NRF17 Vlog Day 2

Hello from New York! Alex Broxson, Head of Marketing at Retail Assist, brings you highlights from the Show in the second of our NRF17 videos, exploring how technology will serve the needs of rapidly changing consumers, changing the ways in which customers and retailers interact. Watch it on YouTube here. (You can catch up with our Day 1 round-up here).

From Day 2, the Top 3 Technology concepts that we identified as the big players are:

• Augmented Reality in hospitality
• Cognitive Computing – further updates
• RFID

Great to see technology developments for the hospitality sector showcased at NRF17 this year, given that this represents a growing proportion of Retail Assist’s customer base. We were particularly impressed with Augmented Reality technology showcased in the Innovation Lab with Marriott Hotels. In a new location, AR overlays a map of the area with data and information on local restaurants, bars, and the option to book tables as well as taxi journeys. A clever use of technology to provide a convenient service – quickly and virtually “walking around” the area for the time conscious consumer.

Next – it’s that dress. . . The fashion savvy amongst you might have seen this before, at the Met Gala 2016 worn by Karolina Kurkova. The same interactive and cognitive principle was showcased at NRF17: IBM Watson is learning from and making sense of unstructured data in the form of tweets with the hashtag #WatsonCommerce, evaluating the emotion within the tweet, and changing the dress colour in real-time response. Quite a spectacle at NRF17 and on the red carpet, but we wonder how it will catch on and feed into mainstream retailing?

We met up with Catalyst, the RFID and NFC technology arm of Li & Fung global. We worked with Catalyst last year to showcase latest technologies at Nexpo, our retail technology pop-up. In the video example, RFID and NFC is embedded within clothing (such as sportswear), to deliver real-time contextual information to its wearer, or potential purchaser.

Thanks for following our NRF17 updates. We’ll be summing up our experience and predictions for the biggest things in retail this year, so stay tuned for our NRF17 feature blog post.

If you’re interested in any of the technologies featured, or want to discuss further, comment below and we’ll get back to you!