Wal-Mart said its fast-growing use of radio-transmitting inventory tags has helped boost sales by keeping shelves better stocked with key merchandise.
The use of RFID, or radio-frequency identification tags, has reduced out-of-stock merchandise by 16 percent at the company's stores that have begun to use the technology over the past 12 months. Wal-Mart (WMT) has been able to restock RFID-tagged items three times as fast as non-tagged items.
Earlier this year, a formatting standard was agreed upon for an electronic product code, or EPC, to replace the old UPC bar code, clearing the way for mass participation by manufacturers of all kinds. Suppliers also have become more enthusiastic about the tags as their price has dropped, now selling for between 10 and 30 cents on average, compared with 20 to 50 cents a year earlier.
The retailer now has more than 130 major suppliers shipping merchandise to its distribution centers with RFID tags attached, with about 5.4 million tags received at Wal-Mart distribution centers during the past year. The company expects to add another 200 suppliers to the list by January, with about 1,000 stores and warehouses ready to receive their tagged goods.
The company continues to expand its use of the technology despite pockets of resistance from consumer-privacy groups. A group organized by CASPIAN, or Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, picketed a Wal-Mart supercenter in Dallas, protesting Wal-Mart's tagging of printers and document scanners from Hewlett-Packard being sold at the store.
"This will make objects -- and the people wearing and carrying them -- remotely trackable," said Katherine Albrecht, a spokeswoman for the consumer group. "We have rock-solid evidence that they are already devising ways to exploit that potential."
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Sour berries: The maker of the BlackBerry e-mail device lost another bid to derail the patent infringement case against it when Chief Justice John Roberts refused to suspend the proceedings pending a Supreme Court appeal.
Roberts rejected a request by Research In Motion (RIMM) to stay a lower court's patent infringement ruling while the high court decides whether to hear a RIM appeal.
RIM could still refile its request for a stay with one of the other Supreme Court justices.
But RIM said in a statement it expected the next step in the case to be a scheduling conference before a lower court, which could be held within weeks, setting the timing for further proceedings and possibly an injunction blocking U.S. sales.
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Raise the rent: Yahoo is doubling the price of its online music subscription service for portable MP3 players, ending a short-lived promotion that sought to lure consumers from Apple's market-leading iTunes store.
Effective Nov. 1, Yahoo (YHOO) will charge about $120 annually for access via download to more than 1 million songs that can then be transferred to portable players. The company has been charging just under $60 annually -- a price most industry observers predicted wouldn't last when Yahoo entered the market in early May.
With its service, Yahoo joined Napster and RealNetworks in trying to sell the concept of renting an unlimited amount of tunes for a set fee instead of buying copies individually.
The rental approach is supposed to encourage customers to sample different genres and discover new artists. But if the subscription expires, the previously downloaded music becomes unplayable.
Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster said Yahoo's low rental prices didn't impress most consumers because the service isn't compatible with Apple's iPod -- which boasts about 75 percent of the market for portable players.
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Spy hunters summit: A coalition of anti-spyware vendors and consumer groups published guidelines to help consumers assess products designed to combat unwanted programs that sneak onto computers.
The Anti-Spyware Coalition released the guidelines for public comment and also updated a separate document that attempted to craft uniform definitions for "spyware" and "adware" in hopes of giving computer users more control over their machines.
The new guidelines from the coalition assign risk levels to various practices common with spyware and adware.
The idea is to agree on what practices consumers should worry most about. Within the general rankings, individual vendors still have leeway to assign their own weight to each behavior in deciding whether to quarantine or remove a program when detected.
The coalition also offers similar rankings on consent. High marks go to programs that are distributed as separate downloads in clearly labeled packages, while those that try to bury what they do in legalese are given low ratings. The commenting period on the guidelines ends Nov. 27.
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Compiled by Keith Axline. AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
