Last week the Wi-Fi industry may have taken another serious stride in the hunt for elusive Wi-Fi monetization dollars when San Francisco-based startup Euclid Analytics announced the closing of a $20 million dollar Series C funding round. That may be peanuts by Silicon Valley standards but it’s no small amount for a Wi-Fi startup. The group of investors is headed up by Cox Enterprises (see this link for the full press release).
Location analytics has long been high on the list of new sources of revenue for Wi-Fi service providers – and if any startup is well positioned to take make the most of that opportunity, it’s Euclid. The company has been laser-focused on doing just one thing really well and that’s using Wi-Fi signals (MAC probes from smartphones) to analyze footfall and user behavior in malls, banks, transportation hubs, you name it.
If this funding round is any indication, investors – including one of the largest MSOs in the US – are gaining confidence in the case for Wi-Fi-based location analytics. And other carriers may not be far behind. Last year, Euclid landed a major deal with an unnamed Tier 1 carrier.
Euclid has made lighting up location analytics on your Wi-Fi network as easy as it possibly can be. The service is of course Cloud-based and will run on Wi-Fi hardware by Cisco, Ruckus, Aruba/HP and many others. The analysis is then presented on a neat dashboard.
The company has also gone to extreme lengths to anonymize location data so that it can’t be traced to identifiable individuals. With enterprise Wi-Fi everywhere, analytics tools like this can be had at a very small additional cost because in most cases, you won’t need any new Wi-Fi hardware.
The good news is that use cases for location data are nearly endless: Store performance, shopper loyalty, marketing effectiveness, staffing efficiency for banks & transport hubs, and much more. So will analytics like these be adopted directly by venues or will the industry need carriers to provide the managed services that will the value?
The jury is still out on that one but at Wi-Fi NOW we’re still big believers in managed Wi-Fi as an opportunity for carriers – and solutions like this could add real value.
/Claus.
