Products & Business Research

Increasing Your Edge Against The Competition

This video demonstration of Nimbus Virtual Shopping Solution shows the key functionality and a brief tour of the virtual supermarket. Users are able to choose objects just by looking at them, and push a single button to make selections of products or on interface menus.
©2008 Nimbus Online Inc.

The life or death of a business can hinge on accurate characterization and analysis of the complex moving target of consumer behavior. The fierce competition for customer attention and retail shelf space in a noisy consumer landscape has raised the stakes even higher for product producers and retailers.

Nimbus Online Inc. is an international business consulting and consumer research firm helping clients in a range of markets understand their target consumers better through sophisticated data gathering systems and analysis. Nimbus saw the opportunity to dramatically improve standard consumer research practices through the development of a virtual shopping simulator integrated with sophisticated eye-tracking hardware to enable detailed data gathering of pre-attentive consumer behavior. When the time came to build their solution, they gave Firsthand a call.

Firsthand started by helping Nimbus hone their technology concept into an effective design to meet their clients’ needs for data gathering and efficient deployment. Firsthand then designed and constructed a finished product that provided the flexibility for expansion to meet Nimbus’s individual client needs. The application integrates behaviormetric data gathering through eye-tracking built into the core of the system. In addition, Firsthand provided Nimbus with the optimal computer solution to efficiently deploy their system in the field.

"One of the best things about our experience with Firsthand on Nimbus was that the Firsthand people were not solely developers -- they were strategic problem-solvers who also helped us sort out and prioritize the key business and developmental issues in creating an application like Nimbus.  This alerted us to problems we needed to solve in the very early stages of development so bottlenecks didn't develop later.  As a bonus, this kind of holistic help from Firsthand also gave us insight into primary points of difference about Nimbus that we hadn't seen before, thus allowing us to eclipse our competitors in the market."

Jerry Johnson, Nimbus Online

The success of Nimbus Online Inc. is just one example of how Firsthand is helping business clients increase their edge against their competition.

Nimbus’s virtual shelves are stocked with photo-realistic products which can be customized to meet specific client and research needs.
©2008 Nimbus Online Inc.