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Three-thousand miles apart, two teams are preparing for the biggest game of the year, along with the millions of fans who will be cheering them on. According to a new survey by the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, a division of the National Retail Federation, conducted by BIGinsight, more than 179.1 million people will watch the game Sunday, February 3, the most in the survey’s nine-year history and up from an estimated 172.5 million last year.

NRF urged the House to approve legislation that would put the federal debt ceiling on hold until mid-May.

Solid consumer spending in the month of December helped retailers finish the year with a healthy holiday shopping season, however economic uncertainties sent a cautious consumer to the stores. According to the National Retail Federation, the world’s largest retail trade association, December retail sales (excluding automobiles, gas stations and restaurants) increased 0.8 percent seasonally adjusted from November and increased 2.1 percent unadjusted year-over-year.

NRF released the following statement from President and CEO Matthew Shay regarding Walmart’s announcement regarding the hiring of veterans: "It is nothing less than visionary for a great American company to make such a bold pledge to help our American heroes.”

Shop.org is launching today a multi-part initiative to engage the industry in examining how retailers are integrating all things “digital” into their business structures.

The National Retail Federation today announced that Saks Incorporated Chairman and CEO Stephen I. Sadove has been elected chairman of the NRF Board of Directors and chairman of its Executive Committee. He succeeds NRF’s immediate past chairman, Terry J. Lundgren, chairman, president and CEO of Macy’s, Inc. Sadove was elected at the Board of Directors meeting held Sunday during NRF’s 102nd Annual Convention and EXPO – Retail’s BIG Show.

The NRF Foundation, the non-profit arm of the National Retail Federation, announced today that Mindy Grossman, CEO, HSNi, was elected as the new chair of its Board of Directors for a two-year term.

The NRF Board of Directors has adopted a resolution directing NRF to “strongly encourage” Congress to enact comprehensive tax reform in 2013 and setting out a list of principles aimed at achieving tax policy that would boost the economy and encourage job growth.

The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), the National Retail Federation’s technology standards division, today announced the release of three diverse standards for the retail technology community, all of which will be available for review in the ARTS Pavilion, booth 2253, at Retail’s BIG Show.

As shoppers become increasingly connected, online retailers in 2013 will get back to basics, focusing on strategies and tactics to improve the customer experience and increase web conversion and loyalty across all devices

Import cargo volume at the nation’s major retail container ports is expected to increase 2.3 percent in January over the same month last year as retailers continue to urge labor and management to avoid a strike at East Coast and Gulf Coast docks, according to the monthly Global Port Tracker report released by NRF and Hackett Associates.

Bringing together the world’s leading retailers and their business partners, Retail’s BIG Show is set to commence next week, offering a speaker lineup never seen before. The four-day convention, held January 13-16, 2013 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, will feature topics ranging from digital and mobile retailing to corporate and social responsibility to economic and consumer trends in the new year.

The Dream BIG scholarship will award 10 current retail employees with full tuition at any University of Phoenix program, providing them the opportunity to pair education with work experience and ambitions to pursue a wide-array of career opportunities within the retail industry.

The NRF Foundation and American Express today announced the winners of their annual Aspire2Retail Intercollegiate Challenge, which is designed to increase understanding of diverse career paths in retail by engaging university students in a competitive, collaborative role play that involves implementing a multi-tiered business strategy.

NRF welcomed an agreement reached between the White House and Congress on a plan to avoid the fiscal cliff.

From Intel Corporation. Merchant IT organizations are grappling with two competing priorities - maintain PCI DSS compliance, and to efficiently manage hundreds or thousands of remote devices. Not to mention that new devices are always being added, and those devices may have different form factors, support requirements, and transactional security needs.

From TrendSource. This two-part study revealed that pre-holiday results stating that over 50% of consumers would be hesitant to purchase without a discount was consistent with post-holiday results in which 67 to 70% of all consumers bought more than half of their total purchases on sale items during the 2012 holiday season.

National Retail Federation President and CEO Matthew Shay issued the following statement on news that the International Longshoremen’s Association and United States Maritime Alliance agreed to extend their contract negotiations for an additional 30 days:

Microsoft in partnership with the Fujitsu Center of Excellence offers this paper as a starting point for understanding how to approach development of a comprehensive cloud computing strategy. The retail enterprise IT environment serves all aspects of business operations including shopper engagement, product delivery and core business operations. To support the varied needs many retailers are embarking on a “hybrid” approach to delivering cloud services. This simply means mixing on premises service delivery with hosted or public service delivery to achieve the definition of an effective cloud computing environment. This document covers guidance for retailers when developing a "hybrid cloud" strategy to connect the three enterprise application profiles (new, strategic, and legacy) together to serve the modern shopper.