Get aggregated or individual (opt-in) location information within Belgium

Integrate your IoT data in your environments or tap into our mobile statistic big data to count people in geographic regions.

Monitor the crowd and anticipate to improve the experience of your event.

Monitor the heartbeat of an event, a demonstration or a gathering and react quicker and more efficiently on (un)expected situations. By tapping into our mobile network's connection live statistics you do no need to deploy any sensing infrastructure. Just define a geographic area to monitor and get streams of live data.

RTCM-microsite

People counting made easy

Create zones anywhere in Belgium using the microsite or the REST APIs. Thanks to the microsite, visualize our network cell overlay to help you create zones that match the closest to our network coverage.

Create geographic zones

Create data streams for the geographic zones you created. Data streams can be started immediately or scheduled to start in the future. Using our REST API or Proximus Cloudengine you can create streams in a fully automated way to receive people counting data 24/7.

Create data streams

The Real Time Crowd Management data streams are simple JSON data packets, easy to integrate in your own applications. For every data update we return both the count of national and international visitors as separate counters.

Count national or international visitors

Real Time Crowd Management API allows you to

Mobile phones are always connected to cell towers and towers cover the whole country. Phones emit events when they roam, call, text or transfer data. By knowing how many phones are in each cell, we allow you to count people easily.

Our network data is fully anonymized, making it impossible to track individual mobile phones or people. Additionally, no data is returned for a cell if less than 30 devices are counted.

People counting data streams can be created using the microsite or our REST APIs and last for up to 12 hours per stream. The data refresh rate in a stream can range from 1 minute to 30 minutes

How it works

At FamousGrey, we always try to keep up with the latest Proximus technologies and solutions. We try to use them creatively and integrate them into solutions and campaigns aimed at our customers. For example, someone noticed Proximus recently launched Real Time Crowd Management (RTCM) technology and matched it to the needs of the city of Brussels.

Testimonials

Do you need more information, a demo? Would you like us to help you get started, or even develop the complete solution for you?

Are you looking for more standard solutions for sending SMSes in bulk, email2sms features, or user friendly interfaces to let your employees have SMS conversations?

Don’t hesitate to contact us by filling in the form on our [contact us page](https://proximusapi.enco.io/contact-us "Contact us").


More information

Measuring your audience live

The renowned full-service agency, FamousGrey, has developed a real time city guide for Visit.Brussels, called <a href="https://now.brussels/">now.brussels</a>. The app allows you to discover Brussels through the eyes of its true inhabitants.
&#8220;Brussels has a lot of beautiful places, many of them undiscovered by tourists, but known by the locals. Visit.Brussels came up with the idea of creating an app as part of a larger campaign aimed at French and Spanish tourists, that shows visitors where the hotspots are located at any time of the day, in real time&#8220;. States Maarten Breda, Experience Director at FamousGrey.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-4446" src="/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/QuoteEN.png" alt="" width="700" height="250" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/QuoteEN.png 700w, /wp-content/uploads/2019/07/QuoteEN-300x107.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" />
<h4>About now.brussels</h4>
If the user allows the app to determine his location, he can start using the city guide. Hotspots are available in 3 categories: eating, drinking and doing. Based on location, weather, choice of category and preferences of the locals, a suggestion list is created. What is Brussels doing at this moment? The app provides a map that show blue and yellow spots. The spots indicate where the locals and tourists are located.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-4430" src="/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/visualApp.png" alt="" width="600" height="285" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/visualApp.png 600w, /wp-content/uploads/2019/07/visualApp-300x143.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" />
now.brussels app – visual representation of tourists and Brussels residents
<h4>Innovative with real time data</h4>
FamousGrey and Proximus are already working together today. &#8220;At FamousGrey, we always try to keep up with the latest Proximus technologies and solutions. We try to use them creatively and integrate them into solutions and campaigns aimed at our customers. For example, someone noticed Proximus&#8217; recently launched Real Time Crowd Management technology and matched it to the needs of the city of Brussels.&#8221;
FamousGrey uses the <a href="https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/rtcm/overview">RTCM (Real Time Crowd Management) API</a> of Proximus EnCo. Via the microsite on <a href="http://enco.io">enco.io</a>, you can easily define certain zones and retrieve data about them over a predetermined period. The creation of the most interesting zones for the Now.Brussels app happens automatically, thanks to the availability of the API. This way FamousGrey retrieves data every day. The tracking happens at the highest granularity (100m x 100m).
The zones have been defined both in collaboration with the Tourist Office and based on social media messages of Brussels residents, from which data is retrieved in real time. &#8220;The zones form blocks next to each other on the RTCM microsite, but in the app these zones are flattened to &#8216;liquid shapes&#8217; to obtain a visually attractive and well-arranged layout. The API then allows for the automated creation of data streams on the defined zones, with new data streamed every 5 minutes. The map is therefore updated every 5 minutes in the app.&#8221; According to Arno Van Biesen, web-developer at FamousGrey.
&#8220;In a second phase, it is anticipated that the &#8216;liquid shapes&#8217; will also move in real time. But this processing was not the initial focus, so that is what is currently being worked on.&#8221;
<h4>What does the future hold?</h4>
Visit.Brussels will be running the now.brussels app during the summer. After this period, an evaluation will be done based on usage and user feedback to decide whether the app will remain available on the longer term for visitors.”
Do you want to get started with the RTCM API from Proximus API Solutions or do you have an idea of what you want to talk to us about? Let us know via <a href="mailto:enco@proximus.com">enco@proximus.com</a> or subscribe to our <a href="https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/rtcm/price">Trial Plan</a> to get started right away.

FamousGrey & Visit.Brussels launch a real time city guide

Proximus API Solutions has released the <a href="https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/rtcm/overview" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Real Time Crowd Management API</a>, a new capability to measure live national &amp; international footprint or audience on any geographic location in Belgium. Any software developer can now integrate live data streams on people count in their own solutions. Supporting smart city or smart mobility projects, assessing the impact of cultural events or opening the road to completely new solutions is once again made simpler today.

<h3>Audience monitoring &#8211; the usual ways</h3>
As an event organizer, large shopping mall manager or dealing with crowd-sensitive situations, being able to perform real-time audience or crowd monitoring can be a very complex task. If several technologies do exist today, they come with step-in requirements which may be difficult to achieve. To take a few examples:
<ul>
<li>Wifi sniffing requires this technology to be activated on the smartphones of your audience. With the multiplication of mobile price plans including large, if not unlimited mobile data, several have started to observe that <a href="https://opensignal.com/blog/2018/04/19/time-spent-on-wifi-in-the-us-falls-as-users-move-to-unlimited-plans/">the time spent on wifi is actually starting to come down</a>. Not to mention people whose concerns about <a href="https://www.csoonline.com/article/3246984/wi-fi/why-you-should-never-ever-connect-to-public-wifi.html">the security of public wifis</a> may be totally justifiable.</li>
<li>Bluetooth-based location services most often leverage <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBeacon">iBeacons</a>. This technology requests that the visitors not only have Bluetooth enabled on their phone, it will also demand a dedicated mobile application to detect the iBeacons. Getting your branded app installed on your target population smartphones can already be very challenging,<a href="http://info.localytics.com/blog/21-percent-of-users-abandon-apps-after-one-use">making sure it&#8217;s not deleted too quickly</a> is an extra hurdle you need to tackle.</li>
</ul>
Wifi, bluetooth or even new approaches such as smart cameras all require the deployment of a specific infrastructure to be able to collect the data. While this can be manageable in a controlled area such as a sport stadium or concert hall, it will become more complex in open spaces, because of the size of the place or simply because you may not get any authorization to deploy.
<h3>Could we use mobile network data ?</h3>
<figure id="attachment_3908" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3908" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-3908" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/lady-mobile-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/lady-mobile-300x169.jpg 300w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/lady-mobile-600x338.jpg 600w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/lady-mobile-1024x576.jpg 1024w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/lady-mobile.jpg 1500w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 85vw, 300px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-3908" class="wp-caption-text">All phones leave traces for everything they do</figcaption></figure>
Now think for a moment about all of the mobile phones out there in every one&#8217;s pocket or bag, whether smartphones or feature phones. Phones are connected all of the time to the mobile network, even if your wifi is on and connected. Every action, such as making or receiving a call, sending or receiving a text, transferring data because of surfing or messaging, all these actions do generate a trace on the mobile network, 365 days a year and 24 hours a day. The mobile network infrastructure is there, there is nothing you have to deploy. We can actually leverage the mobile location data, and after making sure it is properly anonymized and fully GDPR compliant, make it available to external parties to measure audience both historically and in real time. This is exactly what Proximus&#8217; <a href="https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/rtcm/overview" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Real Time Crowd Management</a> (RTCM) does.
<blockquote>We can actually leverage the mobile location data and after making sure it is properly anonymized, make it available to external parties</blockquote>
The mobile network being divided into &#8220;cells&#8221;, we won&#8217;t be able to track an individual person nor tell you how many people are in a square of 2&#215;10 meters, but we can report live on the number of national and international mobiles connected per cell or &#8220;TACS&#8221; (accumulation of 2G/3G/4G cells in a specific location and direction). It is important to note that the size of cells does vary and tend to be bigger in rural, open areas, while being smaller in dense urban or city spaces.
<figure id="attachment_3911" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3911" style="width: 599px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-3911" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/mobile-cells.png" alt="" width="599" height="205" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/mobile-cells.png 965w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/mobile-cells-600x205.png 600w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/mobile-cells-300x103.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 599px) 85vw, 599px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-3911" class="wp-caption-text">Theoretical mobile cell map</figcaption></figure>
<h3>Real Time Crowd Management use cases</h3>
<h4>Low hanging fruit</h4>
The availability of location insights coming from mobile networks, such as <a href="https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/rtcm/overview" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Proximus RTCM</a> is offering on our <a href="http://enco.io">API marketplace</a>, facilitates the enablement of &#8220;low hanging fruit&#8221; use cases such as pulsing the heart of a city in real time, assessing the national and international footprint during large outdoor music festivals, or helping tourist find quieter areas at the Belgian coast during sunny week-ends.
<figure id="attachment_3929" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3929" style="width: 651px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-3929" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/bcoast-rtcm-1024x661.png" alt="" width="651" height="420" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/bcoast-rtcm-1024x661.png 1024w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/bcoast-rtcm-600x387.png 600w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/bcoast-rtcm-300x194.png 300w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/bcoast-rtcm.png 1315w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-3929" class="wp-caption-text">Visitor heatmap at the Belgian Coast</figcaption></figure>
<figure id="attachment_3921" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3921" style="width: 651px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-3921" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/rtcm-de-broeckere-300x124.jpg" alt="" width="651" height="268" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/rtcm-de-broeckere-300x124.jpg 300w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/rtcm-de-broeckere-600x247.jpg 600w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/rtcm-de-broeckere-1024x422.jpg 1024w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/rtcm-de-broeckere.jpg 1489w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 984px) 61vw, (max-width: 1362px) 45vw, 600px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-3921" class="wp-caption-text">Total count of national and international visitors returned by RTCM over a day in the area of Place de Broeckere</figcaption></figure>
<h4>An open door to innovation</h4>
Real Time Crowd Management definitely opens up the road for new use cases. Let&#8217;s take one example. If you live in a large city like Brussels, for sure you have already seen these large digital billboards which, in fact, are always showing the same ads or messages.
<figure id="attachment_3931" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3931" style="width: 300px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-3931" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/place-de-brouckere-300x180.png" alt="" width="300" height="180" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/place-de-brouckere-300x180.png 300w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/place-de-brouckere-600x359.png 600w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/place-de-brouckere.png 939w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 85vw, 300px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-3931" class="wp-caption-text">Digital billboards on the place de Brouckere (Brussels)</figcaption></figure>
Now, let&#8217;s imagine I&#8217;m Coca Cola. Maybe I would be ready to pay more to the billboard company if my ad was to be displayed on sunny days when there are at least 2000 people in the area of the boards. While if I&#8217;m working for the city promotion, I may find it a bargain to buy display time at low price to thank Americans and Chinese tourists for visiting the historical town center despite the rainy weather. We would call such trade platform the Advertisement Auction Platform, built along these principles :
<ul>
<li>Collect real time national and international footprint in the area of the billboards without deploying any infrastructure nor relying on mobile apps : <a href="https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/rtcm/overview" target="_blank" rel="noopener">real time crowd management APIs</a> on EnCo</li>
<li>Collect real time weather information using battery operated sensors to lower maintenance : LoRa sensors combined with <a href="https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/mythings/documentation">MyThings APIs</a> on EnCo</li>
<li>Manage digital billboards location and availability using a cloud-based platform</li>
<li>Manage a digital asset library, where users can upload their digital content</li>
</ul>
<figure id="attachment_3932" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3932" style="width: 1024px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-3932" src="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ad-auction-1024x926.png" alt="" width="1024" height="926" srcset="/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ad-auction-1024x926.png 1024w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ad-auction-600x543.png 600w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ad-auction-300x271.png 300w, /wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ad-auction.png 1055w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 85vw, (max-width: 909px) 67vw, (max-width: 1362px) 62vw, 840px" /><figcaption id="caption-attachment-3932" class="wp-caption-text">The Advertisement Auction Platform based on real time audience monitoring</figcaption></figure>
<h3>You can start testing today</h3>
Do you have great ideas or projects where live audience data would be required ? Any developer can enroll today on the <a href="http://enco.io">API Solutions marketplace</a> and request access to the <a href="https://proximusapi.enco.io/asset/rtcm/documentation">Real Time Crowd Management</a> beta program. During our beta, you will get unlimited access to the APIs and can define any zone and data stream you need to properly assess our APIs. As a beta tester, we will value your feedback and may adapt our roadmap to your needs.

Real time audience and crowd insights : tapping into mobile data opens new use cases

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Real Time Crowd Management