BlueZoo provides a unified solution for foot traffic analytics. The solution begins with small hardware sensors that listen for Wi-Fi probes spontaneously emitted by all mobile phones. Our sensors encrypt and compress these probes, dozens or thousands at a time, and forward them to our analytics servers in the cloud.
How it works
- Wi-Fi handsets send probes to search for Wi-Fi access points. BlueZoo sensors passively receive probes.
- Sensor bundles probes and sends a “pulse” of them to the BlueZoo Cloud every 20 seconds.
- BlueZoo Cloud unpacks this information and analyzes the probes, storing historical results.
- BlueZoo Cloud sends alerts and delivers analysis to mobile devices and web browsers.
BlueZoo provides a unified solution for foot traffic analytics. The solution begins with small hardware sensors that listen for Wi-Fi probes spontaneously emitted by all mobile phones. Our sensors encrypt and compress these probes, dozens or thousands at a time, and forward them to our analytics servers in the cloud.
BlueZoo Applications Programming Interfaces (APIs) enable both BlueZoo applications and third-party applications like Tableau and Looker to access and visualize the BlueZoo data.
The primary end-user-facing applications delivered by BlueZoo are web dashboards and mobile applications. The following sections describe each of these components in more detail.
Our cloud servers record this data and analyze the data to generate metrics including the numbers of visitors and visits, visit dwell time, the number of unique visitors and unique visitor recurrence, and advanced metrics.
Sensors
BlueZoo delivers several custom “sensors”, designed to our specifications, and manufactured by our supply chain partners. For BlueZoo Count products, these sensors listen for Wi-Fi probes sent spontaneously by mobile phones and other devices. For the Engage product, these sensors broadcast an access point and host a landing page that allows consumers to opt-in to location-based services like message delivery. Learn more about our Wi-Fi sensors
Cloud infrastructure
BlueZoo cloud infrastructure provides the foundation for BlueZoo products and services. Our production services operate on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and employ a variety of specialized, high-performance database technologies.
To be compliant with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) and to ensure maximum data privacy, we operate AWS clusters on three continents, allowing us to store data on the continent where it was generated.
DevOps is performed centrally out of our headquarters in Silicon Valley.
Our database and analytics systems are architected for smooth scalability as demand grows. Generally, intake load is closely proportional to the number of sensors deployed in each cluster. Reporting load generally varies with working hours of the geographies of our customers.
APIs
BlueZoo and third-party applications communicate with BlueZoo cloud servers via the BlueZoo RESTful APIs, which conform to the REST architectural style for easy integration into web applications. These APIs control user authentication, enforce access control privileges, and deliver data from BlueZoo’s cloud servers.
BlueZoo customers commonly integrate BlueZoo API calls into custom applications. We work to ensure that our APIs respect industry standards. Providing scalable, rock-solid APIs lets us focus on our core business of foot traffic analytics.
We also provide support for webhooks to support a “push” architecture.
Dashboards
Manage and analyze
The BlueZoo Dashboard provides the user interface to manage sensors and to display visualizations of the foot traffic metrics. The dashboard has extensive tools to activate, deploy, and manage tens of thousands of sensors. It also has extensive capabilities to compare metrics across time (for the same sensor or group) and across sensors and groups (for the same time).
Organize deployments
The dashboard allows administrators to add sensor metadata like street address, floor plans, description, and geo-location. Administrators can also view sensor MAC address, manage sensor firmware, create and assign roles to users, and define security policies.
Ensure accuracy
Sensor hardware capabilities include collecting “ground truth” for sensors and using this ground truth to calibrate and audit sensors. Most ground truth is collected using BlueZoo’s mobile apps on iOS and Android.
Mobile applications
BlueZoo’s Foot Traffic Analytics mobile app is available for Android and iPhone mobile phones. The application provides four major capabilities:
- Installing a BlueZoo sensor by associating sensor hardware with the user’s account
- Configuring the sensor, including naming the sensor, recording its location, and selecting the desired backhaul (ethernet, Wi-Fi, or cellular modem)
- Collecting ground truth for calibration of the sensor and for subsequent auditing of sensor calibration
- Reporting current “visitor” occupancy
BlueZoo Foot Traffic Analytics supersedes and consolidates multiple, earlier generation mobile applications from BlueZoo. This mobile app is a complement to the BlueZoo web dashboard which provides robust data analytics functionality and to the BlueZoo APIs which allow customers to directly access the BlueZoo data warehouse.
The mobile app, the dashboards, and the APIs all access the same fine-grain historical data maintained in BlueZoo’s BigQuery data warehouse.
