Path Intelligence: Tracking footfall in retail stores by monitoring mobile phones 19 Dec 2007

TechCrunch has an interesting article on Path Intelligence, a British company that monitors foot traffic in retail stores in a rather ingenious way - by exploiting the behaviour of customers' mobile phones. Turns out that these devices periodically ping nearby cell towers to let them know that they're available to receive calls / data. Path Intelligence has therefore built receivers that detect these signals and can triangulate the owner's location to within a metre, which means that the company can track customers as they scoot up and down the aisles of their local high street store:

"Each ping...includes the cell's unique identifier (think IP address). [Yet] while these IDs help track the movement of the signal and it's owner, they don't reveal the identity of the user. Only your service provider knows that. This is a similar, but more precise method than Google Maps is using to detect your general location on your mobile phone by cell tower.

"Path Intelligence can then map these signals and track anonymous customers as they move around and answer questions about the store's layout through online reports. Where are the bottle necks? Where do customers spend the most time. How many customers browse and go?"

You can see a video of the product in action here.