There’s no doubt that NRF is a Really Big Show. Some booths were really ginormous, and as other RSR partners have pointed out, most roads lead us to the store, to integration, and to the customer. My goal is always to find some nuggets in the middle of all that mass; they were there and I managed to find some.

It turns out there’s still some low-hanging fruit in the store. We’ve been hearing resurging comments about cash management solutions for the past couple of years, so when Nikki and I met with Kevin Stafford, Director of Front-end Operations for Food City, I wasn’t totally surprised that he’d found some low hanging fruit. But his results, partnering with firm Balance Innovations, have been nothing short of spectacular. Now, Balance Innovations wasn’t the only cash management firm on the floor. I know personally of several. But I do encourage retailers who manage large amounts of cash to take a look at technologies like this. I mean, did you really think there was any low-hanging fruit left? Well, there is!

I was really fascinated by a technology offered up by Panasonic. If you’ve ever projected an image or video on a screen, you’re familiar with the term “keystoneing. ” That happens when you’re not projecting in a straight line. Multiply that by a lot when you’re also shooting at curved surfaces. Panasonic has created a technology that straightens out the images, regardless what you’re shooting at. This will become more important as we go forward and add more digital images in our stores. Again, I thought it was cool. And useful.

Speaking of digital images, there are compliance issues associated with the usage of the right images and other marketing campaign collateral in stores. I found a small company (sharing a booth with another company) that is the next generation compliance tool – based on store layouts – it confirms that all marketing and operational materials are in place, in real time. After all, most of these tools are now digitally enabled, and confirming that the right content is in the right place is a pretty important task. I was impressed with unefi OMS, and hope to learn more about them in the months to come.

I’m also really interested in uses for 4G/LTE in the store. I’ll talk more about that at our post-NRF wrap-up, but it does strike me as one simple way to get around the issues associated with network security and segmentation.

These are some of the nuggets I saw. That’s not to say that vendors with a larger retail footprint don’t have interesting, fresh and new solutions. They do. I know that.

And that brings me to my wish. That wish harkens back to the old Retail Systems show (full disclosure: the company that ran that show, Retail Systems Alert Group was RSR’s original parent company). I really wish we had, front and center on the show floor, some kind of “Innovation Alley. ” It doesn’t have to be restricted to small companies like it was at the old show. It can be the most innovative things done by large companies too. It would be cool to see some of the things companies like SAP, IBM and Oracle are doing in little swamp works (I’ve seen some of SAP’s stuff… it’s innovative as heck). I mean, wouldn’t it be fun to see a Watson computer do its thing? And to see Exadata humming along? I can only wish. It’d be way better than wending my way through 50 or 60 demo pods to find the vendor’s next new thing.