Back in June 2012, I highlighted some of the important deadlines/details behind the October 2012 expansion of the Visa Technology Innovation Program (TIP). The program was developed to not only motivate U.S. retailers to support the migration of EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) chip technology, but to also aid retailers in their roll-outs.

At the time, I urged readers to pay close attention to the road map outlined by Visa TIP--especially those who were considering new technology investments. There are also many benefits of becoming EMV/NFC compliant--most important of which is improved security (with associated fraud reduction).

What’s more, because EMV technology has become the payment security standard in almost every developed country in the world except the U.S., it appears there might not be a way around the seemingly inevitable migration.

Which is why when I came across the recent Integrating Mobile Across All Touch Points report from Retail TouchPoints (RTP), I was really surprised to learn that many U.S. retailers are still so unprepared to accept EMV (contact) and NFC (contactless) payments.

IDTechEx released a new report, entitlled Apparel RFID 2013-2023, that finds that RFID tagging of apparel is now the largest and fastest growing application of RFID in retailing, the retail supply chain and associated industries. What’s more, the systems and tag business in the apparel RFID space is expected to grow at double the rate of the overall RFID market through the next ten years, according to the report.

Sure, that’s just one study. However, over the past couple of months, several strategic partnerships formed between Jamison RFID and Truecount; Port Logistics Group and Tagsys RFID; BizSlate and R.E.R. International, support the claim that RFID technology is starting to gain real momentum within the industry.

One of the biggest drivers of RFID technology in retail is the need for better inventory accuracy—a problem that IHL Group has estimated costs retailers $800 Billion worldwide. In an effort to help our customers tackle this global problem, reduce shrink, and increase shoppers’ loyalty, we recently teamed with RFKeeper. RFKeeper offers solutions that are completely scalable—from a single store deployment to tracking inventory across the entire supply chain. Most importantly, these solutions can be achieved with minimal integration effort to existing systems, which we know is a big concern for many our customers.

It’s a fact that most retailers today are at least using some mix of mobile technology/solutions in their stores. From our perspective, specifically, we’ve been busy helping many of our customers develop a comprehensive mobile solution to keep them on par with their competitors.

Sure, the tremendous growth of mobile technology in retail over the last few years has left many throughout the industry—including myself—wondering how long it will be before mobile completely transforms retail as we know it. But is the traditional POS really dead?

Well, not quite, according to the latest results from IHL Group’s POS Vendor Shipments Database. As a matter of fact, the research concluded that the overall penetration of POS devices continued to expand in 3.9% in North America and 4.6% worldwide in 2012. What’s more, growth is expected to continue at 3.6% worldwide for 2013!