Imagine if every time you strolled across a shop entrance on Newbury Street, your personal attributes – age, gender, race and more – were recognized and documented?
Relax. Sure, it’s a bit Minority Report, but knowing those demographic details about you and your shopping behaviors could help retailers keep stocking the shelves with your favorite items, according to one MassChallenge startup.
Real Life Analytics has created a demographic detection technology that helps retailers figure out who their customers are, and ultimately, deliver a better shopping experience and more targeted advertisements.
The company’s Co-founder Robert DeFilippi promises the software’s intentions are far from creepy.
“We don’t take photos, so we don’t know who they are. … We detect all these features without anything to go on,” Vancouver native and DeFilippi told BostInno of the product.
The startup’s software, housed in a camera-bearing Android smartphone, takes about 20 milliseconds to make estimates on customers’ characteristics, based on a given person’s face. Real Life Analytics picks up whether you’re male or female, young or old, and determines your race with 85 percent accuracy, claims DeFilippi. The system can also classify up to eight faces at a time.
You can try it out for yourself, using Google Chrome and a webcam, here.
“It’s not quite facial recognition but facial detection,” DeFilippi clarified. That being said, Jorge Torres, the company’s CTO and co-founder, had dabbled in the space prior to the spawning of the startup. DeFilippi, Torres and the third founder Adam Carrigan met at business school in Australia in 2011.
Ultimately, Real Life Analytics aims to sell its technology to retailers in monthly subscription packages. Chain stores and small boutiques alike could use the data to garner a better picture of their customers. Retailers could get a grasp on what type of consumer actually makes it to the point-of-sale, and which shoppers merely enter the shop to browse. That information might have an effect on how shops go about ordering their inventory.
And no, we weren’t kidding about the Newbury Street presence. Real Life Analytics is currently testing the software with an unnamed store on Back Bay’s famed shopping strip.
Currently working out of MassChallenge’s Seaport space, the startup is bootstrapping with around $10,000 in the bank; however, the team aims to raise a seed round from Boston angel investors this fall.
Image courtesy of Real Life Analytics
