Building On The People’s Network with Dor & Constellation
This is an interview between Dor Founder, Michael Brand, & Grants Program Manager, Clarissa Redwine.
When we first prototyped our hardware, we were using ultrasonics. Ultrasonics use sound vibrations of frequencies greater than the upper limit of the audible range for humans — that is, greater than about 20 kilohertz. It kind of worked. It was a proof of concept, but it was the best way we knew to start our foot traffic counter. Like any good prototype, we ran into limitations. Fluffy clothes would muffle sound and not detect a person. Echoes would reverberate throughout a room. We were head-on with our first need to pivot and move on to prototype v2. So, we hacked a TV remote and created an infrared sensor. We deployed v2 to our alpha customers but ran into other limitations. Black clothing would absorb all the light or reflect off the floor and think another person was there. It was working well enough most of the time, but the accuracy numbers were not great.
Finally, a buddy of a colleague told us to check out a particular thermal sensor, and we talked to the manufacturer to get a few samples. The data from it looked pretty good, but it would take a lot more algorithmic development to make it useful for us. We moved along that path from there on, and luckily, it worked! This is how our foot traffic counter, Dor, was born.
Today, with a retail version of the Dor device in the market, it’s incredible to look back on how hard the Dor team worked to create this solution. We started prototyping with ultrasonics for three months before throwing it all away, pivoted to reflective infrared, pivoted again to work with thermal, and finally ended with the right solution. The team never once considered it throwing away work — it was always on the path toward our goal.
What does Dor do?
Dor created the first foot traffic counter that is accurate, affordable, incredibly easy to install, and connected as a software service. The service works on store managers’ mobile phones and desktops, using the Helium LoRaWAN network as a backup when the device drops from Wi-Fi or encounters other issues — which is vital for customer support. Today, Dor connects with the Constellation Network, creating a product called Dor Traffic Miner (DTM). Over time the DTM provides foot traffic data to help store owners turn traffic into conversion and increase marketing effectiveness while earning crypto rewards. This data allows owners to baseline their efforts, monitor initiatives in real time, and plan for the future. The data from a Dor device can also help with monitoring operations and better staff planning. Dor helps your store be data-driven and generate rewards. Dor is a grantee of the Helium Foundation.
Why was Dor started?
It’s actually really weird how the idea came about. It started out having nothing to do with retail foot traffic. My concept was that I wanted to own data that no one else had. We don’t have as much data available about the physical world as we do for the digital world. The idea for Dor was just me wanting to know when people go in and out of doorways. I don’t care who they are — it doesn’t matter. I want to know that number. I planned to make this super convenient door counter to stick in doorways and gather data. But where money hits people walking through doors is in the retail business. Legacy foot traffic systems are camera-based and expensive to maintain and install. We found that many locations could not collect foot traffic because of the difficulty and cost of running a traditional counting system. We needed to create something that was battery-powered, self-installed, and cost-effective.
What does Dor solve or simplify for users?
Dor makes it easy for anyone to collect foot traffic data in the real world. Retailers can gain valuable insights, and individual Dor Traffic Miners (DTM) owners can earn crypto rewards for collecting data.
Who are Dor’s users & what do they get from the platform?
Historically Dor’s users have been retail store owners and operators from a range of small and mid-sized businesses up to enterprise-level. With the introduction of our DTM, now the crypto community can own a Dor device to collect foot traffic from any location and earn rewards. Our play is about combining data from everyone’s devices anonymously and using it in aggregate to help individual retailers or other data buyers. As an independent third party, stores are actually happy to give us their data. They can’t see financial info about their competitors, but we can anonymize it to help them grow their businesses and insights without sacrificing their privacy.
What was the product development process like?
While Dor looks like it’s solving a simple problem, the path to get there was quite involved. We have created over ten iterations of the sensor, including support systems that collect a ground truth dataset for training our machine learning algorithms. This algorithm required 3+ years of continuous data collection before achieving the same accuracy as a camera-based system. The data that comes out of the sensor looks like an audio stream. So we must tell it that it’s a human vs. a gust of wind. We started out in front of a door, counted people going in, and trained our algorithm by saying this was a person, in and out. We collected millions of data points like this.
One thing that really sets us apart is that we developed the sensor so that we could upload new firmware to it remotely. The algorithm is stored on our own servers internally. We run it through our machine learning system and train the algorithm. What it spits out is actually a simplified algorithm that the sensors can run that follows all the parameters of the learnings. So we can input new data into our server, then push that out to all of our sensors in the field. Where it gets cool is that we can pull in data from sensors in the field, retrain it on our server, then push it back out.
Additionally, our initial testing process threw us for a loop. Today, Dor uses thermal sensors. This means we have to test our algorithm in various temperatures. And the devices straddle a doorway. For some installations, this means one part might be outside while the other is inside. Therefore, our testing environments emulate this. One of these is in an environment with below-freezing temps outside but room temp inside, like you’d find in a store during the winter. One of the times we tested this happened to be in the middle of summer — and it was pretty warm at the time in San Francisco (and everywhere we could think of to reasonably travel to). It was even too warm in the arctic! One of our team member’s grandparents owned a grocery store, and we realized — ‘Hey, we could set up our test device in the freezer room at their shop!’ Thankfully, that did the trick.
What challenges building the hardware, software, or brand have you experienced? And how did you troubleshoot?
One of our biggest challenges was making this device battery-powered for a greater user experience. Our device has three different sensors and analyzes this raw sensor data using neural networks on the device. With all this processing and sensing, the device can still last for over one year before a battery change.
How does Dor benefit from using the Helium Network? What makes it the right connectivity solution?
The current version of Dor is running on Wi-Fi connected via your phone with Bluetooth. When your device loses Wi-Fi coverage, Dor connects to the People’s Network and pings our servers that there’s an issue with the device. The People’s Network allows us to have a joint system. It’s beneficial because if the sensor disconnects, we can use the Helium network to figure out what went wrong and even reconnect to the network by loading new Wi-Fi credentials. Dor’s current roadmap includes an iteration to fully support Helium 5G, but today allows customers more freedom and less worry by quickly mitigating connectivity issues as they arise. With the joint system, there’s no need to set up network access or firewalls. Additionally, Helium allows our newest iteration of the sensor to ping our servers before the customer connects to Wi-Fi. This has become a critical part of our customer success journey, allowing us to be data-informed about how customers use the product.
Do you have any stats on how many Dor sensors would be out in the field by the end of 2023?
We expect to have over 5000 sensors in the field by the end of 2023.
Are you deploying Hotspots as well? If so, how many and where?
We are not deploying hotspots at a company level, but many of our employees and customers love Helium and have deployed hotspots themselves. Honestly, there’s been incredibly broad coverage with Helium that there hasn’t been a need to deploy more. Although, our entire engineering team would be happy to install more hotspots!
Any interesting stories or other notable information you think should be included?
In October 2021, Dor was acquired by Constellation Network. Constellation built a Layer 0 blockchain featuring parallel consensus, fast and feeless transactions, and advancements in scalability and interoperability, allowing anyone to build web3 solutions. Ben Jorgensen, Constellation’s CEO, was an advisor for us for a few years, and we talked about how our Dor sensor could work with Constellation’s Hypergraph network.
So, in addition to the retail business, we thought about how the Dor sensor could be augmented for people to mine foot traffic data directly, and we’d build a platform with a marketplace for the data. Buyers could buy the data in aggregate, and data providers who send us their DTM foot traffic data would be rewarded in cryptocurrency through Constellation’s network.
This is how we were inspired to create the Dor Traffic Miner (DTM) — it’s the first hardware device out there that combines data mining and crypto rewards. The DTMs will ship before the end of this year and will actually be a data validator node on Constellation’s network.
So far, the idea is being well received by the market. We’ve made a partnership with FourSquare to buy our DTM ground-truth data to validate their location data. We just announced a partnership with Snowflake to sell our data in their marketplace. We’ll offer crypto bounties through Snowflake to DTM owners to gather foot traffic from brick-and-mortar stores or wherever we find a need for the data. People can literally peel and stick them in any doorway and start earning rewards.
So, if you’re running Helium miners and using Dor, you get double the rewards!
This interview was transcribed by the Helium Foundation and will be a part of a series of interviews with ecosystem builders and Foundation grantees.
Twitter: @Conste11ation
Telegram: Dor DTM
Website: https://constellationnetwork.io/dtm & https://www.getdor.com/
Email Signup: https://constellationnetwork.io/dtm
