Software mines security footage to help business owners see what people do once they're inside the store (Technology Review)
"The huge success of online shopping and advertising—led by giants like Amazon and Google—is in no small part thanks to software that logs when you visit Web pages and what you click on. Startup Prism Skylabs offers brick-and-mortar businesses the equivalent—counting, logging, and tracking people in a store, coffee shop, or gym with software that works with video from security cameras."Online retailers are able to free-ride on investments made by their brick-and-mortar competitors (see showrooming). They also have more powerful tools available to them for the purposes of analyzing detailed reports of user activity on retail websites. Why, the page I linked to for this story has fifteen programs that track your interaction with the linked page and TechnologyReview.com isn't even selling anything directly. The image to the left shows the list as compiled by the Ghostery add-on for Firefox.
If brick-and mortar retailers can't learn as much about customers in physical stores as web retailers know about user experiences, they must compensate in other ways or they're going to continue to struggle.
See also:
Target fights Amazon showrooming with plea for special product lines (ExtremeTech.com)
