Shopping centres are starting to seek to maximize at least Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) such as the total number of shoppers coming to the centre (i.e. ‘footfall’), the number of times that shoppers come to the centre over the course of a year (i.e. ‘repeat visits’) and the length of time that shoppers stay at the centre (i.e. ‘dwell time’). Many shopping centres have technical systems in place to capture information on the total number of shoppers in the centre. These are usually camera-counting solutions that count the total number of shoppers entering and exiting the building. Centres also may have the ability to estimate repeat visitors. Some centres have installed license plate recognition software in their car parks and hence have the capability to interrogate this dataset and identify the number of times the same car has returned to the centre. However, until recently it has not been possible to quantify dwell time - except through sporadic, one-off surveys and so ‘dwell time’ has only played a limited role in evaluating a centre’s performance.
Background
A number of indoor solutions based on cell-tower triangulation or Wi-Fi network databases have appeared in recent years, the newest being one from Point Inside. By combining a proprietary location solution with indoor maps of major malls and airports, these systems offer guidance in places where Google Maps and others simply cannot. It is a rapidly growing area of localisation. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Nokia and a few standalone portable navigation device makers are well-entrenched with their efforts to dominate the indoor navigation space. Some of these systems use existing WiFi infrastructures to triangulate position. The key difference between these systems and the traditional indoor tracking solutions like Ekahau and Trapeze is that you are reliant on the company or other users in having mapped the location beforehand. They are however very powerful and cheaper to utilise although there will be licensing costs to build your own apps with integrate with their API. Google and Apple are both in the positioning game and have both recently come into the news for collecting our personal data to improve their location abilities. They are gathering location information to build massive databases capable of pinpointing people’s locations via their mobile phones. These databases could help them tap the £2 billion market for location-based services, which is expected to rise to £6 billion by 2014 according to Gartner. Generally, when companies have collected data from users it has been from personal computers. The data gathered through this medium can be tied only to a city or area code. The rise of internet-enabled mobile phones allows the collection of user data that is much more personal and can be tied to locations on a more granular scale.