Glass Media Now Marketing KrowdSense Retail Analytics Tech Designed To Optimize In-Store Visual Merchandising

April 12, 2024 by Dave Haynes

Glass Media is now formally marketing a new retail analytics platform the Dallas company was previewing late last year at Digital Signage Experience. At last I think so … founder Daniel Black showed me a few things, and that was four months ago.

KrowdSense is positioned as a wireless occupancy scanner that can measure shopper behavior at storefronts, including readings on customer flow, peel rate, and dwell times. The core benefit is providing retailers and brands with the ability to analyze traffic and overall engagement, and then optimize what they do with windows.

This also has a direct benefit to Glass Media, which has technologies like small projection set-ups and flat panel-based POP display set-ups that often integrate with product merchandising in windows and elsewhere in stores.

The KrowdSense service is built around a little signal scanning gizmo and software that is described as a “cost-effective and privacy-compliant alternative” to camera-based audience analytics systems. While almost always just doing detection and not recognition, camera-based analytics still freak out a percentage of people worried about being video-captured and tracked.

The product/service was co-developed by Glass-Media and Toronto-based Kaidu. Along with lowered privacy objections, the service is also touted as being fast to install and easy to maintain, with no technical expertise needed for deployment.

Kaidu suggests its scanner technology is more than 90% accurate, “providing retailers with reliable data on the number of people in their store.”

The KrowdSense and Kaidu sites provide minimal detail on what the signal scanning is all about, but I’m kinda thinking it has to be smartphones with WiFi on. Kaidu has services that track and position using their gizmos and BLE beacons (tech that was buzzy as hell about 10 years ago, but has faded in attention), but I don’t think beacons have anything to do with this.

The companies say KrowdSense is available for purchase in the United States, Canada and Europe, “with strict adherence to each region’s privacy laws and regulations.”