It’s the first month of the New Year and time to consider what can we expect to see happen in the world of technology over the next 12 months?

Following a fairly quiet 2014, Micros is continuing to promote its Prism 2 system, while CBE continues to grow its systems, relentlessly. Parkfoot Garage took delivery of a new mobile EPOS system in December from CBE, which is designed to be mobile around the store. It has full POS functionality and the owner David Charman was most eloquent in his praise of the system.

It is the world of technology and gadgets that continues to see major growth, and there is so much out there. I was particularly keen to see more internet able small systems being developed.

I was lucky enough to get a new iPad (2 Air) which is light as a feather and thin as a biscuit. It is an excellent device, but will the iPad ever make it in business, answer probably not. There are however many different rumours about an iPad Pro, supposedly a more robust version, designed for a harsher business environment.

The recent CES show in Las Vegas was almost devoted to wearable technology such as intelligent watches and monitors. Apple has yet to announce a release date for its new watch. All of the press seems to indicate that the watch will be the best yet?

Some of the developments in 2015 should include more self checkout advances. Just look at the major supermarket chains to see where they deploy these devices increasingly in their convenience stores.

’The Cloud’ will continue to dominate development in retail technology as mainstream, high street retail seeks the ability to move away from fixed POS positions, and offers new ways of delivering EPOS to the customer. Biometrics will play a part in this growth using features such as fingerprint recognition and retina scans.

I also expect E receipts will be seen in the forecourt sector this year.

Recipe management is also being introduced. CBE has just released a Scale to Sale feature enabling butchery and deli counters to add multiple items together at the counter and then produce a single barcode which when scanned at the POS enables a reconciliation between scale and POS as well as listing all items in the bag separately.

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