sensewhere's Indoor Positioning Technology Well-suited for Location-based Advertising

Recently, sensewhere Ltd., an indoor positioning technology company, announced a new solution with fully integrated sensors giving greater positioning accuracy and energy efficiency. To achieve this, sensewhere fuses available signals, such as Wi-Fi, with the company’s new sensors. sensewhere has also launched services such as adwhere, for context-aware advertising delivery within areas of poor GPS coverage, such as a shopping mall. Editor in Chief Joe Francica discussed the news with sensewhere founder and CTO, Tughrul Arslan.

Directions Magazine (DM): Would you say your solution is more applicable for advertising agencies for media buying, retail brand managers, or bricks and mortar retailers?

Tughrul Arslan (TA): The application is more suitable for advertising agencies, as well as retail brand managers.

DM: Your company offers indoor location analytics for retailers via your adwhere solution. What do you install, if anything, at the physical retail location in order to secure the 10-meter accuracy that you claim?

TA: There is no installation needed. Our deployments in shopping malls and other locations demonstrate that the Wi-Fi infrastructure that exists in most shopping malls is good enough.

DM: What location-based data does it collect on customers in order to deliver mobile advertisements? Do they need to be members of a retailer’s loyalty program or to have “liked” them on Facebook before they receive an advert? Please explain the methodology for target marketing and hyper-local advert delivery.

TA: We do not collect any data. We merely sense electromagnetic signals around to improve our positioning.

Typically users need to be subscribed to one of our customers, which are either operators, mall owners, and/or phone manufacturers. They would also be members of one or more key social networks such as Facebook, foursquare, etc. Through our technology we tie the two together in order to deliver to the users mobile messages or adverts that the specific customer (operator, mall owner, etc.) decides.

DM: Can you customize the location intelligence platform for retailers, and what functions are most often requested?

TA: Yes. The key action that is required is user purchase behavior at specific locations and stores. Another requirement is to deliver targeted messages to customers based on their recent shopping behavior, such as, what items have they been searching recently in their shopping, and where are they exactly, so that the right message could be delivered to them.

DM: Do you find that retailers or media buyers are asking the right questions about your technology and that you are able to go beyond most client requirements?

TA: Most are asking the right questions, however some are still trying to identify how best to exploit indoor positioning in their technology.

DM: Where do you see your technology fitting in with other business intelligence solutions in marketing that retailers are more accustomed to using?

TA: We see our solution complementing these solutions by bringing in accurate location as well as intelligent data mining based on this.

DM: This seems to be the year of indoor positioning. What direction are you hoping to take your technology in the next two years?

TA: We see mobile advertising and marketing being a key area. We would like to bring together our highly accurate positioning with our social networking aggregation tools, that derive our social networking applications (such as snapp!, snapp!ed, and friendswhere) in order to allow our customers to pinpoint the right messages and adverts to their own mobile customers.