Technis drinks its own champagne at CES 2024

Walk around Eureka Park at CES and you will stumble upon a few vendors that can describe what their product is yet struggle to demonstrate it. That’s understandable; some concepts are too abstract to be replicated in person.

Swiss-based Technis has no such problem. The company has developed software that helps companies analyse data collected by sensors – such as the kind that tracks foot traffic at events – and has put it to good use at CES, using its own technology to measure the success of its booth.

We like a company that drinks its own champagne. And as you’ll find from the interview below, we are not alone. Companies are working with Technis not just to measure the success of event marketing efforts, but, perhaps more importantly, to understand how they can optimise the management of buildings, an area with obvious implications in sustainability.

Related reading: Record number of startups at CES 2024 – but why?

Could you start by introducing yourself and the company, please?

My name is Beatrice Thouveny and I’m the General Manager of North America for Technis, a Swiss-based software company. We have offices in the UK, Boston, Doha and Bangkok so we are truly a global company.

We are a startup and got our start maybe six or seven years ago… so on second thought, maybe we are not a startup anymore!

Our software helps businesses understand how foot traffic flows at different locations and venues. This enables our clients to analyse how people walk around a place – such as at an event – providing them with analytics in the form of dwell time, preferred paths taken, number of people at a certain location, among others.

How does it work?

Basically, through sensors, like the four we have installed on our booth.

These sensors allow us to track how many people have walked down the alley from our booth for example. Thanks to that, we know we’ve had roughly 11,000 people walking around, of which more than 3,600 entered the booth, with 44 converting into leads. We can also see a heatmap of where they entered and spent most of their time. Once you’ve walked into the area covered by the sensors, you are assigned a unique ID, which gets passed around from sensor to sensor, keeping track of you until you leave.

As for the conversion rate, in the case of our booth here at CES, it’s calculated based on visitors whose details have been entered into our CRM because that’s what we’ve defined as a legitimate lead. That being said, our clients can customise their marketing metrics to their specific business requirements.

Where can this solution be used?

It can be used at conference centres, office space, airports, you name it. And it can be deployed both indoors and outdoors. For example, last year we worked on the Super Bowl and monitored the entire place, including all the entrances and exists. That kind of data is essential for both safety purposes and marketing purposes

Which type of clients are finding this useful?

Retail stores, airports and restaurants are all finding relevant use cases. But one area where we find a lot of traction is building management.

And why is that?

Building managers have a lot on their plate and are often handling information on different systems. They might have a spreadsheet where they keep track of contractors, another for security, another for energy management… and it’s too much for them to handle!

Sensors allow building managers to be able to monitor the flow of people coming in and out, as well as the occupancy rate of certain floors for example. Our software then allows us to blend in data collected from those sensors with data collected from other third-party systems through APIs. [Examples include] leak-detection systems, temperature- and air-management systems or building lighting. Through those integrations, we pull in data that is relevant for those building managers and surface it on a custom-built dashboard, giving them a unified platform to track all those different variables.

So for example, if you are Walmart and there’s a leak in one of your cooling systems, you want to make sure that information is surfaced as quickly as possible because it could represent a lot of money in costs. Our dashboards give users a better chance to make sure those don’t go unnoticed.

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