Purple to take the lead in visualising data about any physical space
January 18, 2016: Purple WiFi, the cloud-based marketing and analytics WiFi software company, today becomes Purple, the intelligent spaces software company, to better reflect the organisation’s wider scope of focus.
Since 2012, Purple has been changing the WiFi landscape starting with easy to access social WiFi for the customer and a range of WiFi marketing and analytics tools for venues to enable better understanding of, and communications with, their customers.
Purple has worked with flagship customers, such as Molson Coors, Legoland, Jaguar, United Wireless Arena, City of York and TUI to evolve its offering beyond WiFi analytics alone to encompass a wider range of data elements within a venue, as more objects become connected to the internet.
As a result, Purple is in a fantastic position to take the lead in visualising data about any physical space, pulling in all sorts of data points, including sensors, security cameras and even overlaying weather data onto purchase pattern data. When this is combined with the information already available through WiFi data, Purple plans to be able to help brands to predict behaviour.
Purple refers to this process as ‘Intelligent Spaces’ and can help brands to learn more about their location, customer base and help them to take action.
The evolved Purple offering includes a selection of products and features suitable for both small business and for enterprise.
Small businesses can continue to take advantage of Purple’s free guest WiFi product and purchase a cloud software license, which allows open access to marketing and analytics tools.
Enterprise customers have the option of four product lines: WiFi, Location, and two new offerings; Fusion and Provision.
• Purple WiFi is the well-established guest WiFi, analytics and marketing product.
• Purple Location is a location based services* product that works to actually pinpoint devices, enable heatmapping, provide zone flow information and enable journey management.
• Purple Fusion is the latest offering, enabling connection to any type of data source, which can then be analysed and actioned. A variety of different data sources will be utilised to harvest information about any physical space.
• Purple Provision is a commercial product more suitable for businesses, enabling a completely secure guest and staff WiFi environment. This uses automatic certificate provisioning instead of WPA or other encrypted WiFi SSID’s, which are intrinsically insecure for a BYOD environment.
Camden Market is already taking advantage of Purple’s services. This includes providing free WiFi throughout the market, and along the main shopping street stretching through to the customer’s access point at Camden tube station. This means that if a user downloads Camden’s market application, a free coffee can be redeemed in the market straight away from one of five different traders, bringing the customer into the retail centre.
In addition, Camden Market is working to introduce Wayfinding as the market is a maze of interesting shops and food stalls and intends to visualise more data sources such as beacon data and security camera data moving forward.
Charles Butler, CEO at Market Tech, comments: “Smart locations, such as Camden Market, are investing in technology to bring a richer and more useful experience to customers, while allowing individual businesses to attract customers and push offers to mobile devices. Purple has enabled us to make that objective a reality via an easy to administer system, which delivers measureable returns.”
Sir Terry Leahy, Purple Board Director, comments: "I cannot think of a better business opportunity than Purple; being able to have ‘Intelligent Spaces’ that actually learn and react to customers will help retailers to enhance the planning and efficiency of physical retail spaces. It also improves the vital link between online and offline customer data, helping them to build loyalty and trust, and heralding an exciting new era for the high street.
"Being a first mover in this market, I am not surprised that Purple are experiencing such growth and interest from all over the world."
Gavin Wheeldon, CEO at Purple, comments: “The world moves fast, and at Purple we are not afraid to change our brand and product to move with it. WiFi marketing and data is still and always will be the core of our business, but we've decided we need to offer more than WiFi analytics alone to truly understand what is going on in a venue.
“If you can collect the data about any physical space, including WiFi data, we can visualise it. We are calling this 'intelligent spaces' and it will change the way venues understand and communicate with their customers.”
* All of Purple’s location services to date have used WiFi as the source of X,Y coordinates. Moving forward, X,Y data sources will change. For example, some Purple customer deployments are now using GPS as a location source. Purple is also exploring BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) as an indoor positioning application, and in the future more sources such as intelligent lighting will be added as the market matures.
