Start-up looks to steer customers to purchases

Plug and Play brings together retailers and start-ups that offer specific technology and expertise that can relieve merchants’ pain points. Chain Store Age offers a Q&A with the head of one of those start-ups, Wibe Wagemans, president of Palo Alto, California-based IndoorAtlas.



What does your company do?

IndoorAtlas provides a blue dot showing you where you are on your floorplan. IndoorAtlas requires no infrastructure and can provide an unprecedented accuracy level of one to two meters. All you need is an app and license our SDK on iOS and Android.



How do retailers leverage your solution?

IndoorAtlas will change shopping as we know it today with the blue dot and wayfinder, product search, and product proximity advertising. It will become easier to find products and the conversion of sales promotions will be much higher since you can guide consumers all the way to the product, unlike Bluetooth.

Infrastructure savings are potentially billions of dollars in retail alone. Now it's up to the retailers to take action or the mapping companies will start advertising directly to consumers in the aisle with indoor positioning, which will change co-op/market development funds (MDF) forever.



What is your background as president and what led to the development of the company?

I oversee global business operations. As a first mover, I ran several mobile consumer start-up businesses which became the largest mobile advertiser and publisher in the world. Earlier in my career I worked for Gillette and Nokia, where I opened up flagship stores 15 years ago.



IndoorAtlas is based on magnetic positioning which was discovered by our founder and CEO, Prof. Janne Haverinen (formerly of the University of Oulu in Finland). He noticed that every square foot in every building has a unique magnetic fingerprint. This discovery will lead to some of the biggest disruptions retail has seen over the last few decades.