Khalid Balkhi

Digital Technologist

Emaar Malls Group

Emaar Malls Group is a Public Join-Stock Company (PJSC) floated on the Dubai Financial Market, the owner and operator of shopping malls in Dubai, with a portfolio of four shopping malls and 30 community shopping outlets. Its majority owner is the luxury properties developer, Emaar.

The flagship mall is The Dubai Mall, the largest mall in the world by total area, re-emphasized by the Fashion Avenue Expansion in early 2018, with more expansions in the pipeline. This is followed by Dubai Marina Mall, Gold & Diamond Park, and Souk Al Bahar.

I served Emaar Malls Group as the Head of Digital & Marketing Technologies from 2016 to 2018.

Wayfinding at The Dubai Mall

The indoor wayfinding solution engages the iOS & Android app audiences of the mall’s official app, adding value to the mall visitors with easy navigation through the world’s largest mall. Delivered in short agile sprints, the solution reached MVP in early April, and continually updated to include Points of Interests, amenities, and increased precision to be within 20cm of the current indoor location.

To cover an indoor space of 4.4 million square feet, 3,000 long-life Bluetooth beacons are fingerprinted and Google coordinates compliments the system from outdoor to indoor navigation. Navigation begins from any point in the world to the most optimal entrance, through the car parks, to the set destination with the use of the Bluetooth technology, assisted by indoor Wi-Fi network.

With over 30% journey completion rate captured, this product allows us to infer customer preferences and interests through the journey and destination.

Digital Signage

To ease customer journey in the largest mall in the world, the project is to assess, recommend & address physical signage within The Dubai Mall’s infrastructure. Assessment & recommendations for …

The Dubai Mall Website Rebrand & Relaunch

Rebranded look and feel of The Dubai Mall website, the largest digital portfolio in the group.

Added functionality to include Tenant portal and integrated workflow on a central platform.

The Dubai Mall Arabic Website

The building of scalable Arabic version of thedubaimall.com. This project enables content to be submitted in English, fed through a workflow of Machine Learning translating algorithms, manual translator reviews, and quality review before being received back as Arabic content, and served in Arabic for the Middle East Gulf audience. This workflow allows us to serve multi-lingual content with a single language entry, and scalable to other languages by leveraging Machine Learning & localisation.

Emaar Unified Wi-Fi

The Unified Wi-Fi project connects all consumer verticals under the Emaar umbrella – Properties, Malls, Hospitality, Retail & Entertainment – beginning with The Dubai Mall. The initial MVP was a …