Phone-Wielding Shoppers Strike Fear Into Retailers

Miguel Bustillo & Ann Zimmerman

Tri Tang, a 25-year-old marketer, walked into a Best Buy Co. store in Sunnyvale, Calif., this past weekend and spotted the perfect gift for his girlfriend.
Last year, he might have just dropped the $184.85 Garmin global positioning system into his cart. This time, he took out his Android phone and typed the model number into an app that instantly compared the Best Buy price to those of other retailers. He found that he could get the same item on Amazon.com Inc.’s website for only $106.75, no shipping, no tax.
Mr. Tang bought the Garmin from Amazon right on the spot.

Making commuters’ lives easier

The Economist:

EARLY this month, a massive new railway tunnel opened for the first time. It was finished six months early and nearly 10% under budget. So by now you know this didn’t happen in America (or Britain, for that matter.) No, this feat of modern engineering (and good government) was completed in the Swedish city of Malmö, just across the Oresund bridge from Copenhagen, Denmark.
The project transformed Malmö Central Station, which is actually in the northern part of the city, from a dead end where trains had to reverse course into a through station. The former terminus is now just a stop on a large circular route that cuts underground through the center of Sweden’s third-largest city. The construction of the tunnel was accompanied by the construction of two new stations–one in the actual city centre, and another south of the city, in an area targeted for future development. Here’s a map:

Much more from Railzone.