Black Friday: The Data

Posted on December 5, 2011

Michael has already taken a look at the Black Friday data we saw in our regular reports, and the reasons why WiFi might matter for retailers like Macy’s, Safeway and Home Depot to include free access in their stores. I’m going to look at this data from a different perspective completely, and think about what we can tell just from the connection trends we see, and whether there is an additional value that a retailer could gain from their free service in terms of what they can deduce from usage. The bar graph to the right (click on it to get a larger version) shows the percentage change in number of connections for each day of the black Friday week compared to the preceding week. As expected, all the networks in this sample showed a drop in traffic on Thanksgiving day. Interestingly, not to zero, but that might be partially explained by all the connection times being recorded in PST, so some of the early morning Friday connections from stores in more eastern time zones would have been counted as Thursday connections. Foot Traffic I’m sure all of these stores have detailed reporting on their sales over this period, but…

What Black Friday means to the Wi-Fi world

Posted on December 1, 2011

Black Friday has come and gone.  As usual, the yearly craziness ensues such as all night shopping sprees, near-riots at retailers, and sadly, the occasional assault for merchandise or in this year’s case, pepper spray attacks.  Now, the craziness will only continue as Chanukah and Christmas are upon us. Here at Devicescape we took it upon ourselves to analyze Wi-Fi usage and trends that emerged across our network during this year’s Black Friday frenzy. Since our virtual Wi-Fi network is made up of publically accessible Wi-Fi hotspots found around the world in places such as cafes, department stores, restaurants, hotels and airports to random shops that offer Wi-Fi as an amenity to their customers, we are able to track activity and connections within these available Wi-Fi network environments. What did we find? The obvious insight was that because of our millions of users, connections to in-store Wi-Fi spiked dramatically versus the week before. While the rise in connectivity is interesting, what gets my attention are the stores that offer some type of Wi-Fi service.  Stores like Macy’s, Nordstrom’s and Barnes and Nobles bubbled up to the top of our network location list. So is it a surprise that these stores…