Location, Location, Location!

In today’s society, we rely heavily on GPS applications to help us find the destination and figure out the best route to get there, at the same time, avoid any traffic along the way. Smartphone apps like Waze, Google Maps and Apple Maps are some popular choices, these apps can even give accurate ETA dynamically based on traffic condition, isn’t it amazing?

Moving to indoor venues like huge shopping malls, large retail outlets, the almighty GPS is no good and people often rely on plain old paper map or directory guide to navigate within covered areas. Do you know Wi-Fi can be your indoor GPS and provide reasonably accurate navigation and venue lookup based on where you are standing within a large indoor venue?

We were involved in a location analytic project where the venue owner would like to get some facts to support her observation on an exhibition area between normal days and peak hours. In addition to offer usual guest or visitor Wi-Fi services, we go to the extend to map the whole venue using state of the art indoor location technology from one of our eco-system partner, combined with eaziWi5 cloud analytics, we are able to derive some very useful information to help improve the exhibition space. The owner of the venue is amazed with the detail of information including the granularity of how much we can zoom in although the visitors did not connect to our Wi-Fi service in the venue. She is completely sold on the investment for our intelligent indoor location solution, currently looking to repeat the same success in other properties within the group.

Just to give you a taste of what we collected on-site (some information will remain anonymous for privacy reasons), the following excerpt shows a live heat map captured during a specific time of the day. From the snapshot below, most people can draw simple conclusion like:

• The entrance is always crowded.
• Most visitor stay on ground floor, very little make it to the second floor.
• Several booths on ground floor attracted significant patrons.

With the analytical engine built-in as part of eaziWi5 cloud app, we go beyond surface level information. Some key information extracted at the end of the 3 day exhibition for venue management are:

• 15% of the visitors attend all 5 days exhibition, these are mostly the exhibitors themselves.
• Excluding the above, 10% of the patrons returned for a second or third day visit.
• The average time a visitor spent on second floor is twice as long as the average time spent on ground floor.

Moving to the next event at the venue, the owner now has a proven set of data to market their exhibition space better. In fact, these reports help her to negotiate the rate better too!

In summary, there are much more detailed information and raw data that we can extract from a properly planned indoor Wi-Fi location setup. Get in touch with us today to get an intelligent and powerful Wi-Fi setup deployed in your venue.