118 – Alex Winter of Placemeter – Sensing the Future of Retail

Jul 11, 2016

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Analyzing retail movement with video …

Alex Winter (bio), Co-Founder and CEO of Placemeter (a video analytics platform that quantifies movement at scale and turns video into meaningful data) joins Pavan Bahl, Rob Sanchez, and guest host Brian Laney (VP of Sales) of Alert Tech (a powerful tool for retailers to understand the performance of their retail stores and make better business decisions), on location at the 2016 SHOPTALK retail and ecommerce event in Las Vegas.

Relevance, data set and potential

Winter discusses Placemeter’s relevance to ecommerce, how the company is deploying a more accurate read on actual traffic, the kind of investment required, ease of setup and ability to use existing cameras, working with municipalities, guiding the retailer to understand the data, how retailers are using it on store exteriors and to A/B test, and the importance of data context. Winter reveals potential for use outside of retail such as measuring foot traffic to quantify property values and find better qualified foot traffic, the navigation on having cameras and sensors, the importance of conforming a data set, time-stamped data, zones, movement/motion, the data set, recording every event in real time periodically, focusing on moving objects, and MPH.

Object matching, privacy, ROI

Why Placemeter doesn’t use stereoscopic vision, re-matching objects which disappear, using inexpensive hardware, identifying race and clothing choice, being careful about privacy and personal feelings, why Placemeter does not do race recognition, gender, age and ways to identify, never giving away data less than 5 or 10 objects, how SHOPTALK can use Placemeter to A/B test events, a great way to optimize expenses and increase general ROI, trends in big projects already installing sensors in place as part of deal, power as a swarm, measuring the pulse of city, age cutoff, how to deal with COPA issues, focusing on size, speed and colors, and how diversity affects data.