Surveillance Cameras Used To Study Customer Behavior 126
An anonymous reader writes "Technology Review reports on a startup with software used by stores to track, count and log people captured by security cameras. Prism Skylab's technology can produce heatmaps showing where people went and produce other statistics that the company claims offer tracking and analytics like those used online for the real world. One use case is for businesses to correlate online promotions and deals — such as Groupon offers — with real world footfall and in-store behavior."
soon: citizens with rfid to be tracked by everyone (Score:4, Interesting)
its not IF but WHEN.
everyone who has an interest in 'tracking' will want to be able to ID people and know where they are.
govs want this, businesses want this, 'law' enforcement wants this.
the only people who don't are the people; and they have no power anymore in the western (or eastern!) countries.
its been said each generation, but its true here: I fear or the world our kids are going to inherit. it does not sound at all like a world I want want. I can see where things are going. Do Not Want.
Are you ready for some Footfall? (Score:4, Interesting)
Football? What?, oh wait, misread. Someone tell me I'm not alone in that error.
At the end of the day does this yield better results than counting sales at the close of business?
More complicated results, perhaps, but after analyzing traffic patterns all day long studying dwell time at displays, does it really yield anything useful that the store owner can actually act upon, re-arranging the displays, etc?
And if they do act on the data, it will almost certainly be to benefit one product area vs another. Will there be any net gain for the store as a whole?
Won't wholesalers with clout demand the data and push hard for the best locations or shelving decisions? If you have data, you are going to be forced to share it sooner or later, and when everyone is rushing past the Laptop counters to get to the TV display area, is there anything short of re-arranging the store you can do about it? Won't Dell, HP, and Apple, insist on being on the high traffic routes? Didn't the store owner just lose control?
And at the end of the day, is it different in any way from just tallying sales ?
Its always the Image Processing People... (Score:1, Interesting)
As a marketer... (Score:4, Interesting)
Besides, when doing observation studies the point is not to disturb consumers so they are usually done from a surveillance room or such to monitor consumers movements. Marketers are very seldom interested in individual interactions but when consumers do stand out from the norm it's good to have the possibility to interact with said consumer.
I see this as a possible solution for very large shopping centers and their likes but I don't think there's anything special about this thing in particular.