Recently, I had a chance to sit down and dish with eyeQ’s CEO, Michael Garel.  eyeQ has been recognized for its worldclass Retail app!

Michael, you have been around the country talking about your application running on Bluemix.  Can you tell me what your App does?

eyeQ is the in-store shopping app shoppers don’t have to download  Let me explain: there’s a lot of development and effort  in the market going into building shopping apps that promise to bring some of the online shopping capabilities into they physical store –both for the shopper and the retailer or brand. An in-store shopping app can give shoppers a different experience based on where you have browsed in the physical store.  It can customize offerings based on who you are, and learn about your interests by what you click.  The problem is that – try as they might – retailers are lucky if they can get 5% of their shoppers to download even the most compelling app, and even fewer open it up in the store.  So we think about the store app a different way. We turn the whole store into an app.  Instead of remembering to open an app on their phone, shoppers actually walk into our app when they walk into the store.

We use a combination of three technologies to give shoppers an extremely helpful, personalized shopping experience – like they get from eCommerce – and to give the retailer or brand shopper intelligence, behavior data, and marketing responsiveness that they get from eCommerce, but we do it all in the physical store.  The three technologies are touch screen displays, visual analytics, and location. The touch-screen displays give information to shoppers that they prefer to have before they buy – ratings, reviews, and information about related and recommended products. Our screens give the retailer the click-through patterns that help them create an even better shopping experience.  Think IBM Coremetrics, but in the physical store. The visual analytics helps to instantly customize content to the age, gender, and even mood of the shopper.  Think online-profiles, but derived from physical information.Finally, we determine position and browsing patterns in the various store departments using location sensing. Think of this capability as a physical cookie.

When we combine all these sources of information and engagement we can give shoppers the type of highly personalized shopping experience they are used to online, but with all the instant gratification benefits of shopping in a brick-and-mortar store. And they physical store – where 93% of all retail sales still occur – transforms from a data blind spot into a rich and meaningful source of actionable information for both retailers and brands.

Being a lean startup, some of our challenges are time and resources.  BlueMix assists us in solving these challenges.  Using BlueMix we have been able to re-allocate time spent on server deployment and maintenance to product development.  This allows us to accelerate our time to market and iterate our offering.  Additionally, BlueMix makes it really easy for us to scale our cloud infrastructure as our deployments continue to grow.
2.  Recently you were named one of the top 5 most promising companies from Dreamit Ventures.   Tell us about that.

Dreamit Ventures is a global startup accelerator that takes early stage companies with exceptional leaders from around the world and provides a small amount of capital, mentorship and guidance to help us grow exponentially in a very short amount of time.  When we joined Dreamit, we had been working on eyeQ full time for 8 months – further along than most of our classmates.  Our goal was to leverage the resources available through the accelerator and their network to help build our pipeline and get us ready to raise funding.  Additionally, one of the founders of DreamIt is also a founder of Monetate, who has been very successful in enabling websites to deliver personalized experiences – so it’s been great to work with him with the vision of creating a seamless personalized shopping experience both online and in-store.

Our class had 9 companies – all stellar and all will be very successful.  Our class has companies from as far away as Bangalore, India.  Others are from Spain, Sweden, New York, Boston, DC, Seattle, Houston, Chicago, and Dallas.  We were the only Austin company.  All are companies that will disrupt the markets they are going into. Here’s a list of companies:(http://www.dreamitventures.com/dreamit_classes/austin-14/)

At the end of an accelerator program there is a demo day – where all companies pitch their companies to a room full of investors, influencers, stakeholders, and media.  Tom Cheredar from VentureBeat was covering our demo day and wrote an article highlighting his top 5, and we were very excited that eyeQ was included.
3.  What are some of the critical trends you’d like to leave folks with in Retail?

1. eCommerce has taken 20 years and a lot of innovation and investment to up to 7% of all retail sales. It did that by creating new ways to be more responsive, engaging, and personalized. New technologies have finally enabled physical stores to emulate those capabilities, and the growth of these technologies will be dramatically faster than online was.  Soon physical stores will begin to re-balance the sales growth by employing theses techniques.
2. As eCommerce and “pCommerce” develop the same capabilities, there is an opportunity to close the loop on the customer experience – for example, browsing online leading to better recommendations in-store, in-store browsing leading to better recommendations online. People will be able to opt-in to an amazing, continuous shopping experience.
3. As shopping behavior data from the 93% of sales in-store is married to the 7% from online, the value of the combined data will increase exponentially.