Roamz to help relieve retailers’ woes with new analytics tool

Australian app developer Jonathan Barouch has promised to help retailers by way of a new app tool, which utilise social media data to deliver real-time insight about customers.

This tool is the latest innovation to come out of Roamz, the Sydney-based start-up Barouch launched in 2011 following a $3.5 million investment from marketing firm Salmat.

Prior to Roamz, Barouch founded Fastflowers.com.au, which was acquired by Jack Singleton’s 1300 Flowers in 2010.

Roamz is an intelligent mobile app that searches through social platforms to show users the places and events locals are talking about.

This month, Barouch is announcing a new location-based insights and analytics tool that provides actionable analytics on a store-by-store basis.

The tool, called Local Measure, is described as a “business owner’s best friend” for its ability to “bring customer stories to life”.

It can identify a store’s most influential customers on social media, their demographics based on attributes such as age and gender, and the top keywords customers use about specific stores.

It also shows which stores are more “social” than others, and will identify which social medium customers prefer. According to Barouch, there are already 100 companies coming aboard.

“Like every other start-up, we want to make money,” Barouch told StartupSmart.

“The really challenging thing with consumer-facing products or applications is you’re special when you’re scaling but when you’re growing to scale, you’re less interesting to people.

“We were getting meetings with some pretty big retailers [but they were saying] we’re not big enough yet.”

Keen to win over these retailers, Barouch set about creating Local Measure, a tool that delivers real-time local insight about a retailer’s customers.

“They’re interested in the data we were seeing – we’re able to pull in data on a geo basis,” he says.

This tool is not the only thing Barouch is launching this month. He is also launching an iPad version of Roamz that displays real-time, location-based social content on a 3D map.

It is one of the first implementations of the new Google Maps iOS SDK, which was released at the time of the Google Maps iOS app launch late last year.

It allows mobile developers who use maps inside their apps to use Google Maps instead of Apple’s implementation.

The SDK also includes support for 2D and 3D views, so users can tilt and rotate the map using gestures inside the app.

Roamz will use the Google Maps 3D angle and will then layer the social content on top of the buildings.

“It puts some of these social conversations over a 3D map, so you can see some of those conversations lit up over the building,” Barouch says.