Google Analytics for the Real World
Steve Walsh — CTO of Smart Retail, an edge-based computer vision platform bringing measurement to out-of-home and physical retail. Originally from Northern Ireland, now in Hong Kong. Runs small models on-device rather than in the cloud, so the raw video never leaves the premises and only aggregate metadata is uploaded. Met the show at the Snowball panel event.
Chapters
- 0:00Intro
- 0:14What are we doing at Compass Studios?
- 0:45Meeting Steve at the Snowball event
- 1:28Smart Retail, and thanks for Overcast
- 3:07We built our own model
- 5:50From Northern Ireland to Hong Kong
- 7:44A Cantonese village or a Hakka village?
- 8:42What Smart Retail actually does
- 9:39Measuring advertising in MTR stations
- 11:26Proving a campaign actually worked
- 12:22Google Analytics for the real world
- 13:16How a real AI model gets built
- 15:13Running it on a low-power device
- 18:50Twenty metres at near-100% accuracy
- 19:48Shrinking the model
- 20:41Controlling the whole stack
- 21:34Everything runs on NVIDIA GPUs
- 23:29Calibration matters more than the model
- 25:22Side projects, and how he got here
- 27:08Using Codex for review
- 29:01Can AI actually help you ship?
- 30:54Staying motivated and on target
- 32:48LLMs packaging the whole thing
- 33:44Iterating on design in minutes
- 34:43It's just an API a model can talk to
- 37:21The new paradigm
- 39:15Requirements, then a PRD
- 42:02Deploying safely without breaking things
- 42:55Automating the test suite
- 43:54Most of our code is now LLM-generated
- 44:47Supervising the factory
- 46:41Building a better factory
About This Episode
Online, every impression is measured. Step outside and the whole industry goes blind. Steve Walsh is CTO of Smart Retail, an edge computer vision platform that brings web-style analytics to physical space — and he is careful to explain how it counts people without identifying them. The engineering is the interesting part: a 30-to-40-million-parameter model small enough to run on a standalone device with no connection, uploading only aggregates. Also: what four years of AI coding tools actually changed about how his team ships.