Entries from September 2008 ↓

This post by Jon Udell made me try Powerset. I already use Wikipedia search for a lot of my queries, so I’m adding Powerset now to my list in Firefox search box…

wealth of insightful thoughts about our modern problems of managing information. He says that the issue is not information overload, it’s the failure of filtering systems.

(via)

Also touches the subject of “privacy by friction and intransparency” (my words) and seems to advocate we engineer some of these inefficiencies into social software systems.

Since he started blogging in April 2005, Nicholass Carr has made the transition from a dull Financial Times analyst of corporate IT to a tech pop star. And he seems to enjoy it

Demo by Alper [link corrected] of the implementation of Open-CI at the Mediamatic and Picnic network sites. This is the result of work done by people at Mediamatic since they presented their ideas at an event last year in December and at Barcamp Amsterdam III. Technical docs are still to come, but there’s already a whitepaper available.

Note: I’m not sure what Open-CI actually stands for (if at all)?

Funny to see a compatriot present a relatively frivolous application, at least more frivolous than than the e-invoicing context I knew Anthony from

Nevertheless, the combination of RFID + low price + open platform really sounds promising…

I listened to this IT Conversations podcast a while ago… this video by the author is a short intro into and promo for the book.

Interesting quote (source):

Why would would an airline give a seat to a less profitable customer?

Turns out that the answer to both questions concern the rise of data base decisionmaking that is at the heart of my new book I just published called Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to be Smart.

Casino’s like Harrah’s are predicting “pain points” for individual customers — how much they can lose at a setting and still come back for more. The pain point is an individualized prediction based on dozens of pieces of information about your demographics and gambling history. If you get close to your pain point, Harrah’s might send out a “Luck Ambassador” to tap you on your shoulder and give a free steak dinner to make sure you don’t lose too much money.

Airlines are doing the same thing. In the old days, if a flight was cancelled, an airline might book customers for the next flight on a first come, first serve basis. Later airlines started give priority to frequent fliers. Later yet, they started giving priority to the most profitable customer.

But now some airlines have started to predict their customers pain points. If you and I are bumpbed from a flight and there’s only one seat left on the next flight, an airline might give that seat to the less profitable customer. Why? Because the airline might have estimated that the less profitable cusomter is closer to his or her pain point (say, she had three bad flights in the last year) and might stop using the airline. While you might be more profitable, the airline uses a massive dataset to estimate that you’ll stick with them even if they bump you to a later flight. Welcome to the wonderful new world of data-driven decisionmaking.

The same story in comic book format here.