Taggalo Mashes Up Beacons, WiFi And Video Analytics To Tell Retailers What Shoppers Are Up To

November 2, 2015 by Dave Haynes

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The Italian/UK start-up Taggalo has launched a new gadget and service it says blends three technologies to provide retailers and brands richer insights about consumer behavior and interests in the aisles.

The device combines a camera that does face pattern detection, a sensor for WiFi tracking and a Bluetooth beacon. The device spits out analytics from all three technologies into an online customer dashboard.

If you have been around digital signage for a while, Taggalo may ring a bell as the company that had a little device that mounted to the corner of a display to log and validate that media files had played.

Says a press release:

This tiny device can be quickly unpacked and installed without any special expertise and starts collecting data in 20 seconds. Typical retailers in a 100-square meter store will use three Taggalo devices to capture information: one located in the shopping window, one above the entrance and one inside the store.

The solution was built from the ground up by Taggalo, from the three sensing technologies to the analytics dashboard, and is very cost-competitive, giving even smaller retailers a way to gather and analyze customer data. The real-time comprehensive analytics are displayed visually in a customizable web dashboard and data are also accessible via APIs to allow seamless integration with other business intelligence applications.

The device provides:

  • Camera for video face recognition analysis using a smart algorithm for accurate morphologic assessment, letting retailers know the numbers of people coming in, ethnicity, age group and gender. Data are analyzed in real time and not saved, to preserve privacy
  • Wi-Fi analysis tracks new versus returning guests and average length of stay in a given area, leveraging the most advanced hashing techniques, without capture or disclosure of personal data
  • Beacon allows for easy ROI measurement, one-to-one contextual engagement and CRM integration using a white label mobile app
  • Highest level of data consistency is ensured because both video and Wi-Fi-tracking information are collected from the same sensor, positioned in a well-known location.
  • Granular analytics dashboard with real-time data by location, by hour/week/day/month and aggregated by store, by window or by other location

“To boost sales as well as provide a seamless omnichannel experience, we wanted to give retailers an easy solution to provide customer behavior data just like online retailers get. Because we provide multiple ways to gather customer data, Taggalo captures information on 100 percent of people passing by and entering a store,” declared Luca Nestola, CEO and founder, Taggalo and Paolo Guida, an early investor in the company. “Taggalo is so easy to deploy that after initial training customers are rolling it out themselves, avoiding expensive integration costs.”

The company is one of 12 finalists in the ChallengeUp, an IoT acceleration program backed by Cisco, Intel and Deutsche Telekom to develop joint use cases for end user customers and it recently raised seed funding from a pool of private investors. Taggalo will present early results at Unbound Digital in London on November 31st and December 1st.

Certainly, I’ve seen solutions that combine WiFi and beacons to deliver retail insights – like PeopleFlow and AisleLabs, both of Toronto. But this the first to my knowledge to layer in video analytics, and I think this is in many respects a better use of the tech than the oft-touted capability to serve messages based on gender or, more lately, emotion.

I’d rather know how many people looked and for how long, than how many got a message based on the machine’s stab at whether a male or female was happy or grumpy.

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