INNOVATION AWARDS: THINKSMART TECHNOLOGIES:IMAGINE IF supermarkets or shopping malls knew exactly how long people spent in each aisle, or if an airport could identify the footprints of every passenger through the duty-free shops.
The operational and marketing potential of such data is enormous. At present most of that sort of data is collected by human researchers taking random samples at different times and locations.
Thinksmart Technologies’ new locational intelligence and analytics product, Intellify, aims to provide a far more detailed and complete profile. It translates data from location services to meaningful business information, like customer flows, dwell times, behaviours, crowding, typical paths and so on. Using the widespread adoption of Wi-Fi and smartphones it delivers precise information about customers’ complete journeys in airports, retail and entertainment venues.
“Large venues struggle to understand how they are used by their customers with any level of precision,” says Thinksmart’s chief technology officer James Little. “They spend large amounts of money on surveys or other technologies such as Bluetooth counters to try and fill this void.”
With Intellify they can fully understand and analyse the typical, complete journey of the customer within the location from point of entry to exit and everything in between; plot actual usage of the space over time, show where people spend time, how they flow through the space; compare trends over any time period; show when and where the crowded areas are; show actual travel times between various areas and typical routes taken; and enable comparisons between first-time visitors and repeat visitors.
The product goes beyond mere statistics but tries to understand, through data mining, how and why customers make the decisions they do and how these can be responded to.
The product is already gaining international recognition with global airport IT company Sita initiating distribution negotiations about an exclusive option to sell it to their 700 airport customers worldwide.
In addition, Cisco has decided to partner Thinksmart on two trial deployments and a flagship demo at the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The company expects to grow revenues by a factor of 300 per cent a year in both 2012 and 2013 slowing to 200 per cent in 2014. All sales will be to export markets and delivered on a software as a service model.
