Photo illustration by Jesse Lenz
Some call it creepy, but the kids seem to dig it. It’s SceneTap (scenetap.com), the app that uses “facial-detection” cameras in bars to approximate crowd size, gender ratio, and average age of customers, then furnishes that info to revelers deciding where to spend their nights out, as well as to the bar owners. SceneTap’s founder and CEO is 29-year-old Cole Harper, born in St. Louis and schooled at the University of Missouri. His service is now available in more than a dozen cities, including St. Louis, where it launched this summer.
Where did you get the idea for this? I’ve lived in Chicago for a number of years—after being raised in St. Louis—and you have a ton of options here, some within walking distance, some a cab away, and every single night is different. Some places are busier than usual, some aren’t, and it’s a crapshoot as to what you might find. One night I was out with a bunch of my “tech-driven” friends. I said to them, “Look, Facebook can give you updates on what’s going on at a bar in terms of events, Yelp can give you reviews, but there’s nothing that can tell you in real-time what’s going on in the scene.” The thing with Foursquare is only about 2 percent to 4 percent of people will check in with it. We wanted to make something entirely automated and effortless; we didn’t want people to have to check in or log in, or the businesses to have to use a clicker. My friend Mark said, “Have you ever looked at video-based software?”
How does it work? We have two sensors: One is a digital turnstile pointing at the floor, counting heads as they go back and forth. A second sensor—the one which gets us a little bit more press—helps us determine the gender and age of the customers. What we found is that tech is already being used in shopping malls and other places. It’s totally anonymous. It’s not facial recognition; it’s facial detection. We call it “demographic estimation.”
How accurate is the technology? On average, it’s 90 percent accurate on gender and 80 percent accurate on age, plus or minus three years.
Who finds this information useful? It’s nice to be able to see what the gender ratio is at say, Molly’s or Lucas Park Grille before you go, but the info is infinitely more valuable to the business operators to measure the effectiveness of marketing and advertising efforts. Let’s say your demographic is getting older, and you’re concerned about customers getting older, getting married, and moving to the suburbs. You decide you want a younger customer base. You run a $1 beer special on Wednesday nights. Did it really change demographic trends amongst your clientele? SceneTap can tell the business owners what the average age was lowered to by the promotion. The other valuable property is the advertising and brand value the businesses get from being part of the SceneTap mobile app. In Chicago, for instance, we have over 100,000 users logging in on weekends to see where they want to go.
SceneTap designates how full a pub is as “Chill,” “Lively,” “Hoppin’,” or “Hot Spot.” Might some people actually prefer a chill spot? Definitely. For instance, people already in a relationship might want to go to a place where they don’t have to wait in line to get a seat. Chill is actually a scene that a lot of people are looking for, the opposite of the place that has the most people, which might be more for the party animals.
Did you consider creating an icon that indicates “sausagefest”? [He laughs.] One of the things that we pride ourselves on is that this is a marketing platform for businesses. We don’t want to display a 90 percent male, 10 percent female update, because it might drive customers away. . In that case, it would say “greater than 72 percent male.” Or if a place is totally dead, like at 5 p.m., before anyone has really arrived yet, it would say “less than 20 percent full.”
Some women have called this app “creepy” because it would seem to help dudes looking for bars full of ladies to hit on. The app even sends out an occasional update like “The ladies love [name of bar]. Currently 50 percent female.” There are many, many apps that depending on how you use them could be creepy. Google can be creepy. Facebook was initially viewed as creepy. People can look at photos of you and your family there, and see from status updates when you’re out of town. Everything comes down to the intent of developers and how the users use it, and then you try to tailor it to eliminate the things you want to eliminate. It just says “greater than 58 percent female,” that’s the cap. We’ve done case studies sitting down with both males and females on this. We also work with privacy forums to get their input to take out any quote-unquote “creepy factor.” At the end of the day, we don’t display any personal information. It doesn’t say “Jenny Smith is now at Café Napoli.” We actually have more female app users than male, 54 percent, and they prefer to walk in and not have it all guys. They want to socialize with other females and not feel like everyone in the room is going to hit on them.
