Shopping is a favourite past time in Singapore and at the heart of the vendor’s efficiency and the consumer’s experience is the Point Of Sale (POS) being used.
As we step into 2015, Bikash Kumar shares his thoughts on some of the key trends shaping the evolution of POS technology in 2015.
Mobile POS enables greater consumer interaction with the sales staff.
* This article is a guest post written by Bikash Kumar – MD, Integrated Retail Management Consulting Pte. Ltd. The opinions expressed are his own and do not represent that of tech4tea.com.
Bikash Kumar has a Bachelor of Business Studies (1988-91) from the College of Business Studies in the University of Delhi; and an MBA (1991-93) from the Faculty of Management Study from the same university.
The Point of Sale (POS) system is where consumers pay for their purchases in a retail store.
Traditionally, the POS systems have been used to generate information on transactions within a retail outlet.
However, the POS technology has been improving significantly, allowing retail staff to deliver multiple operations, besides just scanning merchandise and generating bills.
According to Integrated Retail, a firm that specialises in designing, deploying and maintaining POS systems across the region, the POS systems are likely to see further enhancements in 2015.
Here are five key changes that we are likely to see.
Morphing from Point of Sale to a Point of Service
POS is increasingly mobile and it is lighter
POS systems are becoming inter-connected
POS system activities are traceable in real time
POS is driving up productivity
Below are my thoughts on each of these key changes.
Earlier this month, Palo Alto Networks discovered ten critical vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer browsers, underlining the importance for businesses to focus on knowing the risk of running vulnerable software.
Check out five core concepts on how to protect your organisation against vulnerabilities.
Sharat Sinha – Vice President, Asia Pacific for Palo Alto Networks – shares his views on how businesses and organisations can protect themselves against malicious attacks and avoid compromises to their network security.
“Because you played a part” … in 30 years of Total Defence!
That’s the theme for the eighth installment of the series of annual “N.E.mation!” competition that has seen more than 9,500 students participating since its inauguration in 2007.
I visited the Top 10 teams for this year’s N.E.mation!8 and came away with a sense of awe at how articulate and convicted these youths were in our Nation’s Total Defence message.
The top 10 teams are hard at work at Nanyang Polytechnic producing their 1-minute animation that will vie for the top spot – which will earn the winning team a fully sponsored trip (worth more than S$15,000) to the US.
N.E.mation!8 main theme: “30 Years of Total Defence: Because You Played A Part”
“30 years of security and stability as a nation was built upon everyone’s efforts.
We stood with each other through the good times and bad, overcoming challenges and celebrating our successes.
We are able to enjoy what we have in Singapore today because each of us has played a part, in building this nation, our home.”
The top 10 teams are now in the final week of the 3-week production period when they work from 9am to 9pm daily to churn out the main animation for their submission.
After the 3-week period, they go off to enjoy the rest of their school holidays while their animation mentors and instructors put in the finishing touches and add in the music in post production.
The winning entry will be determined in February 2014 by a panel of judges (comprising NEXUS and animation industry experts) as well as voting by the public, which will account for 50 percent of the points.
The Partta Kappa Team (from SotA) uses an innovative combination of shadow-silhouette and real people for their animation “It Takes More …”
Arieso has just released the results of a study into recent trends in extreme data, revealing new challengers for Telcos and network operators.
The latest Hungry Handsets report by Arieso
This year’s Hungry Handsets study finds that:
Smartphones trump tablets in terms of data consumption and generation
Apple’s iPhone 5 and Samsung’s GALAXY SIII goes head to head against each other at the top of the data utilisation list
Data upload has grown, as users generate more data.
This latest analysis by Arieso into mobile data use also reveals that 40% of all data is consumed by only 1% of users, although LTE is starting to take the strain.
Interview with study author
Dr. Michael Flanagan, study author & CTO, Arieso
I spoke with Dr. Michael Flanagan, the study author and Arieso CTO about the report.
He observed that the data crunch in the wireless industry started by the launch of the iPhone was not abating; and the study revealed that increasingly sophisticated devices are unleashing unprecedented levels of user demand.
He cautioned that the particular results in this study corresponded to the specific market that was studied, and that these results could vary depending on a number of circumstances (including morphologies, available devices, regional customer behaviors, and socio-economic user factors).
“Yet again we found that novel usage patterns, new technologies and regional idiosyncrasies are conspiring to make life increasingly difficult for mobile operators trying to meet evolving customer expectations,” said study author and Arieso CTO, Dr. Michael Flanagan.
As such, these results are intended to be illustrative rather than definitive.
Dr. Flanagan urged network operators to embark upon similar subscriber and network evaluation programs in order to determine the clear and present data demands being placed on their networks as well as the most appropriate response strategies to best satisfy this demand.
Going into 2013, it’s a good time to look ahead at what enterprises should look out for in terms of working securely this year.
Let’s hear from Sugiarto Koh – Regional Director, ASEAN & North Asia, Sourcefire.
Sugiarto Koh, Regional Director, ASEAN & North Asia, Sourcefire
Sugiarto Koh opines that advanced malware and targeted attacks pose the greatest challenge for today’s security infrastructure and methods of protection.
Three major Enterprise IT trends that will continue to impact security.
Mobile computing
Social media
BYOD
Customers are struggling to find solutions that provide effective protection against the latest threats without over-burdening their budgets or sacrificing operational efficiency.
Below are Koh’s take on three major Enterprise IT trends and their implications.
Service quality, coupled with product knowledge and deep experience enables Clarity staff to understand what their customers need and come up with a customised solution that combines the best of breed from multiple brands to offer the best performance for the buck.
A living room at Tanglin Rd. Photo credit: Clarity
I first met the affable CEO of Clarity Group during his recent launch of the Datasat RS20i Digital Audio Processor in Singapore.
Soon Ong, CEO of Clarity Group. Photo credit: Clarity
We met up again today for a 30-minute interview that spilled into an hour-long conversation about the state of the AV industry and his vision for the homegrown company that his great-grandfather founded 83 years ago in 1929.
Himself a music enthusiast that plays the guitar and spends his personal time writing, producing and recording music, Soon emphasises the importance of getting a clear understanding of the customer’s needs before recommending any systems.
He believes in delivering a total AV solution that is customised to the customer’s needs and comprising a mix-and-match of the best of class components from different brands to offer a true-to-life AV experience that is also value-for-money.
Soon reckons that the hardware components account for only half of the performance of an AV solution – other factors such as the room design and materials are also critical.
Private cinema at Gallop Park. Photo credit: Clarity
That is why Clarity does not sell any “cookie-cutter, off-the-shelf AV systems” that are commonly sold in electrical outlets.
“I rather have people who know their products well, than have sales staff that market a mediocre product well,” intimated Soon Ong, CEO, Clarity Group.
Soon feels his staff can value-add by selecting the best and most suitable components and by advising on the set-up and optimisation of the customer’s sound room or private cinema.
The expertise is also monetised in the form of consultancy services for commercial properties and establishments.
From the cordial chat that I had with Soon, the impression that I came away with was that this was someone who felt passionate about music and technology – whose primary concern was in giving his customers the best performance for the money they are spending.
Clarity Experience Centre
Soon plans to set up an concept demo cum experience centre in the first quarter of 2013 which will help customers visualise what they need and conceptualise what they want from the advanced technologies showcased at the centre.
“与新加坡音响影视公司Clarity Group 总裁 Soon Ong 闲聊。听他畅谈对于视听设备与科技的见解以及对未来的展望。” – 科技点心（微薄）
The experience centre will comprise five sections – the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the private cinema, and the bedroom.
The different sections represent different market segments, including HDB/condominium living rooms and kitchens; luxury private cinemas; hotels and service apartments; as well as restaurants and boardrooms.
Here’s a selection of interesting tech events happening this week (11-17 November 2012). It is not an exhaustive list and represents only a sampling of events that gives a taste of the tech pulse in Singapore.
What are some of the more interesting tech events happening in Singapore this week?
This is a really quiet week in the region, partly due to a public holiday (Deepavali) in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia.
Event listing on tech4tea.com
You can see this selection of events in the right sidebar on every page.
Event organisers can submit your events for listing to johntan@tech4tea.com – but there are no promises that your event will be featured.
ASUS is launching the PadFone 2 smartphone with tablet dock 2-in-1 device, while Sennheiser is partying in Zouk come end of the week.
Otherwise all’s quiet, before the madness of SITEX 2012 rolls into town next week.
Veeam Software is a provider of backup, replication and virtualisation management solutions for VMware vSphere and Windows Server Hyper-V.
“What makes Veeam so successful is that it’s been built from the ground up specifically for virtualised environments, and hence is designed with the ability to innovate at an extremely fast rate while meeting the most stringent data recovery and protection objectives,” said Don Williams, Regional Director APAC, Veeam Software.
The company has capitalised on market opportunities for virtualisation, disaster recovery and cloud technologies in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region.
This is consistent with the findings of the VMware Cloud Index 2012 which underscored the importance and growth of cloud computing in the region.
Strong demand in APAC has resulted in a year-on-year revenue growth of 48% in Q3 2012 from new licenses.
Veeam’s cloud services business has seen a particularly strong uptake this year, having grown 58% in the last quarter alone. Veeam’s customer base has increased by 28% in the region this year.
Veeam’s presence in Pan Singapore has seen a 110% YoY increase in revenue growth and 86% YoY growth in new licenses revenue in the third quarter.
Simple and speedy data restoration in times of recovery.
Veeam has recently opened new offices in Singapore and plans to expand further across the region in 2013, having already doubled the headcount in the Singapore team.
Veeam at VMware’s vForum
Raymond Goh, Senior Systems Engineer at Veeam in Singapore.
I had a chat with Raymond Goh, Senior Systems Engineer at Veeam in Singapore, during VMware’s vForum in Singapore.
Raymond gave me a rundown of Veeam’s solutions for data protection and comprehensive systems management for virtualisation.
Two aspects of Veeam’s offerings impressed me during our conversation.
The scalability and flexibility of its solutions means that it can cater to both large enterprises and organisations, as well as smaller SMBs.
The ability of Veeam’s solutions to work simultaneously with both VMware and Hyper-V solutions translate to cost savings for customers who operate both in a mixed virtual environment, since Veeam does not charge separately for catering to two environments.
Solutions from Veeam Software
Veeam Backup & Replication is Veeam’s solution for VMBackup, while Veeam ONE is a single solution for real-time monitoring, resource optimisation and management reporting for VMware and Hyper-V.
The Veeam Management Pack (MP) and Smart Plug-in (SPI) extend enterprise monitoring to VMware through Microsoft System Center and HP Operations Manager.
During CommunicAsia2012, I had the chance to speak with Nigel V. Wright and Gene Zhang of Spirent Communications about the face of things to come as countries in Asia begin rolling out 4G LTE networks.
Spirent is a multinational telecommunications and network testing company headquartered in the United Kingdom.
Wright is the Vice President for Wireless Product Marketing & Corporate Marketing at Spirent, while Zhang is the VP & General Manager for Asia Pacific at the company.
With LTE rollouts in Asia-Pacific now progressing at an aggressive pace, and the region set to surpass 120 million LTE connections by 2015, operators are competing to become the first to offer 4G services in this high-growth subscriber market.
