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Immediately following the New Year, you probably noticed a few changes.  The gym parking lot was jammed packed.  Every other commercial on TV was for some kind of home workout tape or weight loss solution. Nearly every store was highlighting the “new you.”

Not even thirty days have gone by and things are starting to change again.  People are falling off the bandwagon. Grocery stores are replacing the diet products with Valentine’s Day candy and the commercials for diet plans and fitness products have reverted back to ads about fast food chains and cars.

New Year’s Resolutions don’t last very long but there is one resolution that shouldn’t be let go.

Following the New Year, Hotel News Now featuredRead More

By Beth McGarrity

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind of activity as we prepared for one of the biggest retail shows of the year.  More than 24,000 retailers, technology providers, suppliers and partners gathered for the retail industry’s premier event, NRF 2012.   For any professional in the retail sector, the “Big Show” is the go-to affair for networking, business development, educational opportunities and much, much more.

What is most exciting about an event like NRF 2012 is seeing, first-hand, key innovations and learning about the future of the industry.  As I walked the show floor, networked with colleagues and attended breakout sessions, several major themes resonated that will clearly shape the years ahead:

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By Beth McGarrity

This week kicks off NRF 2012, one of the largest shows for retailers, where new technologies, solutions and offerings are announced all week long.  In fact, we just announced a new integrated solution for Columbia Sportswear to secure payment transactions across 54 retail locations.  So, when I was scanning headlines today, I was surprised to see that Zappos.com was in the headlines, but not in a positive way.  The major online retailer had fallen prey to data thieves.

Yet, as I continued reading, a statement caught my eye –

Zappos said that hackers gained access to customers’ names, e-mail addresses, billing and shipping addresses, phone numbers, and the last four digits of credit cardRead More

Merchant Link News

SILVER SPRING, MD (January 4, 2012) – Business Solutions magazine has named Merchant Link, a leading provider of cloud-based payment gateway and data security solutions, as one of the Best Channel Vendors for 2012 in the Payment Processing category.

Merchant Link scored particularly high in the areas of service and support, product reliability, and channel friendliness. The company was also recognized for product innovation, reflecting the company’s recent focus on providing cutting-edge tokenization and encryption solutions to protect sensitive customer data and enable merchants to meet and exceed PCI compliance standards.

“Merchant Link is pleased and honored to be named to the list of… Read More

Joie de Vivre, which manages the largest collection of boutique hotels in California and an assortment of restaurants and spas, will raise the standards of customer service by implementing Merchant Link’s tokenization solution to protect the credit card data of its guests across 27 of its locations.  Merchant Link is a leading provider of cloud-based payment gateway and data security solutions.

Joie de Vivre offers one of the most unique collections of lifestyle hotels and continues to expand on its fresh and inventive properties.  Merchant Link will deploy its hosted, card-based tokenization solution across the Joie de Vivre enterprise,… Read More

Tokenization offers added layer of security to spa management software while reducing PCI scope

Merchant Link, a leading provider of payment gateway and data security solutions, today announced that its TransactionVault™ tokenization solution now fully integrates with industry leading spa and activity management software SpaSoft, providing an extra layer of payment security — while helping meet PCI compliance requirements — for spas and resorts.

Offered by PAR Springer-Miller, SpaSoft is a management and scheduling software solution for spas and resorts that now integrates with Merchant Link’s next-generation tokenization solution, which removes customer credit card data where it would be at risk… Read More