Yesterday, I blogged about Big Brother in US supermarket carts, now he’s arriving in Japanese shopping baskets.

NTT Software will launch in December a sales promotion system for retailers called “One to One History Analysis / RFID tag solution”.

The stores must first attach RFID tags to products and shelves so that smart shopping baskets with built-in RFID readers can decode them.

When a shopper puts a product in her/his basket, the basket reads the tag and sends its data to a server for shopping history analysis. As the shopper walks around the store, the basket’s reader decodes shelves tags and sends the location to the server which in turn retrieves a list of products on a nearby shelf, and another lists of the products already in the basket, to guess what the shopper might be looking for, and notifies it.

NTT Software’s technology expert says “Thanks to the smart baskets’ location recognition capability. The system can not only recommend related products but also promotion items of each area in a store. It can refer to individual shoppers’ shopping histories and recommend products that match their preferences.”

Via RFID in Japan.