Path Intelligence Monitors Foot Traffic in Retail Stores By Pinging People’s Phones

The question that comes to my mind is how are they getting access to the “pings”. I mean with google maps to get your location you have to initiate the signal. But this didn’t make mention of anything the user has to interact with.

Is this company just scanning the “air” in the vicinity of the shopping center???

Neat tech… somewhat scary techniques.

“Neat tech… somewhat scary techniques.”

Scary indeed.

Brilliant concept. I can see them expanding this to track an aggregate of which stores a consumer goes into if they’re able to get buy-in from a number of retailers.

It’ll be great in food stores … you’ll be able to have automatic recorded voices “Hey Fatty, get away from the icecream” booming out over the speakers!

So many uses for this type of technology, instant traffic reports, security for restricted areas, and more

Big Brother is Watching You!

Big brother is really watching and can tell when I went ot the bathroom and how long I stayed. Talk about invasion of privacy. Ughhh!
Imagine using this to track traffic in airports or other places. Makes me begin to hate my cell phone.

Such technology but still we su** in security.

This is a hoax, scam, whatever you want to call it. Cell phones are designed to save battery power by transmitting as little as possible when not on a call. They will not sync with the towers often enough to be useful. Only people talking on their phones will provide data and this data is flawed because the customer is on a call, not “shopping”.

I’m very skeptical of the accuracy claims. 1M accuracy? hmm…

Jeez… take off the tin foil hats guys. This seems like a WILDLY useful technology

Has a lot of potential for many uses. But like another commentor said, I am skeptical about the accuracy and refresh rates. Is the phone really pinging towers that often? If not, someone could suddenly jump across an entire mall.

Wonder how they know which side the customer is facing?

Heretic,

Cell phone do send a sync pulse to a tower, but you are right, the save power, the pulses are sent infrequently…there is no way you can get 1m accuracy with in frequency pulses (user might have moved away). Plus there is the little issue of signal fading, multi-path…

Remember if these guys had such great tech, they should be out trying to convince carriers to dump power hungry GPS and use this instead.

Check out polaris wireless. They seem to have similar technology, but more realisitic claims….

I’m with Heretic…Hoax!

True, didn’t even think of that. A cell phone ping won’t have any direction associated with it.

Wonder do they know which side the customer is facing? Also can they make out blackberry vs regular phone by the ping?

Can cell phone towers pinpoint your height? Most shopping centres have two or more floors, and if the software can only work out where you are on a 2D map like in the screenshot, every single person being tracked could be in any of 2 or 3 or 4 different shops, rendering it pretty worthless.

I’m sure the owner of a tiny specialist polo equipment shop will be very surprised when the shopping centre comes knocking on his door telling him that since he’s getting thousands of customers a day they’re raising his rent, when in fact they’re all in the McDonald’s directly below him.

I’ve been thinking more about this…

I dont think they are tracking users
…certainly they dont have anyway to get the unique ID of end users, that I can think off. I believe they have receivers inside stores that simply detect the direction and concentration of RF signals. The attached image certainly seems to suggest that.

Retails can, by analyzing sales pattern, already high value locations inside stores. What they cannot tell is high traffic locations that do not complete sales. Eg a new gadget at Best Buy has the attention of a large number of visitors, but until enough are sold, a store cant really tell that.

Question is, what is the ROI ?

Thats an amazing idea, but… why does their website look like its from the 80’s?

Now even I didn’t think of this! Clever!

Why not just track shopping-carts, baskets, bags. Sure you mis out on people walking with their own plastic bag but not everyone has a cellphone either.

Maybe just give them a tracking Cookie when they enter the store in different flavours

Ah, the ’80s. That was nice… Looks like their site was designed in India. Not knocking India, but from the little experience I have looking at Indian outsourcing firms, their websites, and many of their reference sites, that’s where it looks like it was designed.

Huh. I wonder if this is technically feasible, based on folks thoughts on ping-frequency, etc - you’d need a pretty steady stream of pings to get a smooth distribution, or an incredibly high volume of traffic to smooth an erratic distribution over time.

I wonder if camera surveilance wouldn’t be as effective a solution? i.e.: just track an individual’s path via camera. Stores generally have cameras already, and the technology exists to identify and follow a unique individual. For the sake of “privacy,” its simple enough to store their path without storing their image.

I don’t know: This seems like too much solution for the problem.

Brilliant, and a little scary at the same time.

LET ME CLARIFY HOW THIS WORKS -

There is an error in the statement which is raising all these questions : THE following statement is WRONG: «This is a similar, but more precise method than Google Maps is using to detect your general location on your mobile phone by cell tower »

Google uses triangulation of the signals received by several towers in order to pinpoint your location. This happens when somebody is actually TALKING over the phone or is BROWSING the NET.

Path Intelligence uses what is called PERIODIC LOCATION UPDATE. this is a short BURST ( called a RACH: random access channel) sent by the handset. It is short but powerful ( 1W or 2W). If a receive listens to the cellular UPLINK ( cellular handset-> band) it will detects this bursts.

There are ofcourse many issues related to the accuracy that need to be taken into account.

It is important to remember that Periodic Location Update is done every 2 hours !

However when a user makes or receives a call, it also sends RACH bursts ( several at the same time!)

Scary? Scary how?

They can already see you in the store. They can already get your name, address, phone number, and credit card when you buy something. So can anyone looking over your shoulder if you’re a dinosaur and paying by check. Any stranger could sketch your likeness on paper, if they wanted.

Check your premise. It’s not scary. It’s practically comforting.

@ 26 I think #24’s “premise” (is that a 5-cent word, perhaps from Atlas Shrugged) must have been the general decrease in privacy that modern life entails… it’s a trend… and the trend will continue… where will it stop? will it ever stop? I suspect that’s what #24 was alluding to. I mean unless they are are clueless, which is quite possible if he things triangulating on mobile phone pings is “brilliant” and new, but maybe someone else is clueless one or the one who didn’t stop and ponder how or why this discussion, if you can call it that, could elicit a “scary” comment. Cheers and just having fun

pardon the typos

#25 was wondering if you whether or not the RACH was identifiable in some fashion? Specifically would they be able to store the RACH ID (or whatever identifies as that phone, etc.. like a mac address?) allowing them to determine if they have seen that RACH before?

tx

So 100 customers come into my store and 2 of them are talking on their cell phone. Next day only 10 customers come into my store and 6 of them are talking on the phone. That means I had 3x the customers on Day 2 versus Day 1?

Forget ‘every few minutes’, nano in the carpets are watching your every footstep!

Very interesting idea - it ties into a blog post I wrote about the differences between shopping online and shopping in a store, and mentions others:
http://rich-page.com/web-analy.....l-shopping

Rich Page

Skin cancer prevention means staying out of the sun. The sun is the leading cause of skin cancer. Too many sunburns, too much tanning, or just spending a lot of time in the sun is bad for your skin if you are not protected. Fair skinned and light haired people are more at risk. In this group of people, children, people who play outdoor sports a lot, outdoor workers, etc. are included.

Why not just ask the customer if they’d mind if you’d be willing to slap on a $.20 RFID tag for a $5 coupon and track it that way. There’s your permission. No whiz bang.

Its no more scary than the video cameras following us around 24/7.

This is the exact reason why I initially started Stratta Park, I submitted this proof of concept and provisional patent to my employer (Major Cell Phone Manufacturing Company) and they turned it down!

Our team actually has a further proof of concept for geocentric usage within cell phones, if anyone’s interested let me know partners@strattapark.com,

I also want to thank Tech Crunch for allowing me to view everything Business 2.0 use to offer before it was acquired, thanks guys.

#29: if I am correct, the RACH bears the TMSI ( the TEMPORARY mobile subscriber id) which is assigned to a cellphone a regularly renewed. for security reason the users does not send its IMSI but TMSI which changes regularly.

so I GUESS ( not really sure) that tracking RACH does not allow you to check if you have seen this user before

I work at Path Intelligence and I thought I should try and reply to a few points in the comments.

Firstly, in terms of frequency of updates we don’t pretend to get updates every few seconds its more in the order of minutes. Having said that a phone will transmit in a number of circumstances even without being a call (sending/receiving a text message, location updates, authentication requests from the operator), and actually we have found (contrary to what we originally thought) shoppers tend to use their phone a lot. Just one more thing, we are based in the UK and the penetration of cell phones here is 108%, so we pretty much get everybody.

Secondly accuracy. As the article states up to 1m is possible, but currently we don’t need to get to that level as most of our installations are in shopping malls, so we only need to know which store the shopper is in.

Thirdly, some of the commenters asked why we didn’t choose another tracking methodology, such as RFID or cameras? We certainly looked at that, but both of those options are expensive when you are trying to ‘track’ people flow through a large area. To cover a whole shopping mall would require a lot of RFID readers or cameras, and even then we would need to make sure that people carried their RFID tag with them. On the other hand, research in the UK and in the US (in Boston to be precise) shows that 98% of individuals have a cell phone that is on and with them when they are out and about.

A good analog for what we do is the analysis of web logs to understand web page viewing patterns. You don’t get detailed answers on everyone (often people are behind firewalls) and you will not be able to see exactly how people read each page, but you will get very good information on how they navigated the site, and, over time and many viewers you will get to know the pages that are popular, and the order in which people view them. Just replace web page with store and you get the idea on what we are doing.

I should probably reiterate the anonymous aspect. As we don’t work with the network operators we don’t know who you are you are, we just see a number (in a similar way that only an ISP would know who is on a particular
DHCP assigned IP address).

Oh and one more thing, our web developer isn’t in India but they do like
the 80’s .

If anyone would like more detailed information please email at the web address on our site.

Techcrunch, kudos for your article TITLE’s: no cruft, skimmable, complete.

I hate about the Indian stuff being talked here. Just because you havent seen what great work can happen somwhere, does not mean it doesnt happen there at all.

Goes on to show who is really ‘inexperienced’ here. And yes, if one has little experience, one shouldnt generalize.

And moreover when PI now says its not Made in India…!