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New iPad-based POS solution aims at small grocery stores

POS technology vendor Revel Systems is at it again: this time it has adapted is iPad-based point-of-sale system for small supermarkets and grocery stores.

The edition builds on the company's recent introduction for food trucks in mid-July. Key features include:

- Integration with Dwolla, a payment processing platform that doesn't charge anything for transactions less than $10 and only 25 cents per transaction above that amount; the system can also be integrated with the LevelUp payment platform.

- Connections to peripherals through the company's Revel Router, including Honewall scanners, Epson printers, cash drawers, food scales and so on

- The ability to import and export products quickly, so that priced can be changed on the fly

- Support for the Grocery Store application programming interface

- A customer-facing interface that allows the system to be used for self-checkout lanes.

- Real-time reporting for inventory control and employee scheduling

"We've seen so many great benefits of the system in the time we've had it live in our store," said Lawrence Capozzolo, head of IT for Marty's Market, a grocery store in Pittsburgh that is using the technology for its five checkout lanes. "With its now intuitive touchscreen interface, the iPad makes it so simple for our employees to learn so that we don't have to spends training them."

The license for the Revel Grocery software is $2,000 per seat, plus any hardware that might be necessary to set up the solution.

The Revel Grocery system can be integrated with widely used scanners, cash drawers, printers and transaction devices.

Nokia Q2: By the numbers

Nokia's second-quarter results are pretty dire. Having said that, there are some streams of rainbows forming out of the smoldering heap of the former phone giant.

Here are the numbers you need to know. These will be updated throughout the morning following the conference call later.

• Nokia saw a Q2 net loss of €1.41 billion ($1.74bn) -- four times greater than a year ago;
• Net sales on devices are down by 26 percent on Q2 2011, compared to 5 percent on Q1 2012
• Smartphones sales dropped by 34 percent on Q2 2011;
• Its current net cash position stands at €4.2 billion ($5.17bn) --- down from €4.8 billion ($5.9bn) in Q1. 

In terms of smart devices, Nokia says the picture looks bleak year-on-year, partially due to a falling number in Symbian devices. Nokia says this was partially offset by sales of Lumia devices.

• Nokia shipped 4 million Lumia smartphones in Q2, falling in line with estimates.
• Overall, Nokia sold 10.2 million 'smart' devices -- including Symbian, MeeGo, and Windows Phone, down from 16.7 million in the last quarter;
• Mobile phone volumes have increased quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year to 73 million units;
• $49.99 is the current price of the Lumia handset in U.S. AT&T stores following a price reduction;
• Its patent portfolio is worth around $6 billion.

Breaking down the figures by region, Nokia only sold 600,000 mobile devices in the United States, while Asia-Pacific took the geographic crown with more than 28.6 million devices sold. 

Despite Nokia's decline in the past quarter, its shares rose on the news. Here's what Nokia looks like at the moment:

• Nokia's share price is up more than 10 percent on NYSE pre-market trading;
• Nokia's market cap stands at $6.48 billion, around 50 times less than its peak in 2000;
• Nokia shares have dropped 84 percent since unveiling its Windows phones strategy;
• 10,000 employees lost in the past quarter, set to leave by the end of this year.

Windows 8 reaches RTM: When will you get it?

Microsoft today announced that Windows 8 had been released to manufacturing. In a post on the Building 8 blog, Microsoft President Windows Steven Sinofsky, thanked millions of beta testers, noting that "The previews of Windows 8 (Developer, Consumer, Release) have been the most widely and deeply used test releases of any product we have ever done." Over 16 million PCs downloaded preview code, with 7 million running the Release Preview.

The final build is 9200, and will introduce changes to the desktop user interface with a flatter Metro look-and-feel to replace Windows 7's glassy Aero. The touch-centric Metro UI also gets improvements, including new touch gestures for supported trackpads.

Along with the RTM announcement, Microsoft released details of when developers and enterprises would get access to the final code.

• MSDN and Technet subscribers will get access on 15 August.
• IT professionals with Software Assurance will be able to download it from the Volume License Service Center from 16 August.
  
• Consultants and resellers with access to the Microsoft Action Pack will get download access on 20 August.
• Businesses without Software Asssurance will be able to purchase licenses from 1 September.
  
• Consumer general availability for upgrade downloads and new PC sales is on 26 October.

Windows Server 2012 also released to manufacturing today, and will be available on a similar timescale to Windows 8, as did the Windows developer tools. Developers will get access to Windows 8 development tools on 15 August, with the release of the Visual Studio 2012 to MSDN.

Metro Windows applications will be able to be sold through the Windows Store, which is now open for paid applications, and developers can register for full accounts, though uploads will need the release build of Windows 8. More details for developers will come when Microsoft holds its BUILD developer conference shortly after general availability.

Microsoft also gave guidance for organisations considering Windows 8 rollouts. Businesses currently deploying Windows 7 are advised to continue with their existing deployment programmes, as Windows 8 will run alongside Windows 7. For companies with XP or Vista, Microsoft is advising that businesses begin to plan Windows 8 deployments, with XP extended support due to end in April 2014 and Vista following in 2017.

Windows 8 reaches RTM: When will you get it?

Microsoft today announced that Windows 8 had been released to manufacturing. In a post on the Building 8 blog, Microsoft President Windows Steven Sinofsky, thanked millions of beta testers, noting that "The previews of Windows 8 (Developer, Consumer, Release) have been the most widely and deeply used test releases of any product we have ever done." Over 16 million PCs downloaded preview code, with 7 million running the Release Preview.

The final build is 9200, and will introduce changes to the desktop user interface with a flatter Metro look-and-feel to replace Windows 7's glassy Aero. The touch-centric Metro UI also gets improvements, including new touch gestures for supported trackpads.

Along with the RTM announcement, Microsoft released details of when developers and enterprises would get access to the final code.

• MSDN and Technet subscribers will get access on 15 August.
• IT professionals with Software Assurance will be able to download it from the Volume License Service Center from 16 August.
  
• Consultants and resellers with access to the Microsoft Action Pack will get download access on 20 August.
• Businesses without Software Asssurance will be able to purchase licenses from 1 September.
  
• Consumer general availability for upgrade downloads and new PC sales is on 26 October.

Windows Server 2012 also released to manufacturing today, and will be available on a similar timescale to Windows 8, as did the Windows developer tools. Developers will get access to Windows 8 development tools on 15 August, with the release of the Visual Studio 2012 to MSDN.

Metro Windows applications will be able to be sold through the Windows Store, which is now open for paid applications, and developers can register for full accounts, though uploads will need the release build of Windows 8. More details for developers will come when Microsoft holds its BUILD developer conference shortly after general availability.

Microsoft also gave guidance for organisations considering Windows 8 rollouts. Businesses currently deploying Windows 7 are advised to continue with their existing deployment programmes, as Windows 8 will run alongside Windows 7. For companies with XP or Vista, Microsoft is advising that businesses begin to plan Windows 8 deployments, with XP extended support due to end in April 2014 and Vista following in 2017.

Office to finally fully support ODF, Open XML, and PDF formats

Earlier this week, Microsoft Office standards chief Jim Thatcher quietly announced that Microsoft would add ”two additional formats for use: Strict Open XML and Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2. … [and] support for opening PDF documents so they can be edited within Word and saved to any supported format.”  It took Microsoft long enough.

As Andrew 'Andy' Updegrove, a founding partner of Gesmer Updegrove, a top technology law firm and standards expert points out, this “brings a degree of closure to a seven year long epic battle between some of the largest technology companies in the world. The same saga pitted open source advocates against proprietary vendors, and for the first time brought the importance of technical standards to the attention of millions of people around the world, and at the center of the action were Microsoft and IBM, the latter supported by Google and Oracle, among other allies.

Seven  years after proposing it,  Microsoft is finally ready to fully support its own standard format, Strict Open XML, as well as  ODF and PDF.

Updegrove continued, “More specifically, the battle had been joined between the supporters of the Open Document Format – ODF for short – developed by OASIS, and then adopted by ISO/IEC, and a format developed and promoted by Microsoft, called Open XML, which it contributed to ECMA for adoption before also being submitted to ISO/IEC. In due course, Open XML was adopted as well, but only after a global battle that, improbably, even inspired a public protest on the sidewalks outside a standards committee meeting.”

The battle was largely over Microsoft's desire to control “open” document standards. In the end, both ODF and Open XML were recognized as standards. Today, ODF is the default format in the main open-source office suites: LibreOffice and OpenOffice. Ironically, it's taken Microsoft more than six years to fully support its own 4,000 plus pages of the Open XML standard , never mind PDF and ODF.

As Updegrove wrote, “Famously, however, after expending such great effort to secure adoption of Open XML as a global standard, Microsoft itself did not fully implement that standard in its next release of Office, in 2007. Or its next. Or its next, although the ability to open and edit (but not save) documents in the ISO/IEC approved version of Open XML (which Microsoft called 'Strict Open XML') was added to Office 10. Instead, it implemented what it called 'Transitional Open XML,' which it said was more useful for working with legacy documents created using Office.”

Of course, “This was something of an embarrassment, because one reason that Microsoft had given for the necessity of ISO/IEC approving a second document standard was to facilitate working with the “billions and billions of documents” that had already been created in Office. Implementers of Open XML as actually approved by ISO/IEC therefore would not be able to achieve this goal.”

The ironic thing is that, while this was as hotly debated am issue in the mid-2000s as are mobile patents and cloud implementation is today, this news was barely noticed. That's a mistake.

Updegrove points out, “document interoperability and vendor neutrality matter more now than ever before as paper archives disappear and literally all of human knowledge is entrusted to electronic storage.” He concluded, “Only if documents can be easily exchanged and reliably accessed on an ongoing basis will competition in the present be preserved, and the availability of knowledge down through the ages be assured. Without robust, universally adopted document formats, both of those goals will be impossible to attain.”

Updegrove's right of course. Don't believe me? Go into your office's archives and try to bring up documents your wrote in the 90s in WordPerfect or papers your staff created in the 80s with WordStar. If you don't want to lose your institutional memory, open document standards support is more important than ever.