People Counting, Use Cases and Monetization

we've seen cities use people and vehicle detection sensors on street lights for dynamic lighting but the technology can also be used for people counting to address other smart city initiatives and other use cases we use a sensor an optical and Wi-Fi sensor with artificial intelligence on board that extract from images data metrics about pedestrians and vehicles and we monitor the flows inside the cities for example one of the application is the analysis of the mobility inside the city so tell the cities where what what the cars and pedestrians do inside the areas so the metrics are both geographical and temporal metrics and the important thing is that the data are on real -time basis in the Mare for example in Antwerp we place 20 sensors one gateway there they monitor the environment 24 7 we aggregate the data on a 10 second level and we consolidate everything based on a 15-minute level why we do that in order to see the evolution and to bring insights to the city government and to the city council. Now, those insights will tell them how people come to the city and when are people coming to the city. For smart city initiatives, municipalities can use this real -time people counting data for traffic and parking management, among other use cases. For example, we have... applications for safety reasons where we monitor specific areas and we send real -time alerts with real -time triggers to police or public safety authorities and this is a kind of integration. We have different kind of applications for smart parking. One of those is to monitor the city centre or the historical city centre or a specific area. We monitor every single city centre. street that goes inside the historical centre and we provide real time alerts to lights or to digital signage monitors where they can in real time tell to drivers don't go here because you will not find parking or you can go but there's a 50 % of the possibility to find parking. For events, cities and organisers need to know how many people attended the event for planning but also for crowd management which can ensure the safety of attendees improve organization and also increase revenue as it can be a marketing opportunity even public transportation can benefit from people counting as depending on how many people are waiting at the station authorities can decide to increase the fleet number this type of solution though is more useful when the city integrates it with other types of information knowing how many people are in an area can be helpful for example for air quality monitoring as knowing how many cars are entering a city can help foresee pollution levels so authorities can prepare. We measure that for a long period in time, not one week but a few months or a year or two years and thus we have an average moment in time, an average week for example, an average day, an average Wednesday, an average Saturday and then we compare. given the contextual information where does it differ and what is then the impact of a shopping week or a holiday week what is the difference between a winter week and a summer week what is the difference between different shopping weeks and why is it then different so bring more context to it in order to really really have an insight of the meaning of its extra context means weather data funny Social data, mobility data, data which comes from a data broker, a digital twin, everything which comes together can have an added value in order to bring more meaning to our data. Most of all we work, especially for smart cities, we work with partners or companies that provide a big amount of services, a big number of services to public administration or system integrators. that takes our data integrates in their platform or in their service and gives to the to the to the public administration it depends we usually don't go directly to the municipalities because they need more services especially to interpret the data and to put on the ground the applications both blimp and crowd scan deploy their own sensors the former uses camera sensors and cellular connectivity wi-fi or ethernet and the latter low energy radio waves and a gateway. So for the shopping street in the Mare, for them it costs like 20 ,000 euro for real -time data a year. So they buy the hardware, they get a recurring fee for their platform, our platform, which means service, support, contract, all those things. And then there is a consumption fee, a consumption fee based on the agreement we have for example real -time data or retail data. An additional way to monetize data and generate more revenue for vendors and cities is to sell people counting data to the private sector. In advertising, people counting data is useful to increase the value of an advertising space depending on the number and typology of people walking by it. In retail, shop owners are interested in how many people... walking past their business, and data can even help them choose the best location for their new shops depending on people flow. However, this type of data monetization doesn't have as much potential as one would imagine for sensor vendors and cities deploying these sensors. The challenge is that people counting for private use cases is already addressed by other players using easier and more scalable technologies like GPS location. and telecommunication data. This type of data at scale is already available in every city and doesn't need hardware deployment. Among those players, French company Mytraffic has positioned itself strongly after they closed the €30 million financial round in 2022. Mytraffic partners with apps to obtain GPS data from their users, so without installing any sensors, the company gets detailed information. about foot traffic across cities and telecommunications company orange created flux vision a service that provides people flow information using phone location data flux vision is already working in ten countries and my traffic in seven meaning they are international and already have available information which comes in handy for retail or advertising brands with international reach sensors which are the best option for smart city applications requiring real time and very accurate location data like dynamic lighting can however complement gps and cellular based solutions to improve accuracy in a specific location in a future video we'll investigate further cellular and gps based people counting solutions and use cases to try to understand how sensor vendors and operators as well as cities can add to these solutions when it comes to data monetization. So stick with us to find out. I'm Emma Lozano for Current Insights.