The technology, provided by Proximus, is intended to allow the anonymous tracking of shoppers as they move through the stores, by identifying not an individual shopper himself but rather the shopping cart he is pushing. While in the long run, Proximus intends to offer the solution as part of a retailer's loyalty program that would track individuals via their mobile phones (as long as they opted in), the first step is merely to determine the carts' locations, rather than identify the shoppers using them, according to Jorge Garcia Bueno, a co-founder and the CEO of Proximus.
Bueno and the company's other two co-founders launched Proximus in September 2013, to develop and sell a technology-based product that would allow businesses to better connect with their customers in the way that online stores currently can. For instance, he says, online retailers can identify which products have been viewed and then tailor advertising to an individual based on that information, whereas brick-and-mortar stores do not have that option.
