Solving congestion points

Foot traffic at U.S. malls has dropped each of the past three holiday seasons, according to retail intelligence firm ShopperTrak. Reason: People are doing more shopping online. To bolster mall sales, a new group of mobile startups, such as New York’s MindSmack, are developing indoor-mapping applications to entice shoppers.

Which leads to this:

The user will open up the map and see a logo for X store. It could be the Gap logo, for example. And then next to the Gap’s logo they’ll see a deal icon that, when tapped, will showcase a deal or information or coupon code that can be shown to a cashier. There’s a huge amount of metrics that we’re capturing here that’s never been captured before. We know what routes people take at a given mall, so we can send this data to the mall owner, to the retailer, to the advertiser.

Bloomberg

There exists a bounded function in the consumers head, the Mall Function. That function is being requantized by spotting the congestion points and adapting the technology. What is the mall function? A polynomial counted out by spike trains in our heads. We start the counters when we enter the mall.

Why has mall foot traffic slowed? The pre-planning is not there. For many other activities, like ordering a computer, the user goes to the internet. The user is congested at the internet, and the mall needs to fix its internet portal.