About us

BlueFox, footfall analytics

Origins and Mission

BlueFox, Inc was founded in January 2014 by Jan Willem Korver and Guillaume de La Tour.  

Korver wanted to deliver a solution for measuring foot traffic that would protect consumer privacy.  Several approaches to foot traffic analytics were already available on the market.  Some, like cameras and computer vision, were (and are) moderately invasive.  Some, like applications that continuously track consumer location via GPS and report your whereabouts to resellers, were (and are) highly invasive.

Korver’s insight was to use mobile phones as a proxy for people, and to count the number of mobile phones in a detection area defined, in part, by mobile phone Wi-Fi signal strength.  The BlueFox solution did not require any software to be installed on mobile phones for those phones to be detected.  

Venture investors, led by Baseline Ventures, invested funds over the next six years to finance the R&D that delivered five USPTO patents and saw BlueFox deploy sensors at customers, including JCDecaux, in the out-of-home (OOH) advertising market. 

In 2020 the Covid pandemic rocked the OOH advertising market as spending on OOH advertising plummeted.  BlueFox needed additional capital to weather the shock.  BlueZoo, Inc was founded in August 2020 as a successor entity and acquired BlueFox’s assets, including its full patent portfolio.  The complete BlueFox engineering team moved to BlueZoo and services continued uninterrupted.  See BlueZoo.io for more information.