Amazon, Apple top traditional retailers

Analysts say that Amazon and Apple are among the household names likely to have outperformed traditional retailers and helped offset a disappointing start to the holiday shopping season, says MarketWatch.

"Spending on technology is one of the few areas where consumers have not slowed down at all, even in the current recession," said Nicolas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx.

For US stock investors, it's hard to get a clear picture, early on in the holiday shopping season, of how much consumers are buying online because the systems for gauging that information are not properly developed, observed Marc Pado, US market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald. He said he thinks more consumers are buying technology gifts than many might expect.

A US Federal Reserve Board proposal would have store clerks asking customers for proof of their salaries before issuing instant credit, reports StorefrontBacktalk.

The Credit Card Act proposal, being fought by retailers, raises many troubling questions for retail IT execs. To be able to later prove its compliance with the federal rule, will retailers have to enter the salary data into its POS? Will copies have to be retained and scanned? This is likely to attract more aggressive cyber thieves and retailers may be tempted to add such information into CRM databases.

From a non-IT perspective, the move would certainly discourage consumers from accepting-or even pursuing-instant credit, which has been a wonderful thing for merchants.

Retail technology provider National Cash Register (NCR) is doubling the manpower of its research-and-development (R&D) facility, says Business Mirror.

At present, NCR in Cebu has 500 employees. The increase changes this figure to 900 employees, made up of mostly software and hardware engineers who will design, develop and test assisted and self-service solutions like automated retail facilities and point-of-sale equipment, mostly for the US and European market.

Instead of just working on retail equipment, Cebu will soon venture into designing travel and entertainment. “We will soon develop facilities that will be set up in airports where passengers will only enter their locator number and they can already get their boarding passes and choose their seats,” says engineering manager Victor Silvestre.