For Immediate Release

Contact: Kathy Grannis or Ellen Davis (202) 783-7971

Email: grannisk@nrf.com or davise@nrf.com

ARTS Pavilion to Demonstrate Advances in Retail Technology

Washington, January 8, 2008—The Association for Retail Technology Standards, the standards division of the National Retail Federation, will feature its eighth annual Standards Pavilion at NRF’s Annual Convention & EXPO in Booth 2155. The Pavilion will be the showplace for retail standards.

The Service Oriented Architecture Solution Center, a new feature of the Pavilion, will provide attendees with precise information on how standards directly benefit businesses. Standards provide flexible applications to keep pace with competition and help provide new innovative functionality to lead.

There will also be demonstration areas devoted to UnifiedPOS, one of ARTS’ most successful standards, and Video Analytics, ARTS’ newest area of development. UnifiedPOS is a standard Application Programming Interface that allows retailers to select POS peripherals such as scales, printers and scanners regardless of operating system. Video analytics turns images into standard data that can create instant messages to alert store associates of lines at checkout or spills on the floor that could cause unsafe conditions. These analytics can also be stored for subsequent analysis, including an accurate count of shoppers that entered the store to calculate conversion rate or measure the effectiveness of a promotion by recording the number of customers attracted to the display.

“The ARTS Pavilion is truly a demonstration of how the industry is working together to solve common retail problems,” said Frank May, U.S. retail industry technical strategist for Microsoft Corp. “In future years, significant new application functionality and POS price reduction will be possible, thanks to ARTS standards like WS-POS.”

Some of the demonstrations at the Pavilion include:

• The newest capabilities of UnifiedPOS (an XML-based standard) from sponsors including Epson, IBM, Magtek, Microsoft and Progress Software. This fully integrated demonstration will show the power of XML and web services to connect POS terminals to peripherals, such as scales and scanners, wirelessly as well as allowing POS terminals to share them. There will also be a demonstration of MagnePrint technology, enabled in the new release of UnifiedPOS. MagnePrint is able to protect customers by detecting cards that have been illegally reproduced as well as cards that have had their data altered.
• Metter Toledo will demonstrate how scales can function as a complete point-of-sale terminal.
• Third Solutions, a new provider, will be demonstrating new uses and benefits for one of the original ARTS schemas, Digital receipts.
• Axis, IntelliVid and Bizerba will demonstrate in the video analytics area. Axis will demonstrate their new network camera that can capture and send live video directly over an IP network such as a LAN, intranet or the internet. IntelliVid will show their analytics software that can take feeds from multiple devices and turn it into a single stream of information, and Bizerba will demonstrate a slightly different spin on video analytics, showing how this technology can properly identify the produce placed on a scale to automatically calculate price.
• The ARTS community continually develops interoperability standards for leading edge retail technologies in the form of standard XML message sets (schemas) and the Standard Data Model for Retail which elaborates standard interfaces for applications found in the retail environment. These standards allow retailers to integrate new applications into their existing architecture more quickly while lowering the costs and risk associated with technology changes for retailers. Effective use of these standards to integrate applications will be demonstrated by AlphaBay, Escalate Retail, Oracle, PCMS, SAP and Soft Solutions.

The Association for Retail Technology Standards is an international membership organization dedicated to reducing the costs of technology through standards. Since 1993, ARTS has been delivering application standards exclusively to the retail industry. ARTS has four standards: The Standard Relational Data Model, UnifiedPOS, ARTS XML and the Standard RFPs. Membership is open to all members of the international technology community- retailers from all industry segments, application developers and hardware companies. www.nrf-arts.org

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