This week's 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES (News - Alert)) in Las Vegas has Verizon Wireless teaming up with Alcatel-Lucent to showcase a new breed of mobile commerce applications. The demonstrations are aimed at helping consumers save money while also showing benefits for retailers.

The demonstration of a connected retail shopping experience uses a series of interconnected demos. It combines 3D telepresence, cloud computing, videoconferencing and ultra-high bandwidth connectivity over 4G LTE. Attendees can find the demonstration in the Verizon (News - Alert) booth at the show, which is being held at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Mobile commerce plays an important role in the way retailers and consumers interact, especially when it comes to coupon redemption and moneysaving offers. Near Field Communications technology and intelligent devices may be used to deliver coupons directly over a network to a consumer's mobile device, enabling a personal and customized mobile commerce experience for shoppers. Retailers also benefit through valuable redemption information that may be used to support loyalty programs as well as for increasingly accurate inventory management.

The joint demonstration at CES shows how merging mobile commerce with other applications can aid in the creation of new retail business models at store locations as well as at home. As a component of the demo, consumers will receive a coupon through a Near Field Communications-enabled device, which may then be redeemed at an interactive Virtual Personal Stylist (VPS) kiosk.

The VPS concept is based on the ng Connect Program, which was founded by Alcatel-Lucent and now has more than 125 member companies. The CES demo features cloud-based processing and other new technologies from a number of companies, including CradlePoint, Systech, TelePresence Tech, [TC]2, Vidyo (News - Alert) and VisionMAX.

After the CES show, the demos will be a featured in the Verizon LTE Innovation Center in Waltham, Mass. The Innovation Program was established by Verizon to encourage collaboration as well as advance the 4G LTE (News - Alert) ecosystem. The LTE Innovation Center as well as an Application Innovation Center in San Francisco were established to inspire, enable and develop non-traditional devices, services and applications that take advantage of Verizon's wireless networks.

“In today's digital economy, connectivity has become as important as any utility for consumers,” said Robert Vrij (News - Alert), president of the Americas region for Alcatel-Lucent. “At CES, we are working with Verizon Wireless to highlight the new breed of applications and capabilities – such as mobile commerce – that were once viewed as futuristic, but are now becoming possible based on the power, reliability and ubiquity of today's mobile networks.”

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