Urgent, Urgent, Urgent…

Excuse me while I just sing out loud to myself for a second:

You’re not shy, you get around

You wanna fly, don’t want your feet on the ground

You stay up, you won’t come down

You wanna live, you wanna move to the sound

You say it’s urgent (urgent, urgent…)

Okay, we’re gonna play human Shazam.

Name that tune!

Need a hint?  Lou Graham?  Singers of “Cold As Ice?” “Hot Blooded?” “Juke Box Hero?”

Of course, I’m talking about Foreigner.  And I’m talking about them not only because they were a band instrumental to my youth, but because they’ll be playing at the IBM Innovate event next week in Orlando.

I won’t be in attendance, but my partner-in-crime, Scott Laningham, will be there and covering the event, and I’m entirely jealous all my colleagues and our customers are going to see Foreigner and I’m not.

You can still register, and if you do, you can expect to select from over 400 technical sessions, some extended technical training with hands-on workshops, great keynotes, a comprehensive exhibit hall, and the opportunity to network with over 4,000 of your peers.

What else do you want?

We’re going to have mountaineers and string theorists among our external keynote speakers, not to mention one of my favorite IBM execs, Rational’s vice president of marketing, Gina Poole.

Here’s just a few of the key tracks you can look to follow while in Orlando: Application lifecycle management. Design, development, test and deployment. Embedded systems and software. Security. Smarter computing with enterprise modernization.

A little something for every developer in all of us.

If, like me, you can’t be there in the flesh, there’s going to be more than ample opportunity to follow the stream from beyond. First and foremost, use the #ibminnovate hash tag to keep track on Twitter.

You can also watch some of the great video content Scott and team will be producing at www.livestream.com/ibmsoftware.

Scott tells me I might even be making a guest remote appearance.

But whether I make it or not, if you’re in the software development realm, I don’t know why you would be anywhere else next week.

Just don’t tell me how great Foreigner was when you get back.

Scanning For Deals

A sample IBM self-checkout system. In partnership with Honeywell, a new smartphone application will let shoppers scan items as they move through the store, then check out themselves using a similar IBM self-checkout system.

One of my first jobs in school was bagging groceries at a local grocery store.  The irony was, it was one of those grocery stories where you were supposed to sack your own groceries, and, presumably, save some money doing so.

But the store was so popular when it first opened that it had its store assistants sack groceries to help move the lines along.

Those were the days when they didn’t have the fancy scanners — everything was still checked by hand.

So when I saw this announcement this morning IBM made that allows consumers to scan items as they move through the store, all I could think about was the Jetsons.

This new retail technology not only allows consumers to scan items with their mobile phones as they move about the store, it then lets them check themselves out at an IBM self-checkout station (yes, those exist today, but not with technology that allows consumers to scan the items as they’re shopping!)

Designed to help retailers provide a more customized in-store shopping experience for smart phone shoppers, the IBM Mobile Shopper application incorporates Honeywell mobile scanning technology capable of scanning virtually any bar code, no matter what background it is printed on, the direction it faces, or the packaging covering it.

The solution currently runs on the Google Android and Apple iOS operating systems.

According to a recent IBM Institute of Business Value study, self checkout is the preferred way to shop for most consumers today, and they are very specific about the way they want to use mobile technology while shopping.

More than 50 percent say they want to use a mobile device to scan while shopping, and to do final checkout at a self-checkout station.  More than 40 percent want to scan samples and retrieve shopping items for pickup, or have the items delivered directly to their homes.

“Retailers can now deliver a more personalized shopping experience that is less of a chore and more of a convenience for consumers,” says John Gaydac, vice president, IBM Retail Store Solutions.  “By enabling consumers to scan and check-out a wide variety of products at their own pace, retailers can not only create a more customized shopping environment, but also increase in-store traffic.”

The new mobile phone application is powered by IBM ACE Store Integrator software and the newest release of IBM Self-Checkout software, which provides shoppers the same access to digital coupons, loyalty programs and special promotions at self-checkout stations that is traditionally available at fully-staffed point-of-sale checkout lanes.

The IBM Mobile Shopper, or “digital shopping assistant,” incorporates Honeywell’s high-performance SwiftDecoder Mobile bar code decoding software, one of many patented technologies that have helped secure the company’s  leadership in camera-based bar code decoding.  Among them is the practice of decoding bar code-related information from a real-time video image, such as the display of a smart phone or other mobile device (U.S. patent 6,015,088).

The IBM Mobile Shopper solution with Honeywell mobile scanning is available immediately.