At Microsoft we’ve been working for a long time to help retailers evolve with changing consumer expectations. We’re committed to creating technology and solutions that allow our customers and partners to adapt and capitalize on market changes. Customers can come to see the latest retail solutions built on Microsoft’s platforms at the Retail Experience Center. Together with our partners we’re showcasing some amazing solutions at NRF this week, here are some of the highlights:

The Microsoft Kinect sensor is one tool that allows retailers to expand their customer’s shopping experiences. With the help of a Kinect sensor, AVAretail’s SmartShelf technology allows every interaction of a shelf in a store to be monitored and recorded in real-time, providing insight into which products are most selected and picked up by customers. This gives retailers immediate insight on in-store customer purchasing behaviors, giving them an idea of what products customers find the most interesting in the store. Linking this to the beacon technology also allows customers to use their personal devices to get more product information and watch associated videos. Another form of technology, Path Tracker, gives retailers real-time detection and analysis of a customer’s shopping path. This provides counts of people in the store, areas visited, dwell time, shopping path, acting as a heat map of where their customers are spending the most time in the store.

The NEC Biometric interface with Kinect Camera system provides demographic and face recognition services to a Kinect enabled application. Retailers use this information for analysis and for providing the customer a more personal selling experience. The solution serves up digital retail signage based upon an individual’s age and gender, and archives in-store demographic and engagement data in the cloud for later analysis by the retailer. This solution, the first of several projects for retail markets, offers the retailer 3D views of the customer to determine their level of engagement with the products.

Other interesting innovations from Microsoft include the Display Seize, which offers the ability to “take over” a digital sign or kiosk and use it as an interactive selling tool from a mobile phone or tablet. A sales associate simply taps an NFC tag to grab any display (kiosk, digital sign, etc.) and show desired content to a customer. When complete, the display returns to whatever it was doing.

In-store displays aren’t the only items in the store with increased functionality thanks to the latest technology breakthroughs. MediaCart will change the shopping cart as we know it. Adding a location-aware tablet to the cart allows a retailer to present a personal and relevant shopping experience to their customer. This allows context sensitive ads and promotions when in front of various products along with a barcode scanning capability for price lookups and basket totals.

With these new innovations, Microsoft is helping retailers compete by turning insight into action. Be sure to check out the Official Microsoft Blog for more information on Microsoft in Retail and news from some of our industry leading customers.

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