Yup, as soon as I read 'free hardware, free to install' I immediately though 'Service model'
Also I don't think this data is particularly attractive to anyone except competitors... and even then its not like its an email list or anything, merely traffic.
I would say it's extremely useful -- most establishments have a general idea of foot traffic (ie: POS transactions or qualitative visual assessment) whereas with density.io you have a detailed history of when and where there's foot traffic.
Why would someone want to know this information? Ideas abound! I don't think we've had such easy measurement and monitoring at the fingertips of the general populace.
Having detailed logs of user growth is invaluable (the much-vaunted hockey stick), however this level of granularity is unavailable in the physical world.
Now we can show interested parties that, for example, our storefronts are hockey-sticking, growth is high and projected to grow higher, etc. You get the idea.
Oh the data itself is interesting, but not particularly sell-able to others, in my opinion.
The alternative to this platform are little devices that monitor things like cellphones that walk into the room, and use this to approximate occupancy.
It is. If you had a competitor who got most of their business around 8pm on Tuesday. You could offer huge savings at 8pm on Tuesdays driving away traffic from their business.
I own a retail store and have been wanting this type of data to quantify behavior, find correlations and discover patterns. In it's simplest form, it could help to quantify previously 'untrackable' advertising methods.
Other products like this are quite expensive to implement and are geared more towards large scale deployments, not small businesses. I even looked into building my own sensor for this, but I simply don't have time. Happy to see this product emerge.
