The digital high street, without the screen
Everyone's talking about the digital high street. Most of what's on offer is a grant to help one shop build a better website. This is different: a chip on a lamppost, and every business on the street live behind it — proven by counting real taps, not estimated.
This isn't a proposal for something we might build
Taptugo is live in Walton-on-the-Naze and Frinton-on-Sea, with around 150 businesses indexed across both towns. Opening hours, categories, contact details, directions, public toilets, local events and verified ratings — all working today, in public, on a real high street.
What follows describes a working system, not a concept. Everything marked as available is available now.
A grant helps one shop. This connects the whole street.
Most digital high street funding does real good, one business at a time — help with e-commerce, a better website, an adviser showing a shop owner how to use social media. Useful, and worth having.
But it leaves every business exactly as disconnected as it started. Forty independent websites is not a digital high street. It's forty businesses that each spent a grant, with no way for a visitor to find any of them from where they're actually standing — outside, on the pavement, phone in hand.
Taptugo starts from the street, not the shop. One chip, and the whole trading area is behind it — connected, counted, and measurable as a single thing, not forty separate ones.
Why build a screen, when every visitor already carries one?
Councils have been sold digital high street kiosks for twenty years, and the failures were never really about the software.
Direct sunlight makes a touchscreen unreadable exactly when the high street is busiest. Rain finds a way into the seams eventually. A large glass screen bolted to a public street is an invitation. And every kiosk needs mains power and a data line run to a street fixture — groundworks, an electrician, and a standing bill, before a single visitor has touched it.
Thousands of pounds to buy. More to install. More again every year to keep alive. And when it finally goes dark, it doesn't simply stop working. It sits there, in public, broadcasting the opposite of what it was bought to say.
| The old way | Taptugo | |
|---|---|---|
| The screen | The council buys one. Thousands of pounds, bolted to a street. | The visitor already owns one — better than anything a council could buy. |
| Power | Mains cable. Groundworks. An electrician. | None. The chip has no battery at all. |
| Weather | Glare in the sun, rain in the seams. | A sealed chip. Nothing for the weather to get into. |
| Vandalism | A large glass screen on a public street. | Nothing to smash, nothing worth stealing. |
| When it fails | A dead screen in public, until someone notices. | Nothing to fail. The screen was never yours to maintain. |
| Language | One menu, usually English. | Every visitor's own phone, already in their own language. |
| Reach | Works in exactly one spot. Useless once you walk away. | Goes home in their pocket. Comes back next time. |
One chip. The whole street.
A trading area is a chip-linked directory for a defined stretch of high street or seafront — agreed with the council, not guessed from a map.
We deliberately don't draw boundaries by postcode, address range or a circle on a map. Postcodes cut arcades and side roads in half. A radius takes no account of where people actually walk. The membership of a trading area is agreed with you, business by business, because you know the street and an algorithm doesn't.
One chip on a lamppost, a bench or a welcome sign opens straight into a live directory of that stretch.
Not just the shops
Every business on the street, grouped by what they are, with opening hours that are accurate today — including bank holidays and seasonal exceptions, so nobody is sent to a shuttered shop on Boxing Day.
Public toilets, with their own opening hours, shown the same way. A visitor can see what's actually open right now rather than walking to a locked door. It's the single most asked question on any seafront, and most towns have no good way to answer it.
What's on — late-night Christmas shopping, markets, seasonal evenings — surfaced on the same page, where visitors are already looking, rather than on a poster they walked past.
Directions to any of it, from wherever they're standing.
All of it on their own phone, in their own language, with nothing to install.
Every tap is a count, not a survey
This is usually the part that matters most to a council, because it's the part that's hardest to get.
Every tap on a trading area chip is logged — the chip, the location, the date and time. Not an estimate, not a footfall survey run for a fortnight in June and extrapolated across a year. An actual count, at that exact spot, continuously.
We report it weekly by email to whoever you nominate — the council, the BID, or both. Taps are counted, not people. We record a one-way hash of the visitor's IP address purely to avoid counting the same person twice within a few minutes; we do not store IP addresses, and there is no way to identify an individual visitor from anything we hold.
Ratings that can only come from real visitors
Every business in a trading area can carry a Taptugo plate, and a rating on Taptugo can only be left by someone who physically held their phone against that plate. The chip is an NTAG424 DNA — the same class of secure chip used in contactless payment cards — and it produces a fresh cryptographic signature on every tap that we verify before a rating is accepted.
It cannot be cloned, copied or faked remotely. For a town measuring the success of a high street investment, that's the difference between evidence and anecdote.
What "the whole street" will mean next
The trading area model was built to carry more than a directory listing. The next piece is a website for every business on the street, not just the ones who could afford one or knew how to build one.
We're building a free website for every listed business — automatically generated from the details already on their Taptugo page, no design skills or budget required on their part. In a trading area, that means a genuinely connected high street: not forty businesses that each separately paid for a website, but one street where every single business has one, reachable from the same chip.
This is what "digital high street" should mean. Not a grant that helps one shop catch up. Every business online, connected, and counted as one thing.
Built to cost almost nothing to run
There's no screen to buy, no power to run, no data line to install. The ongoing cost of a trading area is close to zero, which changes what it's eligible for and how it gets approved.
A few routes towns are taking:
Grant-funded. Several current high street digital funding schemes are built for exactly this shape — a one-off pilot cost with little or no ongoing revenue commitment. Worth checking what your authority currently has open.
Sponsored. A trading area can carry a sponsor — a local business, venue or employer with a genuine interest in footfall, named clearly as supporting the town's directory. This can fund some or all of a town's costs without them touching the council budget.
Council or BID funded directly. Some towns simply pay for it themselves, as they would any other piece of street furniture.
Every town's arrangement is different, and we'd rather talk it through than guess in writing what fits yours.
Start with one lamppost
Everything described here as available is live in two Essex towns today. The next step isn't a procurement process. It's a conversation, and a single chip on a single piece of street furniture.
Bring us a lamppost. We'll bring the chip, and show you in thirty seconds what this page took several minutes to explain.