WiFi/Bluetooth platform – BlueMark Innovations BV

The Platform

The WiFi/Bluetooth platform is a visitor analytics platform to measure visitor metrics in real-life situations such as festivals, marketing events, retail, inner cities. Similar to Google Analytics for analyzing your website traffic. It is based on:

sensors – sensors (hardware) are installed on-site. It consists of hardware together with BlueMark firmware.
internet connection – sensors need an internet connection (and main power) to upload the data to the server. The internet connection can be fixed or mobile (integrated in the sensor).
analytics platform – the platform collects and processes the raw sensor data into visitor metrics. Those metrics are visualized via a web portal.

Most of customers are system integrators that use part or the full solution. For instance it is possible to use our sensor firmware only and do the processing yourself. We offer a technical wiki to provide technical background and help with using our platform.

The solution exists since 2011, used by well known companies in the field of visitor analytics and under active development.

What is WiFi/Bluetooth visitor analytics?

WiFi/Bluetooth visitor analytics collects WiFi/Bluetooth signals from smartphones and other personal electronic equipment. No app or modification of the smartphone is needed! Smartphones send those signals to look for nearby WiFi networks, to broadcast their services etc. In those signals an unique hardware ID is included, the so-called MAC address. The platform uses these MAC addresses to analyze and calculate visitor metrics, such as average dwell time, recurrence rate, number of unique visitors.

Privacy

WiFi/Bluetooth visitor analytics may impact the privacy of consumers according to international laws, such as the EU GDPR. For us privacy is important, therefore our platform complies to these privacy laws. We are co-founder and member of the privacySIG; an European Special Interest Group for WiFi/Bluetooth visitor analytics with a compulsory code of conduct. Technically we use several techniques, such as hashing, truncation, rehashing every 24 hours, data minimalisation and different salts per project to ensure the privacy of consumers.

Benefits

Open source

The visitor analytics platform uses several open-source projects. The proprietary sensor firmware runs on openWRT OS (15.05+) or Raspbian (Raspberry Pi). Often we rely on hardware from GL.iNet for our sensors. This also means that you have access to the sensors for your own modifications. The analytics platform consists of a Docker stack (a lightweight virtualization platform) that runs on a server with Ubuntu OS. The stack consists of databases (mariaDB) for storing data, a webportal based on cakePHP and a proprietary processing container.

Modular platform

The visitor analytics solution is a modular, a l a carte platform. For instance you can select to use our sensors only and do the processing yourself. Or buy the hardware yourself and use our firmware. On the portal side, the platform can be hosted by our servers or yours. For most projects a dual core server, 2 GB RAM and 40 GB disk is sufficient.

API

The platform offers a REST API for exporting visitor metrics with JSON or XML payload. It allows easy integration in your own IT system or external visualization/data aggregation platforms. Data access is protected by using API keys.

Intelligent processing

Recent years two challenges have emerged in processing collected signals a) random MAC addresses b) abundance of WiFi/Bluetooth equipment. In case a smartphone uses random MAC addresses, recognition of a device is based on auxiliary data instead; a fingerprint; each phone model has its own fingerprint. A multi-layer approach is implemented to filter away signals from WiFi/Bluetooth equipment effectively: automatic blacklisting of devices that are seen too often or too long, blacklisting of vendor equipment, discarding weak signals.

Tools

Besides the main platform, the ecosystem consists of several other tools. First, there is the deploy-tool to allow easy management of your deployed platforms: adding, configuring and upgrading. The license portal allows you to generate and manage licenses for both the portal and sensors. Also it has an API to automate the configuration and licensing of new sensors.

Escrow

For a rainy day. As an additional premium service to our partners we offer a multi-license software ESCROW agreement by the NCC group. This means that your business-critical services will continue in case we can’t deliver anymore. Our source code will be release in that case to you.

Our product offering

Hardware

sensors

BlueMark Zero – run BlueMark firmware on devices from GL.iNet, Raspberry Pi or your own openWRT hardware. It needs a valid license.

support for popular targets/hardware such as from Mediatek and Qualcomm
license can be a software license that is billed on actual use or a hardware license that is locked to your device.
technical wiki and professional support is available

Outdoor or indoor sensor – Please contact us for more information

Platform

The BlueMark visitor analytics platform is a tool to analyse visitor behavior. It can be compared with Google Analytics for analyzing website traffic. It gives you the following answers:

How many visitors were at my location (hourly, daily, weekly overview)?
How many unique visitors were at location (hourly, daily, weekly overview)?
How long did these visitors stay?
What is the most busiest entrance and exit?
What are the traffic patterns of my location?
etc

The platform comes with an admin portal where you can configure sensors, projects and users.

Sensor data is uploaded to the portal via MQTT or using SCP protocol (SSH) to transfer compressed SQL lines.

A technical wiki and professional support is available for easy integration and use of the product.