As if browsing store aisles isn't taxing enough
Attention K-Mart shoppers (and others): Falling prices for NAND flash memory can be expected to bring a major surge of electronic advertising to retail store aisles that will have consumers longing for the days of the occasional blue-light special.
So says Jim Handy, chief analyst at market research firm Objective Analysis, in a Computerworld story on our site:
Handy said retail customers may soon see widespread use of “these very annoying little LCD screens” in grocery and drug stores. When you walk past them, “somebody starts barking at you from a video and talking about how you need this or that thing,” he said.
In-store advertising displays “are probably going to become extraordinarily prevalent just because of the fact that they are cheap and they just gobble up a ton of flash,” said Handy, who was speaking at the Storage Visions conference (in Las Vegas), held in conjunction with CES.
One might hope that retailers would carefully weigh the pros and cons of such high-tech tactics, because the last the thing they need is to provide shoppers with yet another incentive to make more of their purchases online.
Coincidentally, Samsung announced last week that the Korean government has endorsed its plan to invest at least $3 billion to build a NAND flash memory factory … in China. From an IDG News Service story on our site:
The new plant will eventually produce 100,000 12-inch wafers per month using cutting-edge 20-nanometer technology, each of which is cut into multiple memory chips. Construction is to begin this year, with operations to start in 2013, although the exact location has yet to be set, according to company spokesman Nam Ki-Yung.
Soon enough those chips will be coming to a store near you … and not just in the products.
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