The Measurement Minute

Apr 03 2023 20 ep. 3 mins 31
The Measurement Minute Podcast artwork

Welcome to the Measurement Minute. I’m Gary Angel CEO of Digital Mortar. Measurement and analytics is what I do – I’ve worked at everything from political opinion research to direct mail, lots of digital measurement and now shopper journey analytics. And if I’m known for anything, it’s very lengthy blogs. Brevity is really not my style.

I’m challenging myself to go shorter and the Measurement Minute is the ultimate test. My goal: quick, fun, informative takes on analytics that you can binge-listened or access whenever you have…you know..a minute. Retail analytics and store measurement is my current focus. But I’m not going to ruthlessly limit myself to that. I love digital analytics. I often get ticked off by how hard enterprise transformation is. I do more than my share of dabbling in Machine Learning, and occasionally bubble up from work long enough to talk analytics in sports and even the wider-world.

No rules. Except, dammit, I’m going to do my best to stay under a minute.

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Look Ma, No Wires!

Apr 03 2023 2 mins  
The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   One of the biggest challenges to doing people-measurement is the cost and hassle of the cabling. Deploying standalone single sensors has always been possible. But when data needs to be fused across multiple sensors to track customer journey, each LiDAR sensor must be connected via a home-run (a direct cable run) to a server in the IT clos

Measuring Journeys from Outdoors to Indoors

Jan 18 2023 3 mins  
The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   One of our clients at Digital Mortar is a chain of gas/convenience stores measuring the full journey from pump to shop and back. What makes their use-case more compelling is that the stores are a significant upscale from your traditional gas convenience mart – with lots of more upscale food and coffee options. Those options likely incre

People Measurement Alerting for Security and Perimeter Monitoring

Jan 03 2023 3 mins  
The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel Although Digital Mortar isn’t really focused on loss prevention or security applications, there are two big reasons why it matters if you’re thinking about people-measurement. First, there are times when you can dual-purpose sensors to do both crowd-analytics and security (which greatly improves your hardware ROI). Second, when it co

Customer Journey Alerting with People-Measurement

Dec 27 2022 3 mins  
The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Customer Journey alerting can completely transform the experience of a physical space. Instead of waiting for a customer to seek out help, it actively looks for opportunities to use the available help most effectively. Common use cases include identifying customers who absolutely require assistance (unmanned support, locked cases, etc.),

The Operational Use-Cases for People-Measurement Alerting

Dec 19 2022 4 mins  
The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   While performance may be the biggest challenge in building a people-measurement based alerting system, the most important problem for most businesses to solve is HOW to use people-measurement alerting. Use-cases tend to fall into one of these basic categories: operational management, customer journey, and security / loss-prevention. Of th

The Challenge of a Real-time People-Measurement Alerting System

Dec 09 2022 3 mins  
The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   The visible part of an alerting system – the text alerts, webhooks and emails users get – is the easy part. The hard parts are building the realtime pipeline for store or location measurement, creating things like the predictive queue model, and keeping the underlying alerting engine performant so that Associates and Location

Productionizing a Predictive Queue Management Model

Nov 22 2022 2 mins  
The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Productionizing a predictive queue measurement model really involves solving two problems. The first is integrating the predictive queue model into a real-time pipeline so that you can generate predictions about future line states based on current data. The second problem is deciding what to do about those predictions – how they get see

Building a Model for Predictive Queue Analytics

Nov 11 2022 3 mins  
The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel   Building a predictive queue management model is the penultimate and most interesting step in the process of building a queue management system. We used two different analytic techniques to tackle the problem: classic time-series and neural networks. The advantage of time series is that it is simple, easy to implement and productionize,

Getting the Right Target Variable for Line Prediction

Oct 25 2022 3 mins  
The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Probably the most important step in building a model is making sure you’ve got the right target variable. Usually that’s not too hard. But looking at our line data, we quickly realized that predicting line depth wasn’t going to work as straightforwardly as we thought. The problem is that in some of the locations we’

Choosing a Model for Predictive Queue Management

Sep 13 2022 3 mins  
The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   After the data wrangling comes the fun part of any analysis – building the actual model. That starts with model selection. For predictive queue management, we’re looking at time-series models. And because we have store traffic and occupancy data, it will be a multivariate model. In addition, it’s worth thinking about win