
Peggy Anne Salz, founder of MobileGroove
It was less than a year ago that the MMA UK published Mobile: The Great Connector, a comprehensive publication that revealed how many verticals, including retail, were harnessing mobile to bridge the digital and physical ‘worlds’ to drive conversions and boost customer loyalty.
Fast forward, and we are witnessing the advance of projects and pilots aimed to ‘blend’ these worlds together to make shopping immersive and — at the same time — enable bricks-and-mortar retailers to (re)gain control of the in-store environment in order to optimize, personalize and monetize the advice and advertising they deliver shoppers on their mobile devices.
The recent Google I/O Developer Conference provided us a glimpse into this not-so-distant future. I’m talking here about the tie-up between Google’s Project Tango and aisle411, a company specializing in indoor mapping, to make in-store shopping with mobile devices much more immersive and rewarding for consumer.
A review of their combined solutions strengths shows why we can expect this vision is set to become reality much sooner than we think.
- Google’s Project Tango is a multi-partner effort that has produced a disruptive new technology for creating 3D maps of indoor spaces with the ability to show a user’s precise location and orientation within centimeters of accuracy.
- aisle411 has a long track record and powers over 12,500 searchable store maps for retailers including Walgreens, Home Depot and Marsh. Its indoor/in-store mobile marketing platform technology allows it to collect, organize, and monetize retailers’ product inventory location data, and optimize this information for display and delivery via the retailer’s mobile app.
Continue reading →