The National Retail Federation's annual show at Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan was a gathering of big name retailers talking about multichannel branding and marketing. The Jan. 14-17 conference included 16,000 pre-registered attendees from 51 countries, and the floor included 500 exhibitors. Tim Lindner, manager of professional services sales at Sony, was publicizing his firm's retail management system that has quietly been on the market for five years. We are there to develop relationships with retailers and to meet with potential clients for integration, Mr. Lindner said. Sony's retail products included a systems tool that Mr. Lindner compared with Tom Cruise shopping in the film Minority Report. It tracks and measures customer behavior in the store, much like most e-commerce sites do. It scans the customer's entrance into the store through a loyalty badge or a credit card. When the system recognizes that a customer is in the s