Australian-produced app Roamz is reaching out to the retail sector with analytics that will tell a store what customers are saying in real time.
Developed in Sydney by entrepreneur Jonathan Barouch, Roamz uses the number-crunching capabilities of Amazon cloud to sift through Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram postings in a chosen area, and return aggregated intelligence as to what is being said publicly in real time.
It can return details of social media posts happening in a building you are visiting, at a railway station or in a sporting arena.
But this social media crunching capability isn't enough for Mr Barouch, who is adding business analytics and a means to render location-based social content on to a 3-D map.
This month he is announcing a new location-based insights and analytics tool that provides actionable analytics on a store-by-store basis.
"The tools will allow merchants with one or many stores to be able to identify their customers who talk about them on social media," he told The Australian.
"It will allow businesses to engage with their customers regardless of which platform the customer uses to talk about the store.
"It will also identify key trends in real time so that the merchant can adjust their strategy based on live feedback," he added.
The tool, called Local Measure, includes a dashboard that can identify a store's most influential customers on social media, their demographics based on attributes such as age and sex, which stores are more social or less social, and the top keywords customers use about those stores.
It will also identify which social medium customers prefer.
Pricing would start at $59 a month and already there were 100 companies coming aboard, Mr Barouch said.
"The technology that we have built to power the analytics tool is globally unique in that it identifies the specific store where the comment was made, meaning that for a brand with lots of stores, we give them visibility down to a store level.
"The platform also allows businesses to broadcast out a message.
"For example, if I am a cafe and I have just baked fresh muffins, I can broadcast an invitation to my customers across social media platforms."
The analytics tool is not the only new feature being launched by Mr Barouch this month.
He said he also was launching an iPad version of Roamz that rendered real-time location-based social content on to a 3-D map.
"You can walk down (a street) and see social media content bubbles popping out of the building.
"The app can give you a 3-D view of the building and the content happening inside.
"This will be one of the first apps globally to use Google's new Maps iOS SDK that was built by Google in Sydney.
"We are thinking of the app as Street View for social media data, allowing you to see what places people are talking about and then saving those places to your to-do list to remind you on your phone next time you are nearby."
He said Roamz also could identify social conversations at places about events happening nearby, such as a festival or a march.
Mr Barouch said the scalability of Amazon cloud meant Roamz was geared to handle spikes in traffic.
