NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, the man credited with starting the World Wide Web, told retailers attending the industry's annual technology conference of numerous near-term prospects: robotics that fuel tanks for customers, global positioning systems that inform passing motorists of fast-food options and cars that play MP3 files.
Attendees present on the first day of the NACStech 2007 conference in Nashville, Tenn., began to understand the ramifications of what Berners-Lee began almost 20 years ago with crude drawings and ruminations of [image-nocss] universal communication. Going forward, the common threads are diversity of participants, openness, royalty-free [communications] and a sense of excitement and unbridled opportunity, he told the group of roughly 1,000 opening-session attendees.
Earlier in the afternoon, workshop session speakers presided over topics ranging from project management to mobile commerce. Robert Wesley, president and CEO of MobileLime, Watertown, Mass., spoke to a smaller group of approximately 75 conference attendees about how strategies such as text messaging and electronic coupons are becoming critical ways of reaching customers.
Wesley said loyalty programs would drive the industry's use of the technology, noting how electronic push and pull strategies will become more common. Push strategies will send text messages to interested motorists while pull tactics will allow people to access information about specials while they're on the road.
Steve White, vice president and CFO of Robinson Oil Corp., San Jose, Calif., said the information was an eye opener. Though the cell phone and mobile market in general has yet to mature, he believed the use of the technology as a marketing tool and eventually as a form of payment is undeniable. It hits on the button of convenience, he said.
Meanwhile, at the general session, Berners-Lee pointed out how the model of the World Wide Web resembles the efforts that NACS began several years back with what has become its technology-standards effort. That effort, which spun off into its own entity, Alexandria, Va.-based Petroleum Convenience Alliance for Technology Standards (PCATS), seeks to achieve similar goals in connecting diverse applications and hardware. For an update on those efforts from NACStech, see related story in this issue of CSP Daily News.
Like the PCATS effort, the Web was designed to do the engineering without changing the way people managed the data, Berners-Lee said.
In terms of this year's attendance, NACS officials had not released concrete figures, but Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for the association said the numbers were upwards of 1,500 -- an estimate that mirrors last year's figures for both retailers and suppliers.
With regards to the first day of formal NACStech events, Lenard said he was awed by the progress of technology within the industry. It's interesting to see the environment go from Isn't that neat?' to We're doing it.'
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