A ‘smart trolley’ for supermarkets. The goods there are already RFID-ed (what a verb!), some at least, soon more to be.

A box attached to the trolley handbar communicates with the tags (‘trolley speaks to goods, 2-way’). The box has card reader where shopper plugs/swipes ‘loyalty’ card (what wrong name for a digital ID card).

The box connects over store-wide WiFi to main system where it retrievers shopper profile (explicit preferences, implicit ones from past shopping behaviour, propensities from predictive modelling). Box also retrieves from system data about goods in proximity (sell-by date, callorie content, special offers).

Upon close matches of goods v/s shopper preferences and propensities, alert messages and promotions are displayed on small screen on the box. Can be scripted like ‘goods speaking to shopper’ (‘See me on your left! I am fresh, and you can have 2 for the price of 1 – Grab me from the shelf!’) Can even be speech-synth-ed.

Variation: instead of trolley box, a much smaller ‘dumb’ transceiver (e.g. matchbox-size or smaller, stuck to baskets) just WiFi-es the RFID data of nearby goods to main system. Then the server-processed/matched messages are communicated to the shopper on her mobile phone (over WiFi, if handset is capable, or over cellular network) – perhaps using a (very) thin J2ME client that is downloadable free via the ‘loyalty’program and thus contains shoper ID…

Technically easy, ROI comes from cross-sell / up-sell, and does miracles for retention (even when rival supermarket builds similar system it will take a switching customer ages to ‘teach’ it about preferences).. Any candidates to take this blueprint and run with it?

Just hurry, because I know one large UK retailer who are toying with it