In recent years, we've seen a drastic increase in smart technology aimed at making our lives easier. These innovations focus on improving our physical health, public safety, environmental conditions, and more. From smartphones and appliances to smart grids, businesses across the globe are capitalizing on the notion that smart technology is essential for the future.
The retail industry is no exception when it comes to leveraging smart technology today. Nearly 71 percent of retailers state that digital transformation is an essential part of retail technology. The recent advances in technology, including artificial intelligence, cloud, business intelligence, analytics, and others, have massively impacted the retail industry. The digital revolution has made the industry as a whole more customer-centric, and the primary aim is to enhance the customer experience to its greatest extent.
Now, retailers are reaching for innovative solutions to find new opportunities for generating revenue and building modern business models. Driven by the need to improve business operations and become more customer-oriented, both online and offline retail markets are striving to eliminate the limitations in their services by using various advanced technologies and creating personalized customer experiences. And thanks to digital platforms, businesses are experiencing many changes, and the internet and mobile devices have enabled consumers to connect with companies like never before.
Today, Veea Inc., a New York-based leader in integrated smart edge connectivity, computing, and security technologies, and iFree Group, a Hong-Kong based conglomerate providing global connectivity, Smart City, Smart Retail and Smart Hospitality solutions, today announced that they have launched their newest product, TROLLEE, at Qualcomm's Smart City Acceleration global customer and partner event at Qualcomm's headquarters in San Diego.
"Retailers must join the digital transformation revolution in order to grow in today's hyper-competitive markets," said Allen Salmasi, founder and CEO of Veea. "TROLLEE offers a cost-effective platform to grow profit margins through increased sales, customer loyalty, and new profit centers while eliminating overhead through decreasing hard costs and finding new efficiencies."
TROLLEE is an advanced smart shopping cart platform, developed by iFREE Group, that powers smart retail solutions through leveraging hybrid edge-cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), indoor positioning systems, contextual digital advertising, and other technologies that will revolutionize big box and supermarket retail by bridging the online-to-offline (O2O) customer journey and experiences.
This isn't the first time Veea and iFREE have collaborated, hosting a range of smart retail applications over several years. As for Trollee, it is supported by VeeaHub and its proximal marketing advertising solution called AdEdge.
VeeaHub is a Smart Computing Hub product platform with a unique software architecture and a range of wired and wireless connectivity, supported by a cloud-based network management, monitoring, and maintenance services. VeeaHub software platform's powerful Linux server runs user applications in complete isolation in Docker containers.
VeeaHub's integrated platform provides enterprise-grade Wi-Fi 6, IoT, and cellular connectivity solutions, including 4G and 5G SD-WAN services as either a primary or a failover WAN connection, with a full security stack for Trollee and other applications within the store. It incorporates IoT connectivity, including Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Classic, Zigbee, and LoRaWAN. VeeaHub nodes installed on the local network instantaneously create a Connectivity Mesh, called vMesh, that simultaneously provides for a Computing Mesh, a microservice-based Service Mesh, an Application Mesh, and an Edge Intelligence Mesh that also supports a highly accurate indoor positioning solution.
The AdEdge application, which runs on VeeaHub's local server in a secure container and delivers the content to Trollee's display, is supported by the AdEdge cloud backend. Retailers can optionally implement other applications such as smart digital signage, Augmented Reality (AR) throughout the store, further supported by an SDK for retailer's smartphones or smart glasses, smart unattended stores within the store, and others alongside of Trollee or just independently.
The AdEdge application is also a platform that intelligently and proximally micro-targets audiences in the real world with interactive and immersive advertising from a global network of advertisers. It processes real-time data from multiple sources to provide holistic insights and deeper intelligence about ad performance, viewer attentiveness, demographics, and shoppers' preferences. Retailers can set a full range of advertising campaign goals and constraints that are delivered locally through the VeeaHub platform with the ability to cache the ad content for targeted, personalized advertising supported by a highly accurate indoor positioning solution.
"This technology truly enhances revenue opportunities for the hypermarket retailers. TROLLEE can be fitted to existing shopping cart stock, giving retailers significant cost savings and an immediate rollout that will quickly cover their initial investment," said Soh Wei Hong, CTO of iFREE GROUP. "TROLLEE is helping to drive Martech, Edge AI, Data Intelligence, Smart iOTs, AR Spatial Computing, and Omnichannel to push smart retail technology to the next level."
Overall, shoppers can find what they need more efficiently while checkout is streamlined, reducing staffing requirements. Based on shoppers' journeys through the store, its planogram can be highly optimized for most shoppers with machine learning and AI. Retailers can leverage this technology, offering it to customers for a virtual, personal shopping device to seek recommendations, discounts, and product reviews, which is essential, as today's consumer wants their retail experience to be unique, memorable, immersive, fun, and, most importantly: easy.
Edited by
Luke Bellos
