[ndriscoll]

> They wanted to bring indoor maps and navigation to their retail stores... It turns out that this doesn’t just apply to retail. Every office, university campus, events venue, hotel, airport, warehouse, factory — basically everywhere indoors have some need to navigate people around, provide relevant information, and improve efficiency.

You'd think they would add this information to openstreetmap then or at least put a map on their website (and put it in the public domain so others like OSM can add it to their maps). Or put it in the store so people can take a picture. I go into target and there are posters saying to install an app for maps. Put the map on the poster!

> and they could pop up relevant promotions along the way

Oh, right, they don't want to provide information. They want to track people and spam them.

[voidUpdate]

I was with them until they said that it's going to give me ads while I'm walking around

[imglorp]

You might think shoppers finding their product in a store quickly would delight customers and pay for itself quickly.

But it seems instead of stores simply depending on the sale, they also now demand impulse purchases, which mean they want you wandering the store looking in multiple places for your quarry: the casino model. So if they delight a customer with direct route to the sale, they need to make up that windfall elsewhere?S

So they fall back on surveil, profile, and market plus selling your profile to others? Is this is why we can't have nice things?

[moritonal]

Major grocery shops routinely swap their profitable items with the popular items. They do this to stop the customer going into auto-pilot and instead forcing them into actually looking for what they want. So no, shoppers finding their product does not pay for itself.

[ranger207]

Little bit of a tangent, but as a customer I am not "delighted" when I find a product quickly and easily; I am merely not frustrated. Finding what I'm looking for is the baseline experience, having to search for what I'm looking for makes me annoyed and less likely to buy anything other than what I need so I can just get out of there.

In my experience, any product or service advertising itself as "delighting" customers actually means that they're overall making the baseline experience worse, and their product/service is just reducing the frustration they're introducing.

[SkyPuncher]

It depends on the segment. All of the hardware stores near me have websites that list the exact aisle and bay product is in. They've seemed to figure out it's a competitive disadvantage to make their customers wander.

It's not entirely clear to me if grocers and other retail will end up taking the same route. Grocery service is increasingly move to hands-off (pickup or delivery) and other segments seem to be moving heavily on-line (including gig-delivery). It seems like they'll continue to punish foot traffic while encouraging customers to do online or hands-off buying.

[rf15]

Finding a product quickly is actually the opposite of what a store owner would want, because it means you are spending less time on looking at the other products.

Yes I hate that attitude too.

[voidUpdate]

This is exactly why we can't have nice things. There has been a lot of study in how to manipulate shoppers to get them to buy more things in your shops, from playing in-store music that is slower so they walk slower, to putting expensive stuff at eye-level, to putting common things at the back of the shop so you have to walk past everything else to get to them

[Den_VR]

The dream of augmented reality was brilliant until the obvious consequences were recognized

[mpeg]

If you had read the article you would see:

  1/ they need to collect ground truth data for their algorithm to work, it doesn't magically work everywhere. 
  2/ the ground truth data was collected mostly by their clients, it is not their data to give away for free

I honestly don't see a problem with this technology, and I am a huge privacy advocate. First off, it uses the wifi signal strength + a model based on ground truth data to accurately position you in a map. This means that it's entirely opt-in, they can't accurately track you if you aren't using their app / connected to their wifi (yes I know some data does go out to wifi access points even if not connected, but I doubt it would be enough for this kind of tracking, and it can be disabled by the user)

Yes, they mention promotions, but again the promotions would be opt-in – if I use their app to find a product I'm looking for, they might suggest other products along the way that I might also find useful, or they might take me in a route that passes right by them. This is no different to the way retailers stock up their shelves already, placing products next to others you might want, and moving necessity items around when they want to direct you to another part of the store.

I don't know, I think it's a bit harsh to criticise this when the technology has so many applications outside of retail. I would love this in a museum or library, and even in retail I absolutely hate those interactive map displays that modern shopping malls have, where only one person can use them at a time and you have to navigate through 200 store names for the one you actually want to visit

[ndriscoll]

The criticism was directed at retailers. If they want to provide indoor maps... why not just do that? For my Target example, there's even a convenient place to put them in store: the posters that say to download an app to see a map. There's also a standard place where they can add their indoor maps for free without needing anyone's permission (openstreetmap). Or put them online with a public domain disclaimer and someone else will eventually probably do it.

Edit: In Target's case, they do apparently also put it on their website if you go hunting for it, but the ubiquitous pushing of apps is still annoying vs just putting it right there in the store as well, and perhaps offering a QR code + text link to the online version. They're clearly using it as bait to install their tracking/ads trojan. Also their online map for my store is east-west inverted for some reason (the east end of the building is on the left, the north on top), which would be immediately obvious if they mapped it to their building in OSM.

[yodon]

> If you had read the article you would see:

(1) It's clear from the use of quotes that the person you're replying to did read the article.

(2) from the official HN Guidelines[0]: Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html