Tech Market Rises Again

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Supermodel Claudia Schiffer drew reporters to a nondescript supermarket in her hometown of Rheinberg, Germany, last month, when she presided over its rechristening as a high-tech "Future Store" designed to showcase and test interactive shopping technology. She was the star that day, but the shop's owner, German retail chain Metro AG, and its 39 partners in the venture — including the likes of Intel and SAP — are more interested in the response of people like Birgit Hüsken. She regularly uses the store's most prominent tool, the Personal Shopping Assistant (PSA) — a cart-mounted computer that advertises sales as she moves from section to section and keeps a running total of purchases. A central computer ensures that the prices in the PSA sync with those of the store's 37,000 radio-controlled price tags. Some products even have chips that tell "smart shelves" when inventory is low — or even how many times a product gets picked up and looked at before someone buys it. "At first, shopping took me twice as long with this thing," Hüsken says. "But now I've got better at it, and I really like seeing a running total of what I've bought." The system's price prevents it from widespread application, and less than 10% of the store's customers use PSAs regularly. But with dozens of test spins daily, Metro hopes the devices will catch on enough to justify mass production.

Advantage on The Net
Wimbledon may be one of sport's most old-fashioned events, but that hasn't stopped IBM from using this year's edition of the tennis tournament as a kind of tech lab. Equipment from IBM and Cisco is being used to turn the entire Wimbledon site into a wi-fi zone. Journalists will be able to file stories wirelessly from any location, and game statistics will be logged directly from courtside into the data-crunching network used by TV broadcasters. Perhaps the most useful innovation is the "Hawkeye" system that determines where a ball will land based on its trajectory. IBM and the BBC insist that they're not out to second-guess official calls — as if a mere machine could stop the John McEnroes of the sport from yelling at the line judge. — By Jim Ledbetter

Feel Lucky? Fat Chance
One-armed bandits often seem to have more than one leg up on Lady Luck. Now British advocacy group FairPlay says it has proof. It used an emulator, which "borrows" a gambling machine's programming code and plays it on a computer, to test the honesty of fruit machines. The program let FairPlay run through games backward to see what would happen if gamblers made different choices. The result? "All the common British machines we tested cheat," says spokesman Stuart Campbell. When the machine gives players a number and offers a chance to "gamble" on whether the next number will be higher or lower, it has already decided whether the player will win. BACTA, which represents the U.K.'s 32.1 billion-per-year gaming-machine-business, will only say the machines comply with the law, which dates from 1968 — before machines were so sophisticated. The government is working on a new bill to allow Vegas-style gambling in the U.K. Odds are, it will address this, too. — By Blaine Greteman