Monolith aims to track what people are watching on TV or billboards, the offline advertising world if you will. It all started when co-founders Martin Birač and Tomislav Fistrić decided they wanted to explore the potential of Microsoft’s Kinect accessory for the Xbox 360.

Now, the startup is now working on both the software and the hardware for gathering data about shopper behavior in retail stores. The company has won a slew of startup awards to date, but most promisingly it has customers lined up already, including Nike as well as Johnson&Johnson, and is planning pilots with Bogner.

Monolith is comprised of a Microsoft Kinect device enclosed in the company’s own casing and armed with its pattern recognition software. It tracks shopper behavior and characteristics while they are doing their shopping, but claims to maintain the shoppers’ privacy by making it impossible to identify a particular person using the captured data.

The hardware, which can receive upgrades over the air, is capable of telling its owner which one out of a series of ads gains the most attention by potential customers in a given area. The software side of things meanwhile looks like this:

At the TNW Conference, Monolith is announcing a solution to what it refers to as “the problems of the data-starved retail industry.” Here’s the pitch:

Unlike the online world, the offline retail world is yet to attain a “big data” platform such as Google Analytics – a constant stream of data about the behaviour of its customers. We promise to deliver such a platform with our Monolith device.

Monolith transforms the collected data into a set of metrics that the company calls Kinegraphics. Kinegraphics are comprised of shopper characteristics such as gender, age group, and clothing style as well as shopper behaviors such as walking paths, interactions with products, and visual attention in relation to the retail environment.

The company hopes its customers can use this information to redesign their offers, their services, or even their whole store in the best way that will enhance the shopping experience.

➤ Monolith

Image credit: Thinkstock

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