GREC: Mobile Retail Experience at CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2009

The centerpiece of the Mobile Retail Experience was the "Tag Your IT!" pavilion hosted on the expo floor. This pavilion brought together four separate technology vendors into the industry"s first simulated store shopping environment, covering an end-to-end shopping trip:

1. A street team circled the convention center wearing t-shirts with three different "tags" on it: the Nokia Point & Find enabled logo on the front and a back featuring an industry-standard QR code for other camera-enabled phones and an abbreviated dialing code (#147) from Singletouch so people could dial a short code and listen to an interactive message.

2. At that point, the visitor could enter their phone number and receive a text message inviting them to the booth and giving them a bCODE - a text message accessible to 99.7% of the roughly 4 billion mobile handsets in the world today - which brought them into the "store" to be redeemed at "checkout."

3. In the store, three different technologies for providing shoppers with additional information at the shelf: abbreviated dialing codes from Singletouch made it easy for shoppers to get recipes, deals, and product information by dialing simple codes like #MEALS on their phones; Tranzfinity showed how a physical environment could link into the world of social media on Facebook; and Nokia"s Point & Find technology seemingly magically enabled shoppers to point the camera on their phone at products and trigger interactive experiences.

4. Fashion Three separate stations, illustrating the three primary shopping categories (food, fashion & speciality goods), gave our visiting "shoppers" a first hand look at how these technologies come together to improve the shopping process.

* FOOD: Moving the phone over boxes of macaroni gave the visitor allergy information, while apples were tagged with location of origin, method of harvest, varietal and organic status.

* FASHION: By moving the phone over a shoe on display, shoppers could find out if the store had their size in stock - a major time saver for the customer and labor savings for the retailer.

* SPECIALTY: A handheld computer was tagged with multiple information sources, from product reviews to carrier compatibility to ancillary software applications, all accessible by simply moving the phone over the device.

5. At the end of the shopping experience, visitors could redeem their bCODE at the "point of sale" to see if they had won a prize.

This complete "end to end" storyline is unique, and at the heart of the Mobile Retail Experience. While the show floor was jam-packed with companies showcasing technologies, it is up to retailers to tie them together into a comprehensive offering to their shoppers that simply makes the shopping experience BETTER. This was the point of the Mobile Retail Experience: to actually demonstrate how different technologies work together in a retail environment.

To read more about the Mobile Retail Experience at CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment 2009, please visit our blog at:

http://blog.globalretailexec.org/2009/10/the-mobile-retail-experience-part-one-tag-your-it.html

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