Gina Tricot is a family-owned, Swedish fashion chain that consists of over 180 stores across the following five markets: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Germany. Combined with growing online sales, the company reaches fashion-conscious women in 28 countries across Europe. In 2012, Gina Tricot reported sales of SEK 2.3 billion.

Challenges

• Implement a reliable and scalable infrastructure to drive online sales both in countries with a physical presence via stores and in countries where the company sells exclusively online.
• Outsource the day-to-day administration of the e-commerce system, including the databases, to a local partner while maintaining overall overview and control of the system.

Solution

• Selected MySQL to power Gina Tricot’s e-commerce application based on its reputation as default database for web-based …

Retail is an area where MySQL has been very popular for a long time. Leading companies like Zappos, Puma, NET-A-PORTER, Suzuki, Pricer or OKQ8 have selected it for retail applications including Sales Kiosks, Point Of Sales, Electronic Shelf Label systems and Online Stores.

According to independent research firm, Forrester Research, Inc. *, Online and Web-influenced in store sales will grow to 53 percent of total retail sales by 2014.

The retail sector has indeed undergone a colossal evolution in the past decade as new technologies have offered people greater choice in the way they shop. Winning retailers now adopt Web 2.0 technologies and best practices in order to improve their customers' online experience, cost-effectively create "buzz" about their offerings and boost their revenues.

If you want to better understand how to leverage MySQL to get the most of the …

Intuit launches open source project. SFLC on Microsoft GPL violation accusations.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Intuit launched open source projects and community to develop apps based on its Intuit Partner Platform, while Savio Rodrigues declared Intuit’s open source play is all business.

# SFLC’s Bradley Kuhn told SDTimes Microsoft was in violation of the GPL.

# MySQL and Memcached-based appliance vendor Schooner Info Tech has raised $20m in Series B funding.

# …

As consumer spending slows across the world, a variety of "brick and mortar" retailers are clearly feeling the impact. Foot traffic is slowing, and it's getting harder to balance debt laden real estate portfolios and fickle consumer trends.

For consumer product manufacturers, retail distribution is key - it's how you get in front of a customer. It's why the big PC manufacturers are all working hard to score deals with big retailers (or build their own retail outlets) around the world.

But making money on PC's is tough - for most PC makers, you're remarketing someone else's operating system and someone else's microprocessor - it's not for the faint of heart (or faint of balance sheet). For Sun, our retail distribution concerns don't surround consumer hardware (we don't make PC's) as much as consumer software - the popularity of which defines our market opportunity. …