Last week at SAPPHIRE NOW, the team at Centigon Solutions shared a small glimpse into its upcoming indoor analytics capabilities that will ship with GMaps MobileV3 later this year. PrizeFinder provided a simple experience for attendees to identify SAPPHIRE NOW Exhibitors who were raffling off prizes. Location is a critical element for indoor analytics, so it is no surprise PrizeFinder's key visualization was an interactive map of the show floor.
Why Indoor Maps?
Most business with brick and mortar locations are missing the tools to visualize activities that occur within their physical space. Retailers, data centers, airports and casinos to name a few, have large indoor spaces with lots of assets and more importantly consumer foot traffic that directly impact the bottom line. The machine generated data from sensors, WIFI access points and cameras can provide incredible insights about consumer engagement and behavior. However, the availability of this data does not grant actionable insight. You need point of sale data, membership card data, unstructured data from social media, and other operational data to create powerful mash-ups and analytics.
Mahesh Desai from Kingfisher Inc, describes his insight for how Indoor Analytics can help impact the quality of events like SAPPHIRE NOW, and other applications. Kingfisher Inc is an SAP Gold Solution Provider and Authorized Training Partner
Role of Analytics
The true power of indoor analytics rests in the engines, algorithms, and business logic that serve up valuable information. The role of analytics is to lead someone to down the path to explain “WHY”. The potential opportunities for indoor location intelligence are profound for many organizations because it reflects operational activities that directly impact customer engagement leading to sales.
PrizeFinder was a simplistic tool for relaying one dimensional data on top of an indoor map. The natural progression of this indoor analytic would include foot traffic heatmaps, social media data associated with each booth, and potentially other sources (lead scans, etc). Such insight could assist exhibitors in real time to plan promotions, flier handouts, staffing, social media campaigns, and understand what other exhibitors typically draw big crowds for the next major event.
Thanks to smart phones, we are all location-aware beacons, generating real time data. Today, we have reached a stage of hardware and software maturity to create tools for measuring consumer engagement indoors. In the near future you will use indoor mapping technologies with the same ease and comfort as Google Maps. Stay tuned for GMaps Mobile V3, where you can start combining your indoor maps with business analytics. By this time next year, we will have the ultimate interactive experience for navigating the SAPPHIRE NOW floor!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ryan Goodman is Centigon Solutions CEO, author, global speaker, and BI Apps expert. Ryan applies over 10 years of experience designing business software solutions to his leadership role shaping Centigon Solutions' strategy and location intelligence product roadmap.
