Retail Gets a Smart Upgrade at NRF This Week

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

Source | IoT Evolution World

NRF 2022: Retail's Big Show brought the most interesting tech and innovation hitting retail stores to New York City this week, and some of the biggest buzz came out of a collaboration between Veea, Qualcomm, and iFREE Group.

The three partner companies unveiled and demoed the new TROLLEE RetailHub and AdEdge solutions, showing how consumer experience can improve right along with profit margins when the tech is paired with strategic thinking.

TROLLEE is a smart shopping cart experience loaded with the AdEdge advertising platform, and the joint solution is a next-generation shopping experience designed to upgrade shopping carts, or trolleys, in retail locations with location-enabled smart services, coupons and discounts, entertainment, and, with the addition of AdEdge, targeted advertising.

The product is powered by Qualcomm's APQ8053 and IPQ7153 IoT solutions and was developed through work by iFREE Group and layered into Veea's VeeaHub platform. All together, the complete package brings edge computing, AI, and indoor positioning into one service that reportedly is set to give Smart Retail a real (and needed, in my opinion) upgrade.

Shoppers will be most excited by the ease of use, targeted discounts, and help to navigate shops, but the NRF buzz was all about the contextual digital advertising solution that is AdEdge. The sophisticated advertising platform is designed to intelligently and proximally micro-target shoppers with interactive and immersive advertising in the real world. It reportedly processes real-time data from multiple sources to provide holistic insights and deeper intelligence about ad performance, viewer attentiveness, demographics, and shoppers' preferences, which will allow retailers to, for the first time, set advertising campaign goals and constraints that are delivered locally with the ability to cache the ad content for targeted, personalized advertising supported by its highly accurate indoor positioning solution.

Advertising content, special offers, and/or coupons for products in the store are cached on VeeaHub units and are delivered instantaneously when a shopper is in the proximity of the advertised products for unparalleled shopping experiences. However, real-time downloading of this content from the Cloud wouldn't result in satisfactory user experiences due to latency and lack of tight integration with indoor positioning systems.

"Retailers win when they consistently deliver exciting experiences to customers, while driving sales of products in their physical stores, supporting brands in disruptive new ways," said Allen Salmasi, Founder and CEO, Veea, Inc. "We are delighted to be part of Qualcomm Technologies retail technology ecosystem and to demonstrate our TROLLEE smart shopping cart and AdEdge solutions at the NRF event. After launching these collaborative retail innovations at last year's Qualcomm Smart Cities Accelerate event, together and other retail ecosystem members, we are rolling out extraordinary shopping at the intelligent edge with entertaining, engaging digital services that make the shopper's journey better while generating valuable data and insights to retailers and brands."

An introductory video of the TROLLEE Smart Retail Solution is available here.