From Power Source to Data Treasure
Let’s take a short break from our exploration of wireless power technology and share a story of an unexpected value it provided our customers.
Two hot examples are advertising in retail and digital signage in the office:
The value proposition of these use cases is easy to see and more can be learned about them on our website and LinkedIn page. Here we’ll look at something less obvious — how a secondary feature became a valuable data source for our customers.
The Background
We at Wi-Charge designed the Wi-Spot from scratch. The Wi-Spot is an ultra-efficient, wirelessly powered video display, updating content automatically over Wi-Fi and consuming 5x less power than the typical tablet.
On top of the 5x improvement during video playback, we implemented a presence sensor. This sensor triggers a video only when a person is around. This was born as a power conservation strategy, but also fits nicely into sustainability efforts. In most offices and retail spaces the various displays operate 24/7, while the spaces themselves are very often empty.
Lastly, both the Wi-Spot and the R1 wireless power transmitter are smart, connected devices. Specifically, they report back various diagnostics which can then be analyzed.
The Surprise
As with any new technology, as we were rolling out the first Wi-Spot installations in restaurants, supermarkets and offices, we were busy with getting the kinks worked out and making sure everything runs smoothly.
Over time, things calmed down and we started paying more attention to the data the units were sending. The idea was to look for bugs and warning signs, but very quickly we had an eye-opening moment.
Completely unintentionally, we collected a treasure trove of data.
Our presence sensor, designed as an engineering tool, turned the Wi-Spot into a traffic data collection engine. Let’s look at some examples.
Counting presence events over the hour in the day (two specific products below):
The retailer and the CPG can immediately see which product gets more traffic. The mid-day calm period is also clearly visible. Less obviously, the dark blue product experiences a much larger relative traffic drop during mid-day. This gives our customers an insight into in-store traffic patterns, allowing optimization of product placement.
Or we can aggregate by day in the week. Below, we analyzed data gathered over half a year from 4 Wi-Spots installed in different aisles in the same area of a large US supermarket. We can identify three different behaviors:
- The first two aisles get higher traffic over the weekend
- The third aisle is stronger on Wednesday-Thursday
- The fourth aisle is relatively uniform across the week
Looking at absolute numbers, we can see that the snacks get about 80% more traffic than chocolates, and 3x more than the laundry section. By itself this behavior is not surprising, but quantifying it and reacting to changes over time is key to store optimization.
We can also zoom out and aggregate traffic over months, here for 20 Wi-Spots in a German supermarket:
In February traffic dropped from about 500,000 monthly events to about 400,000. This is correlated to the customer moving the Wi-Spots from one set of products to another.
It could be that in the new locations each event is more valuable, generating more sales. But that may also not be the case, and the store may have lost 20% of its advertising reach.
Was the change expected? Was it visible to the retailer or CPG? Whatever the specific situation is, the data helps make an informed decision.
The Insight
By bringing power to the shelf-edge we not only delivered the primary advertising value. We also got a smart platform into a place it couldn’t previously reach, providing an entire additional service to our customers.
In a world where data is everything, and data at the edge is both the most valuable one and the hardest to acquire, retailers and CPGs now get an advertising platform and a data collection tool, all in a single device.
The same applies to office space traffic patterns. Why clean a room that wasn’t used? Or maybe invest a bit more in areas that get higher than expected traffic?
To summarize, we learned that wireless power doesn’t only solve the power problem for a specific device in a specific location. By creating a “virtual power socket” in a hard to reach spot, it lights it up with unexpected capabilities.
