Shopping Centers Today is the news magazine of the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC)
Issue link: https://sct.epubxp.com/i/617826
IBM eventually acquired. Three years ago Gilbert-Rolfe first caught the cus- tomer spatial-intelligence wave as COO of Path Intelli- gence, a London-based company that tracks customers hus faR ReTaIL sPaTIaL- intelligence firms have focused mostly on the customer. But if they ever decide to cover the executives too, they could do worse than to track the movements of Cyrus Gilbert- Rolfe, of London, whose career has in turn tracked some of technology's bigger shifts. Indeed, for 25 years Gilbert-Rolfe has displayed a knack for turning up just at the beginning of the next big thing. he says he built the first intranet in the City of London while working as an information- services manager for Lehman Bros. in the early 1990s. he joined Perot systems as an e-commerce consultant in 1994, then took a post as Netscape's european sales director between 1996 and 1999, and from there he moved to Microsoft and a hand- ful of other firms, including a startup that through their mobile phones. Now the 49-year-old is CeO of Movvo, a startup based in Porto, Portugal, that he says offers a more advanced solution to that same chal- lenge. founded in 2009 by three research- ers from the university of Porto, Movvo is built around a patented algorithm that can trace and analyze a shopper's movements to within a square meter by reading a phone sig- nal through a ceiling-mounted receiver. The technology makes it possible for retailers to get data-backed answers to questions that tra- ditionally relied on a gut decision, according to Gilbert-Rolfe. It also gives leasing agents a more persuasive set of talking points. "Traditionally, leasing has been a T following the phones Cyrus Gilbert-rolfe launChes a new firm to traCk shoppers By Bennett Voyles n e w s m a k e r s 54 s C T / J a n u a r y 2 0 1 6