The airbnb website puts together travellers with people who have space to rent. The spaces, according to airbnb, can be anything from “futons on the floor to castles on the hilltop.” Airbnb noticed over time that some space listings attracted more clicks than others for very similar spaces. airbnb wanted to make all their listings…
A venture capital company identifies entrepreneurs and offers them funding even before the entrepreneurs know they are entrepreneurs! Imagine you are sitting on your front porch when a dump truck rolls up. It backs into your driveway and dumps a mountain of $100 bills onto it. Then the driver walks up to you and says,…
Some years back, Domino’s decided to get feedback from their customers, then mine that data to improve revenues. They put a survey on their website asking customers to rate their purchase. They also collected social media postings about them. The result: people were significantly disgruntled with their pizza, especially the crust and the sauce. They…
Everyone loves pop-tarts, especially the strawberry kind. And Walmart decided to take this to the next level with a little help from Big Data. As you may have heard, Walmart tirelessly collects data on each of its customers, then crunches it to arrive at individual and group preferences. This process recently unearthed the fact…
As music festivals go, this one is a juggernaut. Crowds roll onto the entry gates in towering waves, presenting ticket booths with a challenging task. At the most recent instance, ticketing began to take too long. People in the queues became first restless, then frustrated, then angry. Fortunately, big data analytics prevented a disaster. Here’s…
