types of analytics need – at the very least — to be forthright about their practices. “I think it’s absolutely crucial for these companies to come clean with the public and disclose what is happening,” she says.

While privacy issues related to in-store use of video cameras has yet to cause much of an uproar, another component of retail companies’ collection of data – smartphone tracking – has been a hot-button issue. The Wall Street Journal conducted a study in 2010 of over 100 popular smartphone applications and found that applications were collecting information about, “location, unique serial-number-like identifiers for the phone, and personal details such as age and sex,” and sending that information to marketing companies.

Though privacy concerns about tracking users on smartphones has made many in the public uncomfortable, marketing intelligently through smartphones is believed to be a crucial next step for many retailers. Smartphones can bridge the gap between the online and offline worlds, because users always have their phones with them, even when they’re not browsing the Internet. Retailers can learn about a customer through their online shopping behavior and then offer them short-term discounts through a cell-phone when the consumer is near that stores brick-and-mortar location.

Unfortunately for consumers who are made uncomfortable by all this surveillance, there aren’t any federal laws that block this kind of behavior, and the federal regulators haven’t been entirely successful at forcing companies to be forthright about their practices. But for brick-and-mortar retailers who wish to serve their customers better by knowing them better, there has never been a more exciting time.

Link to origianl article: http://business.time.com/2012/08/31/future-of-retail-how-companies-can-employ-big-data-to-create-a-better-shopping-experience/