by Dr. Björn Christensen, Chief Executive Officer of meteolytix

A rainy day can generate a sudden spike in cupcake sales while a hot summer day can generate a surge in the sales of panini’s.

These are some surprising trends hidden in mountains of information that analytics can unearth to help businesses understand their consumers better and seize the unexpected business opportunity.

Consumer-focused businesses know all too well just how much weather shifts can affect consumer demand. Retailers, restaurant chains and consumer product companies often point to the weather as a key factor driving positive and negative variations in sales.

So how can your business manage weather’s impact to predict consumer buying trends more effectively?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Take for example, in Germany, local bakeries continue to dominate the market for baked goods due to their deep knowledge of German consumers’ taste and short shelf life of baked goods.

Analytics is helping local bakers in Germany get one step closer to understanding what consumers want and when they want it so they can focus on exploring new baking techniques to keep the consumer coming back for more versus having unsold bakes goods on the shelves.

The ability to identify and manage weather’s impact requires more than a simple weather forecast.

Businesses need a level of analytic insight that is time-sensitive driven by an unexpected weather change that can be incorporated quickly into planning, distribution, marketing, pricing and inventory management to drive sales and fullfill consumer demand.

For instance, data such as local holidays, vacation times or big events such as weddings and anniversaries need to be captured. Questions such as, “Do you understand how your sales figures or foot traffic is affected by the weather? How can weather’s influence on consumer buying behavior be factored into marketing or promotional decisions?” need to be asked.

In capturing all this information, identifying the importance of these single influencing factors over time can help businesses spot buying patterns of when the most cupcakes or cookies are sold during any give day. This, in turn, helps make better predictions — leading to better business decisions.

Even though consumers have tightened their spending, they continue to purchase baked products as an affordable and accessible indulgence.

Who would have thought that there is a strong connection between weather and cupcake sales. Which means there could be so much more we can learn with analytics uncovering these hidden patterns.

Technorati Tags: business analytics, retail

by Jill Puleri, IBM GBS Retail Leader

We grew up hearing the story of Hansel and Gretel, but it’s not until recently that the moral became applicable to the business world. According to the story, Hansel leaves a trail of breadcrumbs so the duo can find their way home, but they get lost after the birds make the bread their dinner. As the IBM GBS Retail Leader, I’ve taken a lesson or two from Hansel’s mishap — it’s that if you don’t watch the breadcrumbs carefully, you’ll never find your way to the prize.

Tuesday IBM launched a new suite of Smarter Analytics solutions. In a world filled with too much data, analytics helps convert data – which is collected from a variety of digital devices– into valuable insight. IBM’s research has found that 90 percent of the data that exists in ‘cyberspace’ was created in the last two years.  Whether through online social channels or transactions, these bits of information give clues that businesses can use to determine who their customers are and how they behave. I often tell people that it’s not about running the numbers to see how many people clicked on a link or tweeted about a particular shopping item, but it’s about uncovering insight and then applying this insight for a competitive advantage.

The use of analytics is a journey. Sometimes, the whole story may not be visible at first glance, and it may require some trial and error to determine the appropriate course of action.

For example, after conducting an extensive analysis of its product sales, a grocery store decided to eliminate slow-moving items, such as Cream of Tartar.  What the grocer didn’t anticipate, however, is that local bakers would be up in arms if this staple ingredient was no longer available. The grocer found itself in jeopardy of losing a portion of its customer base if the item wasn’t re-stocked.

A journey that began with the question “What products should we remove off the shelves?” inevitably led to the question “Who is the customer we want to reach?”

Similarly, for one UK bakery, the answer was not to eliminate product, but rather, to deliver personalized offerings for their customers. A team of IBM analytics experts noticed that on rainy days customers were more likely to purchase cakes, while on sunny days the choice food was paninis. We couldn’t have guessed this by looking at the weather and sales reports separately, but together, we uncovered a new outcome.  Now the bakery knows what to bake based on the weather forecast.

Next week IBM will release a home furnishings retail forecast. With the help of our experts, we’ve picked up the breadcrumbs consumers have left behind and made connections and correlations allowing us to forecast sales. We can now project retail sales in this category with a 97% confidence over the next three months, and because of this, retailers can ensure that they stock the right products, and at the right quantities, and schedule the right amount of staff in their stores.

Big data really changed the game for businesses, and analytics has enabled us to play the game well. Analytics has gone from a business initiative two decades ago to business imperative today. It has shed light on what was once possible to what now can be proven.

No one wants to be lost in the woods looking for their way home.  We all want to be able to pick up the crumbs on the trail to find what awaits us at the end. Analytics can now make the ideal fairytale become a constant reality.

Join Jill April 4 on the People for a Smarter Planet Facebook page where she’ll be discussing Smarter Retail from 9:00 AM EST- 1:00 PM EST. 

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, Jill Puleri, retail

 What do Valentine’s Day and the December Holidays have in common? If you look past gifts, romance and loved ones the answer may surprise you: mobile shopping

I have spent a great deal of time over the last two months dissecting the influence of the empowered consumer. Throughout that time, the conversation has focused primarily on the emergence of the mobile shopper.

Now just more than six weeks into the new year, I am thrilled to report that mobile shopping remains a staple of the retail landscape whether through an iPhone, iPad or an Android device. Specifically in an analysis of online shopping the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, the IBM online Benchmark study found that 14.5 percent of all online sessions on a retailer’s site were initiated from a mobile device. As for sales, 10.1 percent of all online sales for the week before the Valentine’s Day holiday came through a mobile device.

Sound familiar? Well it should. These figures for both traffic and sales are almost identical to what we saw over the recent Christmas holiday where traffic and sales were 14.6 percent and 11 percent respectively. What this tells us is that the mobile shopping habits witnessed over the November and December holidays are not fleeting. They’re actually quite the opposite. A permanent change is in affect with the empowered consumer turning to mobile devices not just for blockbuster shopping days but for all holidays and shopping occasions in between.

For Valentine’s Day, the influence of m-Commerce was perhaps most prevalent in several key verticals where mobile sales from mobile devices were up dramatically from last year:

• Jewelry and Intimate Apparel: A record number of consumers made impulse buys via their mobile devices with mobile sales of jewelry and intimate apparel growing to 28.8 percent and 17.7 percent respectively.
• Health and Beauty: Shoppers continued to demonstrate a desire to pamper their loved ones with mobile sales of health and beauty items (lotions, fragrances and more) growing to 15.1 percent, an increase from less than 4 percent in 2011.

Valentine’s shoppers also showed a similar pattern when it came to device preferences:

• Apple’s iPhone and iPad ranked one and two for mobile device retail traffic (5.5 percent and 4.9 percent respectively). Android was third at 4.4 percent. Collectively iPhone and iPad accounted for 10.4 percent of mobile device retail traffic so far this month.

It’s exciting to see the promise of mobile remains strong and I cannot wait to see how it continues to influence both shoppers and retailers as we move forward.  As for now it’s safe to say that Valentine’s Day shopping has evolved from the standard box of chocolates.

By Steve Canepa, General Manager, Global Media & Entertainment Industry

February seems to be a month of excitement for all movie, television and sports enthusiasts. It’s that time of year – Super Bowl madness and Oscar Buzz – frenzy so electric that it transcends worlds – into the social media world. Think about it, how long does it take for you to see a Tweet or Facebook post once you hear the winner for Best Motion Picture or following the first touch-down? Seconds?

Information flows so quickly that Twitter alone is handling approximately 35MB of data a second, every second. The majority of this social media data represents public ‘streams of consciousness’, data that approximates human thought and speech, what we in the business call unstructured data.  But, as anyone who has filled in a tax form, booked a flight or applied for a loan knows: computers prefer data with structure, data fields that have entries in strictly controlled formats.

The good news is change is coming. Computers are becoming smarter about unstructured data (unstructured data isn’t just natural language … it’s photos, videos, emails, tweets, audio, sensor data, mobile device data).  For example, using advanced analytics technologies and natural language processing we can now begin to understand the patterns behind human expression. Not just ‘key words’ that have been identified and indexed, but all words, as we type them or say them.  We may have spent most of the computing age training humans to communicate with computers, using methods optimized for the machines, but today the reverse is happening. We’re now training computers to communicate with us and understand us in our own language. It is not easy. It is as the IBM Research team behind Watson declared, a Grand Challenge. But it’s a challenge that can lead to some very important and far-reaching results.

Watson represents a pinnacle achievement in Deep QA and natural language processing but there are many routes to the top and plenty of room for additional exploration and discovery. The team of researchers, students and faculty at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg Innovation Lab are taking a slightly different approach to the Grand Challenge. Rather than using the Answer Question formulation of Jeopardy!, they are applying IBM analytics software, and some very smart coding and modeling, to train computers to understand and analyze Tweets. The project is part of an ongoing collaboration between the lab and IBM to explore how technology can be used by organizations from news outlets and journalists to movie studios, broadcasters and retailers to better understand, respond, and predict public sentiment. To date, the model has been applied to film forecasting, the World Series and fashion retailing trends, in an effort to identify social media trends and better understand public opinions. For example, just last week IBM and USC analyzed millions of public tweets to determine the fans’ sentimental Super Bowl Quarterback favorite – Tom Brady or Eli Manning. Just like the game, Eli Manning in a late game-changing move, overtook Tom Brady as the Social Media MVP with 66% positive sentiment vs. Brady’s 61%.

But why stop at the World Series and Super Bowl? AIL and IBM are now collaborating with the Los Angeles Times to measure moviegoer sentiment toward the upcoming Academy Awards race.  Dubbed a ‘Senti Meter’, we’re analyzing Oscar- related positive and negative opinions shared via millions of tweets to determine who will win “The People’s Oscars”. The project has been profiled by the Los Angeles Times and we can all follow the evolving sentiment for Best Actor, Best Actress and Best Picture categories over the next two weeks by visiting http://graphics.latimes.com/senti-meter/.

This project is much more than just analyzing which best picture or movie star fans are rooting for – it’s an example of how movie studios can better understand their audience preferences and use social media to improve their marketing programs and in turn improve box office results.   There is no doubt that the Twitterverse and other social media platforms are changing communication as we know it. Tweets, Facebook and blog posts are becoming a vital resource for many organizations including the media industry to identify trends, inform reporting and understand as well as connect with their audience.

Think of how much change in the last year has been driven or expressed or reported in social media. Think how much social value could have been derived if we’d had the ability to understand and react to these social media conversations and sentiments – in context and in real time. We can now analyze the vast river of public data that streams from Twitter in its unstructured complexity, and apply a level of sentiment to the commentary. In other words the computer can now determine, with the certainty level of a non-native speaker, that the tweet it just analyzed expressed a positive or negative sentiment and how strongly that sentiment was stated – all in real-time. We can then apply this analysis to deliver business value – the effectiveness of marketing activities, customer responses to services, products and promotions, the impact of advertising, or the reaction to real world events…   the list is limitless.

This new capability will eventually deliver solutions founded on semantic analysis of Big Data that are only just now being imagined. And it will happen faster than we expect. Stay tuned, there is more on the way….

Learn more about the work IBM and USC are doing on social media sentiment http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/36720.wss

Technorati Tags: Academy Awards, Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, Education, Entertainment, entrepreneur, IBM, IBM Research, Jeopardy, Media, nfl, Oscars, picture stories, predictive analytics, retail, smarter commerce, Smarter Planet, social business, social media, storytelling, twitter, Watson

John Squire is IBM’s director of Digital Marketing and Analytics.

Updated Post
AN UPSET IN THE MAKING
3 February 2012, 11:30 AM Eastern

Just like on the field, Eli Manning is riding a late surge to overtake Tom Brady in the IBM and USC analysis of Super Bowl XLVI social media sentiment.  Overnight results of Super Bowl Twitter buzz drove Giants quarterback Eli Manning’s ‘T score’ for positive sentiment ahead of Tom Brady. Manning now leads with 66% vs. Brady’s 61%, which represents an 8-point shift compared to the previous day. In another interesting development positive sentiment for Giants head coach jumped dramatically with his score rating increasing to 76% positive. That places Coach Coughlin above all of the players and coaches on both teams.

This day-to-day shift in Super Bowl fan sentiment illustrates the speed at which consumer sentiments can shift online — a factor that businesses are watching closely due to the potential impact on their brand equity and sales.

By applying analytics in social media settings we can identify nuances – positive, negative, irony, snarky vs. sincerity, in real-time.  That’s enough time to help an organization, or in this case professional athletes, adjust their comments and actions to dramatically (and positively) impact their brands.

Original Post
SUPER BOWL ANALYSIS TAKES US BEYOND THE TWEETS
2 February 2012

One of the most dramatic NFL games ever played was Super Bowl XLII pitting the undefeated (18–0) New England Patriots led by record-setting quarterback Tom Brady against the surprising NY Giants with young, unproven Eli Manning at the helm.   A thrilling, some say shocking victory for the Giants ended the Patriots bid to be the only 19–0 undefeated champion in league history.  And now Super Bowl XLVI –  The Rematch —   anticipated to be the most watched American television show in history, promises to take social media to a whole new level.

As my colleague, and former NFL player Kevin Nosbusch posted on Wednesday, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab are conducting the first sentiment analysis of the two Super Bowl quarterbacks to illustrate how new analytics technologies make it possible to quickly assess the positive, negative and neutral sentiments shared by fans.

Why is this sentiment analysis important to IBM? In addition to being a longtime partner of the NFL, IBM recognizes that its clients, just like football players, are closely connected to their brand presence.

Using advances in analytics companies, academics, journalists can gain new insights into consumer perceptions via social media on endless topics from football and baseball to movies and retailing. Technologies can even distinguish irony and figure out which tweets are just background noise and those that are truly important.

Branding Upset on the Digital Playing Field

The Super Bowl analysis shows us that today the two quarterbacks, Tom Brady and Eli Manning are in statistical dead heat:  Brady earning 65% positive sentiment and Eli Manning earning 62% positive sentiment.  That actually represents a big branding upset on the digital playing field. Most sports and marketing followers would assume that Brady should be far ahead given his lofty status as an elite QB for many years and three championship rings.

Other noteworthy findings show that wide receivers have upstaged the quarterbacks, who are being positioned in the news media as the chief protagonists — Wes Welker is #1 in positive sentiment and Victor Cruz is a close 2nd.  Interestingly Brady leads by 3% points, exactly the point spread Las Vegas oddsmakers have favored the Patriots.

So while it looks like Tom Brady is going into the game as the Social MVP, now is not the time to get cocky.  Eli Manning is holding his own against the more experienced Brady in terms of positive sentiment.

The IBM USC analysis illustrates the potential insight and benefits that social media analytics can deliver to a brand — whether you’re an professional football player or a global enterprise.  Businesses that ignore the impact of social media will be stuck on the sidelines.

Learn more about IBM and USC AIL social media analysis projects.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, Education, entrepreneur, IBM, IBM Research, Jeopardy, nfl, picture stories, predictive analytics, retail, smarter commerce, Smarter Planet, social business, storytelling, twitter, Watson

Editor’s note: Vol Pirrukh leads one of the contestants in the IBM SmartCamp competition world finals this week (Jan. 31, Feb. 1 and 2) in San Francisco. Nine startups from around the world will compete for fame and expert advice. To follow the event virtually, return to A Smarter Planet for liveblogging, view livestreaming video and follow the Twitter hashtags #IBM SmartCamp and #startups.

Yes, it’s true; our company name did come from those delicious little cakes – profiteroles. When we were brainstorming the name of our start-up we all liked “profiteroles” because it has “profit” and “the cherry on top” – i.e. sweetness – in it. But it was a bit too long and the domain Profiteroles.com was taken. So we sent a survey to over 100 friends to pick their favorite name from a few alternatives and “Profitero” got the most votes.

Profitero offers an online service to retailers to help them monitor competitors’ prices, stock availability and shipping charges. We help our clients increase sales and maximize profits by leveraging high-quality online competitive data. Profitero simplifies and significantly speeds up the process of collecting and assessing this data and the service can be used by both online and offline retailers.

Our service grew out of the own pain that Kanstantsin  Chernysh (one of the Profitero co-founders) as an online store owner had to go through to monitor his online competition; Dmitry Vysotski and myself saw the huge potential for this service while working at IBM and Google and decided to bring it to the market.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now our clients tell us there was a big gap in the market for this service. “I was looking for something like Profitero for two years and couldn’t find anything even close to it! What used to take me two to three hours each day, I do now with Profitero in minutes!” one client says. Another said, “We were price comparing 1000 products once a week which took one person a full day. Now we price compare over 2000 products, checked daily and all we have to do is analyze the information given to us by Profitero.”

Despite Profitero providing a price monitoring service for retailers and manufacturers, the backbone of our technology is the ability to collect and analyze large quantities of online data. Profitero collects data on 30 million products from 2,800 retailers with plans to grow this to 100 million products by mid-2012. Over the past fifteen months, Profitero has secured contracts with a number of key retailers in the European market. Tesco, Auchan, Worten are just a selection of the high-profile retailers using our software to help them grow their sales and profit margins. We are also partnering with some significant service groups operating in the retail industry e.g. Nielsen.

Why did we apply to participate in IBM SmartCamp? There were two main reasons:

For starters, our business has good synergies with IBM Smarter Commerce. At Profitero we have this vision: Modern day consumers are very smart in their purchasing decision-making: you can go to the store to try the gadget, check the prices online on your smartphone and then buy it where you get the best offer. Price comparison is the industry that has existed for years. Consumers are savvy! The IBM study Capitalizing on the Smarter Consumer found that 49 per cent of consumers use two or more shopping channels during a single purchase. But retailers are lagging behind. We want to help retailers to be smarter: helping them to make data-informed timely decisions on pricing to grow their sales and avoid losing customers. Hence we found that our vision really relates to the IBM Smarter Commerce strategy.

Another reason we participated is we wanted to work with Big Blue. It is very hard for a start-up to begin working with a large company; they have many layers of hierarchies and thousands of constantly changing priorities. Despite some successful cases where we managed to build some really great business relationships, this is a tough area to break into. Thus we find it fantastic that a company of such size and influence as IBM supports start-ups and gives them an opportunity to connect with the right people, offering support to get things moving. Thanks to all IBM’ers who have made it possible to start working with the organisation. We really appreciate your help and support!

Along the way we discovered more benefits than we originally counted on: 1) Excellent mentors during the IBM SmartCamp sessions. The experience and range of mentors was incredible. Entrepreneurs, VCs and IBM’ers were asking tough questions, that we often don’t want to ask ourselves. Thanks to all the mentors we met and will meet during the finals. 2) Networking opportunities. We got some really important contacts during SmartCamp London, but even more came along when we continued working with IBM after the event. 3) Great PR exposure (even writing this blog post!) Every start-up likes to see their name in publications but being mentioned alongside Big Blue goes a long way with clients and leads.

We believe that IBM SmartCamp is really useful for any start-up. Even the story of SmartCamp itself is similar to the stories of successful tech start-ups: with great idea, no money but lots of work and support you can achieve incredible results! We look forward to this week’s IBM SmartCamp Global Finals, which is promising to be even more exciting then what we saw at the SmartCamp London.

Technorati Tags: ibm smartcamp, Profitero, Vol Pigrukh

To see smarter commerce at work, you only have to observe the holiday shopping rush that took place on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  A record number of consumers focused on finding the best online deals using social networks and mobile devices; while the big retail winners were those that delivered compelling, relevant deals that people could easily access from their channel of choice. This is based on findings from IBM’s fourth annual Cyber Monday Benchmark, which tracks more than a million transactions a day, analyzing terabytes of raw data from 500 retailers around the country.

Click on the images below for a larger view, or here for the entire set:

Technorati Tags: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, IBM, mobile, retail, shopping, smarter commerce, social commerce

That’s because they know that decision-making today is an art based on incomplete and conflicting information, and that hunches play a big role in determining which way to go.

Now imagine a company that could look at all of its information at once; Spot hidden trends before they occur; Glean insights into customer sentiment from data in a wide variety of formats; And keep up with consumer conversations and opinions moving at the speed of the Web.

Click on the images for a larger view:

The underlying technology works in three stages. First, advanced analytics algorithms using search and index technologies begin sifting through all the different pieces of information for gems of intelligence.

Second, the information is correlated and analyzed for patterns and trends at more than 200 times a second – faster than a hummingbird can flap its wings.

And third, this advanced analysis is quickly turned into a narrative that people can understand and put to use — generating better market forecasts, and putting customers at the center of an organization’s strategy for what new products and services are introduced.

Imagine what this kind of market intelligence would do for business in terms of reducing the time and risk associated with developing new products. Entertainment companies would be able to take a real-time pulse of moviegoers and record buyers to find out what they think and want.  Investment companies could more easily understand investor concerns about their products and go-to-market strategies.

Pharmaceutical companies could better understand what doctors, pharmacists and patients are thinking about their latest drugs. Retailers would be able to better gauge what consumers will buy at holiday time – which could be linked to suppliers – and reduce lead time in making buying and product inventory decisions.

Organizations that “get it” will capitalize on this deep insight ahead of their competitors, and serve the connected customer’s needs at every turn.

See also: ‘Picturing’ the new world of analytics

Technorati Tags: Analytics, baseball, consumer, customers, smarter commerce, social media, world series

By Vincent Quan, Associate Professor, Fashion Merchandising Management Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT)

I had the opportunity to participate in an informative and lively dinner panel hosted by IBM for the retail press in the Big Apple last Wednesday.  Joining me on the panel were Nihad Aytaman, director of Business Intelligence at Elie Tahari, IBM Global Retail Industry Leader Jill Puleri, IBM Retail Analytics Leader Michael Haydock and IBM Enterprise Marketing Management Executive Director John Squire.

A few takeaways from the dinner:

• A fundamental shift has been taking place in retail – power is shifting from the retailer to the consumer through the use of technology.  However, retailers are working hard to maintain, and even grow, market share.  Customer satisfaction is a main focal point.  Now, there are multiple touch points to reach the consumer (through personalized promotions, mobile websites and social sites like Facebook).
• Although e-commerce is posting huge comps (YOY) versus their brick and mortar counterparts, mobile devices are not driving the sales.  Size of screen and limitations on mobile content are some of the primary challenges. When shopping for a fashionable dress from Elie Tahari, or the latest in technology on a site like Amazon.com, the typical cell phone screen just doesn’t cut it. Not surprising, in a “statistically insignificant” but real poll taken of my students (who are Gen Z “trendsetters”) only 8.3% actually use their smartphones to shop.
• Social is becoming a powerful player in the retail space. According to a global survey by IBM, up to 84% of consumers rely on their social networks when researching new products.  When buying online, shoppers coming from a social network convert at 2x the rate of other non-social network channels.

While the majority of what we hear about the economy is gloom and doom, retail sales look like they’ll be fairly healthy this season according to Mike Haydock, who predicts, using decades of Census data and analytics technology, that jewelry sales will be up ( +7.7% Nov. 2011 vs. Nov. 2010 and +4% YOY for December). Clothing and health & beauty categories will also be strong this year, according to Mike.

Another “statistically insignificant” but real poll conducted on my students at FIT yielded a slightly more conservative outlook on shopping habits for the holidays – slightly higher than LY but the poll was based on “holiday gifts.”  Economic uncertainty, including an employment rate remaining fixed at 9.1% for September, announced layoffs of 30,000 at Bank of America, a tumultuous stock market, issues with European debt, and recessionary worries have prompted the response from my students.  The speed at which information flows faster than the aftershocks of the recent earthquake on the East Coast demonstrate that technology is a “game-changer”.  News and information are fast and furious…

Technorati Tags: FIT, polls, retail, Vincent Quan

These days when you check out of almost any retail store, nearly without notice or care, the checker passes your purchases under or above a laser and you hear a “bleep” as the laser picks up the product information from that strange looking set of black bars on each product.  The name and price of the product then pops up on the register – and the register sends that data back over a network to a database for inventory processing and analysis.  All this happens in an instant, all while you’re getting out your credit card, reading the latest scoop on a celebrity, or trying to keep your kids from adding more candy bars to the checkout belt.

Adding a series of black lines to a stick of gum changed the world of retail. Click the image to read the whole story.

Well, here’s something for you: The next time your son REALLY REALLY REALLY needs to have that pack of Juicy Fruit (he just can’t live without), you can pick up the package of gum in the familiar yellow wrapper and show him those crazy looking black bars and on the side and say: “Did you know that on June 26, 1974, the very first bar code – that’s what these lines are called – was swiped by cashier Sharon Buchanan at a Marsh’s supermarket in Troy, Ohio and that the first product swiped was a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit chewing gum (you point to the gum)?  Did you know that?”  Your son will stop in his tracks, look at you with wonder, pause briefly, and probably say, with a slightly sarcastic tinge: “Mom, you should play Watson!” and continue adding candy to your order.

Oh well, you tried.  It’s alright.  But luckily for you, me, us, and the retail industry the bar code has made checking out quicker and more efficient, and made businesses around the globe smarter in the way they manage data-driven processes like inventory and customer service.  With the advent of RFID tags you see popping up on clothing and other products, the bar code model is being extended even further – bringing it into the digital age.

Norman Joseph Woodland, “the father of the supermarket scanning system”

Today, in recognition of those very facts, the National Inventors Hall of Fame announced it will induct retired IBMer Norman Joseph Woodland for his contribution to the invention of the Universal Product Code (UPC), a.k.a. the bar code. Woodland and his co-inventor, Bernard Silver, who also will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, were working at Drexel University when they applied for the first bar code technology patent on October 20, 1949.  Woodland joined IBM in 1951 and received a patent for the UPC on October 7, 1952 – some 20 years before it showed up on that pack of Wrigley’s! (There’s another piece of trivia your son can chew on.)

For the full story about the birth and evolution of the bar code and much more, head over to the IBM100 site where IBM has been highlighting some of its achievements in recognition of its 100th anniversary this year.

Jill Puleri is IBM’s vice president and global industry leader.  She leads IBM’s retail consulting practice and is an expert in multichannel and customer-centric strategies.

Wrigley’s®, Juicy Fruit® and all affiliated designs used courtesy of WM Wrigley Jr. Company.

Technorati Tags: Barcode, IBM Centennial, IBM100, invention, Jill Puleri, People for a Smarter Planet, retail, Smarter Planet, UPC