Nowadays, more and more companies understand the importance of data analysis to improve their work and products. In the recent period, moreover, public entities, such as large cities, are also trying to take advantage of tools such as artificial intelligence or big data analytics.

Digital metrics in the physical world

This is the goal of Blimp, which, by analyzing and processing different data sources, provides useful insights to make more targeted decisions and help companies and/or government create new services.

"How does the data collection system work? Proprietary sensors, called Head-Counters, extract data from the image and send aggregated anonymous data that is related to everything a human can count by seeing an image. Data such as counting and classifying pedestrians and vehicles. Why choose Blimp? Each project is carefully followed, and with the support of the in-house team of Data Analysts, the most important KPIs to monitor are defined with the client and help is provided in interpreting the data."

This year too we participated with an exhibition space, in pavilion 10 E01, to tell you about our solution, Blimp Store Analytics, designed specifically for retailers to measure store performance and collect insights along the entire customer journey, from outside inside the stores.

It was an opportunity to meet our sales team who are always available to answer questions or suggestions.

Thank you all for stopping by, see you next year.

Blimp was awarded in the Digital Marketing category with the project “Il Digital Twin delle Vetrine” created for Mondadori Duomo.

In a context in which consumer behavior has changed profoundly, it becomes essential to monitor all the touch points made available. In fact, the difference between physical and digital space is increasingly blurring in favor of an Omnichannel Customer Experience.

What does the project consist of?

Through proprietary technologies, totally privacy compliant and based on Artificial Intelligence, Blimp measures external pedestrian traffic and the exact audience of individual Mondadori shop windows in real time, providing an innovative tool to maximize store performance.

The project presented aims to create a Digital Twin of the environment in which Mondadori Duomo is located through on-field sensors that analyze and certify the impact of the point of sale on passers-by. Through proprietary technologies, totally privacy compliant and based on artificial intelligence, Blimp creates a constantly updated hybrid model.

The extrapolation of digital metrics of the physical space, through the real-time measurement of external pedestrian traffic and the exact audience of individual shop windows, provides an innovative tool to maximize the performance of the store by responding to a constantly evolving digital marketing strategy.

Milan 15 June 2023 – Blimp, a company of the e-Novia Group, founded in Milan and specialized in AI solutions on a global scale, announced today that it has joined NVIDIA Metropolis, a partner program focused on bringing to market a new generation of vision AI applications. The program nurtures a rich ecosystem and offers powerful developer tools to supercharge vision AI applications that are designed to make the world’s most important spaces and operations safer and more efficient. Blimp has developed a service enabled by proprietary sensors called Head-Counter, primarily targeted for use by retailers, for people and vehicle counting in real time. The Head-Counter sensors operate in very large spaces, covering distances of more than 200 meters, consequently minimizing the number of installations required even in very large areas.
They can also process and interpret data by extracting the information brands need to make targeted decisions.
After an initial phase of product development, in 2019 Blimp launched its first solution on the out of home advertising market. It was rapidly able to gather the trust of customers becoming a point of reference in the Italian measure audience market. In this sector, in 2022 the company consolidated its positioning by tripling its customers, doubling the manned spaces and acquiring its first international customers. The company also entered the retail market, thanks to its Store Analytics solution designed to measure the customer journey of stores; a product that brings great added value to retail players. In fact, important customers have already been acquired from several industries ranging from fashion to oil & gas, from telcos to specialized large-scale distribution. Blimp is very active on the market and is constantly looking for new solutions. It is currently focused on smart cities, implementing important projects such as smart parking and the analysis of pedestrian and vehicular mobility across different municipalities in Italy.
The permeation of technology in urban contexts has favored the diffusion of applications to support city institutions and brands operating in the retail world. These are large-scale and, above all, innovative: in 2022 the robotic vision market, towards which Blimp products are aimed, was worth 2.4 billion dollars worldwide and is expected to reach 3.8 billion by 2027, with an expected CAGR of 9.6% for the period described.

NVIDIA Metropolis makes it easier and more cost effective for enterprises, governments, and integration partners to use world-class AI-enabled solutions to improve critical operational efficiency and safety problems. The Metropolis ecosystem contains a large and growing breadth of members who are investing in the most advanced AI techniques and the most efficient deployment platforms, using an enterprise-class approach to their solutions. Members have the opportunity to gain early access to NVIDIA platform updates to further enhance and accelerate their AI application development efforts. Further, the program offers the opportunity for members to collaborate with industry-leading experts and other AI-driven organizations.

Alex Buzzetti, co-Founder and General Manager of Blimp, says: "Our set of technologies integrates perfectly into the new lifestyles of intelligent cities. NVIDIA Metropolis places us in an ecosystem of value and allows us to gain knowledge on what matters the most to our customers. Being part of the NVIDIA network also pushes us to work further for the design and implementation of highly innovative solutions for a really fast-moving present."

Blimp was chosen to represent the world of tourism and was awarded for developing a system for detecting and analyzing the flow of people and vehicles using an optical sensor with artificial intelligence, providing extremely useful data for tourism sector management, event planning and urban area management. Presenting the award were Minister of University and Research Maria Cristina Messa, Minister for Technological Innovation and Digital Transition Vittorio Colao, Minister for Public Administration Renato Brunetta, and COTEC Foundation President Luigi Nicolais.

This award represents the efforts of the entire Blimp team, which has been working since 2017 to bring innovative solutions to the market and offer solutions to smart cities to understand how the city moves.

Click here to watch the award ceremony. From minute 1:21 to minute 1:48 you will see a short interview with our General Manager, Alex Buzzetti.

Almost a year after the outbreak of the pandemic, a climate of great uncertainty still remains. Globally, we are going through a period in which we understand less and less about what is happening around us, while our rhythms of life are punctuated by personal restrictions and limitations. Although it was designed to operate in the advertisement, retail and event sectors, since March 2020 Blimp has expanded its scope, adapting its technology to the pandemic context. It has found wide acceptance in industry for controlling social distancing among employees and the use of personal protective equipment. In this way it has opened up to new markets and developed major new partnerships.

Not only that, thanks to its head-counter devices, today Blimp carries out continuous observation of some neuralgic points in the Milan Metropolitan Area (and other Italian and soon European cities), where monitoring of vehicular traffic and people has become necessary.

The objective of such monitoring is to measure the impact of the anti-Covid measures imposed by the various Dpcms.

The analysis conducted in the Milan Metropolitan Area shows:

• The effect of anti-COVID measures on vehicular traffic at the entrance and exit of the city’s main roads.
• The pedestrian traffic in the center, nightlife areas and more residential neighborhoods.
• The time slots when a major change in city traffic occurs.

The results are used as the basis for analyzing citizen behavior: extremely accurate data that no other major digital or telecommunications player is currently able to provide while drawing on major collection sources. Blimp’s sensors can measure foot traffic and related characteristics, such as age or gender, and perfectly distinguish the type of vehicle passing through, from heavy trucks to ultralight vehicles.

The data provided by Blimp are regularly adopted by SkyTG24, a number of major national newspapers and made available to the public administration with total respect for citizens’ privacy.

Precisely the protection of privacy is one of the founding values of the company. In fact, all data are collected in an anonymous and aggregated form, and no personal data are collected by Blimp’s sensors.

Blimp thus represents a clear example of how Artificial Intelligence can be a strong ally in the fight against the pandemic.

Cities are changing and the way we move in cities is changing. Technologies, especially digital ones, are the key ingredient of Smart Cities and create new opportunities for different market segments: one of them is Out of Home, that is, advertising communication "outside the home," billboards that are increasingly rich and powerful. We talked about this with Alex Buzzetti, co-Founder and General Manager of Blimp, the "blimp" born in 2017 within the Enteprises Factory e-Novia under the motto Good Data, Better Decision. The startup, in fact, uses artificial intelligence and big data to interpret citizens’ behaviors and needs. Data collected through a network of sensors installed in major Italian cities.

Blimp’s mission is to build technologies to bring web methods and metrics to the physical world, with sensors that can analyze flows of people in public spaces. How does your product work and how does it fit with privacy requirements?

Blimp is a service that relies on patented sensor technology that monitors pedestrians and vehicles, deriving useful data analytics. Privacy is therefore a central issue for us when we consider video monitoring and the related protection of the image that is captured. The first aspect to highlight is precisely that the image is transformed directly into a number for us. This is then associated with a set of data, which we are going to process exclusively in aggregate. With this mode, we do not incur any risks related to the violation of citizens’ privacy.

In addition, together with the DPO (Data Protection Officer, ed.) we have addressed this issue with working tables involving other players interested in this type of detection. And thanks to this work we have also prepared a whitepaper dedicated precisely to the privacy issue.

What are the markets in which you operate most?

The markets affected by our technology can be grouped into three macro-categories: Out of Home Advertising, which allows digital billboards to be used as if they were web pages with sponsored content chosen based on the audience; Retail, which deals with taking surveys for specific stores or brands, analyzing data such as reactions to the storefront, the conversion rate of pedestrian turnout in the area in actual sales. Or even the products that most interest store visitors; Smart City, which analyzes the data produced by citizens in order to make the city more efficient in various ways.

Certainly one of the main focuses for Blimp is the conversion of digital billboards into actual web spaces. By analyzing the different types of people who frequent a certain area at certain times of the day, certain creative content can be conveyed. Or even analyze sentiment and attention with respect to a certain type of advertising.

You have recently partnered with advertising concessionaire Media One, which manages, among other things, advertising space in more than two thousand Italian stations, Autostrade Group service areas, and Fiumicino airport. What metrics are you going to monitor?

Media One is precisely one of our main clients, present in different areas of the national territory. For them we are going to analyze audience and clientele out of home, profiling the level of attention and efficiency of creative content. This information will then allow us to make certain reasoning to make campaigns more effective.

What has been your experience in 2020, the year of the pandemic? How have you used your technology?

2020 was a special year for everyone. We at Blimp used our technology to carry out detections to address the spread of COVID-19. Not only in the city of Milan, thanks to the three hundred sensors distributed around the city, but also inside certain manufacturing plants. In particular, the flow of urban information has allowed us to publish several reports aimed at monitoring the reaction of citizens to the different contagious containment measures (curfew and red zone). Based on the findings, we can say that the red zone was the most effective restriction but, at the same time, as it extended beyond two continuous weeks, the fear of contagion tended to decrease. As citizens got used to the “new normal,” they became less strict about following the rules, and all this led to a relative increase in pedestrian and vehicular traffic rates. Another interesting fact, today traffic in downtown areas has increased by 11 percent compared to the pre-pandemic period, while pedestrian traffic has decreased by 60 percent. Certainly the Area C freeze, free parking and fear of crowding in public transportation has increased the use of private cars.

What are your plans for development? And what are the hottest areas?

Out of Home is definitely the hottest sector because it is booming and leading to a revolution in the advertising world. Demands are increasing and Blimp, after consolidation in Italy, will open up to the French and Spanish markets.

Another focal point is Smart Cities: today we are present in the Milan area and in the City of Rimini. Phenomena such as smart lighting (electric lighting based on the influx of people) or smart parking are increasingly interesting. They will facilitate the life of the citizen and data will increasingly be at the center of every activity.

To view the article click here.

For years, WOO has engaged in lobbying activities worldwide, promoting the interests of its members among international organizations, policymakers and the media, and playing a leading role in standardizing labels for out of home advertising research data. The association also supports freedom of communication by actively opposing all those restrictions that still hinder the expression of advertising media in many areas of the world.

After a period of great economic challenges, today the Out of Home billboard industry, in its Programmatic Advertising and Digital Out Of Home declinations, is experiencing a period of strong ferment, characterized by the experimentation of captivating creativity designed for very specific user targets, thanks to the integration of innovative technologies.

According to data from Mediakey’s Out-Of-Home Advertising Forecast, an increasing increase in foot traffic levels in cities will generate growth in the global OOH market of 14.9 percent by the end of 2021. According to the statistics, it will be possible to recover 50 percent of the losses incurred due to travel restrictions by the end of the year. However, full recovery will have to wait until the end of 2023.

Blimp is able to transfer digital metrics into the real world thanks to its patented technologies: its head-counter system, which acts with full respect for privacy, detects flows of people in public spaces, allowing it to decipher audience-specific messages. With its artificial intelligence sensors and computer vision algorithms, Blimp measures in real time the number of passersby gravitating around ledwalls and advertisements (up to a distance of one hundred and fifty meters) while also identifying their gender and age completely anonymously.

«This campaign brings deep tech and Italian entrepreneurial excellence to the prestigious global Out of Home circuit» commented Alex Buzzetti, «with our membership in the World Out of Home Organization we intend to reach new international partners and clients. In parallel, we continue to work on developing new advanced metrics that bring considerable added value to the Digital Out of Home sector».

According to the latest evidence on pedestrian and vehicular traffic in the Milan Metropolitan Area, yellow zone travel in recent weeks has returned to September and October 2020 levels, increasing risk factors in the city. Now, will the recent switch to orange zone be enough to limit travel?

March 1 was the first day of a new orange zone for Lombardy. After three weeks in the yellow zone, in fact, on Monday the Region’s residents woke up to new bans and restrictions to abide by, in order to contain what looks for all intents and purposes like another surge in contagions. But is intensifying the Region’s color from yellow to orange enough to limit citizens’ movements?

In recent weeks, the Blimp team, which examines real-time data on the flows of people and vehicles in the Milan Metropolitan Area, with a view to providing the municipal administration with a decision-making and management tool for local public transport, has detected an increase in risk factors in the city. This is reported by Michela Finizio in Sole24Ore, in an article documenting the latest evidence provided by the Milan-based company. The first relevant data: in mid-February, travel in Milan has returned to the levels of September and October2020.

Increased traffic and time slots:

But when did we get out the most? Definitely around lunchtime, during which there was an increase in the traffic of people and vehicles in both the central areas of the city as well as in the “movida” areas and road junctions.

Pedestrian traffic data, then, showed a propensity for gatherings in the aperitif time slot, which have come to replace the now inaccessible classic dinner parties.

Interestingly, in general, when there is yellow or orange zone, pedestrian flows are mostly related to weather than to actual restrictions. Translated: if the weather is good, people go out more.

Resumption of activities and risk factors

Another data point of curiosity is the following: during the first two yellow zone weeks of 2021, traffic on road junctions increased significantly compared to the two “yellow weeks” in December 2020, possibly due to a resumption of office work activities. Could this be the beginning of the end of smart working?

Finally, it is worth noting that the different transitions from yellow to orange zone (and vice versa) did not have a strong impact on the flows of people and vehicles: in the city of Milan, specifically, there is no difference in this regard.

Meaning. That the only measures that can really reduce movement and, consequently, the risks of people-to-people contact are the red zone, lockdown and curfew. The coming weeks, in this regard, could prove decisive.

To view the article click here.

How does artificial intelligence come to our rescue?

The headline cites in particular the case of Blimp, an enterprise of the e-Novia Group that, at the moment the emergency broke out, decided to make its technology available to help companies and businesses get back on their feet faster. Founded in 2017, Blimp has developed an artificial intelligence sensor that is used to measure the flow of people and detect their gender and age distribution, for example. After the March 2020 restrictions, the company, which was already working with some entities challenged by the enacted security regulations (such as retail outlets and shopping malls), decided to leverage the project to support recovery, already starting Phase 2, which started between April and May. Artificial intelligence has been trained to recognize infectious risk situations: gatherings and failure to use personal protective equipment. I sensori di Blimp sono infatti in grado oggi di rilevare la distanza tra le persone e Blimp’s sensors are in fact now able to detect the distance between people and whether or not they are wearing a mask. When a dangerous situation is registered, an alert is sent, which can be an audible warning, an automated voice reminding people to observe the rules.

This feature, called Beat-19, has been exploited mainly in manufacturing plants and offices to help reopen factories and businesses safely. Sensors have been installed in food service areas, where it is easier to let one’s guard down. But also in retail, to signal the presence of the maximum number of people an enclosed environment can accommodate based on the available floor space.

In addition, interest in the project is growing from municipal administrations, which want to receive important information on the flows of pedestrians, vehicles, bicycles and percentage of mask use. The system is very useful to monitor with analytical and scientific methods the security measures taken, for example, during events with many people.

Privacy information

Privacy is crucial to Blimp. In fact, information is captured by a camera located inside the sensor. The image is processed within the instrument itself, strictly anonymously, aggregated and with the utmost respect for privacy, and immediately destroyed, leaving no trace. The user is informed at each installed location through the presence of a notice in simplified form that gives information about the system used, and a QR code that links to the notice in extended format, to read in detail about data processing.

Health also comes through the creation of sustainable cities

Not only that, Blimp’s technology serves our tomorrow to find cutting-edge solutions with the aim of ensuring a better quality of life and making cities more livable. In this direction, in addition toGoal 3 of Agenda 2030, Blimp’s project also embraces Goal 9 (innovation) and Goal 11 (sustainable communities). And in this sense it is actively collaborating with theMilan City Council in order to monitor the progress of the city administration for that green turn needed in every urban center.The Lombard city hosts sensors that can provide useful information not only for what concerns the effects of the decrees and restrictions issued for Covid, but also for what concerns security management or mobility monitoring. Also in light of the new bike lanes that have sprung up in the capital city to promote more sustainable travel and consequently improve the quality of the air that the Milanese breathe every day.

To view the article click here.