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This is clever! I admire the hacker spirit in this... seems pretty interesting, and anonymized person data / trends would definitely help restaurants / other bu

This is clever! I admire the hacker spirit in this... seems pretty interesting, and anonymized person data / trends would definitely help restaurants / other businesses who need to staff part time folks to fill out shifts.

brianyu8 9y ago
Thanks for the response! It might be a bit of a stretch, but I remember reading a comment on here about someone who used satellite imagery to count the number of cars in store parking lots and used that data to inform investment decisions. Perhaps something like this could be applied to that use case.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  There are numerous NewSpace companies with that as their business plan.
bri3d 9y ago
There are several startups working on this, like Prism Skylabs: https://prism.com/ https://prism.com/ . I had this idea as well and pitched it to small business owners, but wasn't able to drive enough interest to want to pursue the idea in earnest.
- chrsstrm 9y ago
  Just a guess, but you were probably trying to sell them their own data (total people in/out, peak busy times, largest/smallest crowd in location, etc.). That's not what business owners want to know the most. In my experience with retail-type stores, the owners and managers are more concerned with how their competitors are doing in comparison. If you were to sign up many related customers into a network and share quasi-anonymous data with store owners like, "a similar sporting goods store to yours located ~0.5 miles away just set a new weekly attendance record in the sporting goods category..." or, "a sports bar located within ~0.4 miles of your location is now at 80% capacity...", that is information owners will pay for. Rank the store against their competitors to show them what percentage of customers they are getting out of the total segment. The only difficulty is signing up enough related stores to provide meaningful data.

brianyu8 9y ago

Thanks for the response! It might be a bit of a stretch, but I remember reading a comment on here about someone who used satellite imagery to count the number of cars in store parking lots and used that data to inform investment decisions. Perhaps something like this could be applied to that use case.

greglindahl 9y ago
There are numerous NewSpace companies with that as their business plan.

bri3d 9y ago

There are several startups working on this, like Prism Skylabs: https://prism.com/ https://prism.com/ . I had this idea as well and pitched it to small business owners, but wasn't able to drive enough interest to want to pursue the idea in earnest.

chrsstrm 9y ago
Just a guess, but you were probably trying to sell them their own data (total people in/out, peak busy times, largest/smallest crowd in location, etc.). That's not what business owners want to know the most. In my experience with retail-type stores, the owners and managers are more concerned with how their competitors are doing in comparison. If you were to sign up many related customers into a network and share quasi-anonymous data with store owners like, "a similar sporting goods store to yours located ~0.5 miles away just set a new weekly attendance record in the sporting goods category..." or, "a sports bar located within ~0.4 miles of your location is now at 80% capacity...", that is information owners will pay for. Rank the store against their competitors to show them what percentage of customers they are getting out of the total segment. The only difficulty is signing up enough related stores to provide meaningful data.