IFTF's Future Now

Firing Your Customer

This has been in the news of late, with the buying season at hand ... The books/articles on classifying your customers via data mining make mention of the fact that you might want to 'fire' your lowest profit (or net loss generating) customers ... but this is the first case I have seen of a retail enterprise actually doing it. Almost all of the loyalty/club cards attempt to reward on the high end in some way, and just ignore the bottom third. I have to applaud Best Buy for trying this, they are the obvious ones to do it since there are certain consumer behaviors, especially with regard to returns, that are quite costly to them. Though you have to wonder a bit if on a purely psych basis, isnt rewarding good behavior still much better than punishing bad behavior? But maybe its not the same as training a puppy?

Previous Slashdot article brought to my attention (excerpt):

"Best Buy is one of the retailers that has now decided that the customer is not always right. Best Buy consultant Larry Selden has identified "demon customers" like those who file for a rebate then return the item. OK, I get that one .... Other categories like customers who only buy during sales are more interesting. Best Buy declined comment on how they are dealing with those customers. Some stores have actually "fired" customers. Welcome to the end result of all that customer information data mining."

referenced article

Wireless in the city

Salon has a lengthy, pretty interesting piece on "Urban renewal, the wireless way," which talks about the impact that mobile and wireless technologies are having on city urban design and the ways we experience urban space.

In November 2003, New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger penned a diatribe in Metropolis magazine against the isolation and dissolution of place wrought by the pervasive use of cellphones on city streets. "The mobile phone renders a public place less public," he wrote. "It turns the boulevardier into a sequestered individual, the flâneur into a figure of privacy. And suddenly the meaning of the street as a public place has been hugely diminished."

Goldberger's critique of mobile communications technology capped over a decade of analysis revolving around the ability of global communications networks -- for better and for worse -- to release people from the constraints of time and place. "The post-information age will remove the limitations of geography," wrote Nicholas Negroponte in "Being Digital." "Digital living will depend less and less on being in a specific place at a specific time." In "Pandemonium," Lars Lerup, dean of the architecture school at Rice University, proclaimed: "The bandwidth has replaced the boulevard."

Actually, it didn't. Virtual reality as a substitute for reality? That kind of thinking is, well, so very yesterday. With a new generation of wireless devices, GPS (global positioning system) locators and ubiquitous networking, future gazers claim, digital space will simply add another dimension to physical space, especially as technology continues to penetrate what sociologist Ray Oldenberg has famously described as "third places": the communal public spaces where people interact with friends or strangers.

Amateurs and professionals

The distinction between professionals and amateurs is one that's so familiar today as to seem perfectly natural. Professionals are serious, amateurs are dilettantes; professionals know what they're doing, and have credentials and training, amateurs don't; professionals get paid, amateurs are hobbyists. Of course, in a few fields there are exceptions to the rule: astronomy, for example, continues to have a place for amateur comet-watchers.

In the past few years, we've seen a number of claims that new technologies or technology-enabled phenomena are leveling the playing field between professionals and amateurs. The interpretation of blogging, and in particular of political blogging, as a bottom-up response to professional journalism is but the latest incarnation of this trend-- though it's interesting to note that this is an occasion in which the term "professional" is used as an epithet: it's right up there with "elitist." (I've also written about blogging and the Victorian concept of the amateur here.)

According to a newly-released report by UK research group Demos, there are a number of fields in which you can see the balance between amateurs and professionals shifting:

The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society

From astronomy to activism, from surfing to saving lives, Pro-Ams - people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards - are an increasingly important part of our society and economy.

For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory, it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations.

The 20th century witnessed the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organisations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it.

The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought.

Based on in-depth interviews with a diverse range of Pro-Ams and containing new data about the extent of Pro-Am activity in the UK, this report proposes new policies to support and encourage valuable Pro-Am activity.

Perhaps it's no surprise that a British think-tank would see this trend: after all, the sophisticated amateur-- or "gentlemanly specialist" as historian of science Martin Rudwick described them-- was a staple of science, letters, and other enterprises into the last century.

RFID in toys

Greetings from Copenhagen. I'm here for the next couple days, giving a talk at the Next 2004 conference on Wednesday.

Popgadget has a piece on RFID in toys:

There’s probably no better way to indoctrinate your kids into the ways of RFID than with the MagiCook Kitchen from Little Tikes, a toy kitchen where all the fake food comes embedded with RIFD tags. Swipe a plastic waffle over the built-in sensor in the fake stovetop and you’ll hear a variety food and cooking-related phrases.

A number of toy companies are looking at RFID uses in toys, but I think this may be the first to actually get to market.

Clothing Signage

SolutionSpaces reports on clothing integrated-displays, with pictures. I have commented on clothing integrated displays a number of times. (See for example, France Telecom's effort) This appears to be the first public commercial example. On first look this appears to be wacky, but then it was not too long ago that people would have thought the same of simple advertising on t-shirts.

The ACM on the Blogosphere

The December issue of the Communications of the ACM is devoted to the Blogosphere. The Association for Computing Machinery, with its quaint name recalling wheels, belts and sprockets performing steam-engine computation, is sometimes seen as providing an imprimatur on a computer science subject, especially when its a bit off the beaten path. I have been a member since the late 70s, and have always found it useful. Articles:

Structure and Evolution of Blogspace
Why we Blog
Semantic Blogging and Decentralized Knowledge Management
How Blogging Software Reshapes the Online Community
Democracy and Filtering.

Here is the link to the issue, but I believe a subscription is required. The Communications publication is mostly non-technical, the articles do a good job of overview for a professional. Of particular interest, and more technical, is the article on Semantic Blogging, based on work at HP Labs. I will post commentary on that concept later.

Webcasting a new Blogosphere?

From the Anglosphere Challenge .. by James C. Bennett, via Glenn Reynolds.

.... The cost of a facility for Webcasting is far less than the cost of a facility for television broadcasting. At some point in the relatively near future the quality of the webcast will be as good as, if not better than, that of broadcast television, and the cost of a webcasting facility for high-quality production will be within the range of many individuals. Just as the personal computer capable of producing first-rate software is revolutionizing the work relations of software, the personal webcasting facility will change the nature of the broadcasting media. It also changes the dynamics of production...

Digital Signage in Retail

To the left, dual high quality displays at the Metro Extra Future Store in Rheinberg, Germany. The displays can be programmed and updated remotely to serve traffic and demographic needs.

Below, related BusinessWeek Online article on digital signage in retail.

How In-Store TVs Play to Shoppers
Slim screens in shops give retailers innovative and dynamic ways to keep consumers informed, entertained, and more likely to buy

Flat-panel TVs are cool. Retailers know that, too -- and they're using them to woo you. As you hit the mall this holiday season, expect to see these sleek screens -- from large wall-mounted units to tiny four-inch displays embedded inside cases -- staring at you from more places than ever. Increasingly, retailers are not only using them to play commercials but also loading them with eye-catching video to draw you inside their store and enhance the experience while you're there ...

Bayesian Nets

A very good tutorial on Bayesian Nets, with lots of supporting information. Via the package Netica from Norsys. This methodology is becoming more common for delivering expertise. Because its statistically based it can model aspects of uncertainty in a system. The site has downloadable software for testing. This can be seen as a replacement for the 'rule bases' that we used for delivering expertise back in the 90s in expert systems. Here is another useful online tutorial.

The color-coded bookstore

On Friday I visited Adobe Books here in San Francisco, a used book store currently the site of an installation called There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World run by artist Chris Cobb. I had seen pictures beforehand, knew the simple concept behind it, and yet I still tingled when I entered. The entire bookstore is arranged by color, wall to wall. If it hadn't been for the other people in the store with curious expressions on their faces, it would have felt like a chapter from Einstein's Dreams, or even an episode of Sliders, or any scenario where the sky is green and up is really down. My interest in seeing this project was spurred by recent thinking about the potential and forthcoming role of RFID in organization, in this case libraries (see Alex's posts on the same subject). In the tricked-out library of the future, every book may have an RFID tag and every shelf at least one antenna. The central system will know the real-time location of every book within, independent of any other classification system. When any book can be precisely located, why arrange books -- and, subsequently, the library -- around Dewey or LOC? Why not arrange by year, or size, or, even, color? Or what if library patrons simply left a book where they last used it? After all, the RFID system will still be able to instantly find the book's location. It seems obvious that arranging by theme would still be the most useful choice for everyone involved in a library (if you want one book on Brazilian spiders, you'll probably want to easily find the others), but I'm reserving judgment for now, at least until I process by Adobe Books experience more. Increased serendipity looks to be the first benefit of a color-based shelving scheme. Art Under Stalin was next to a romance novel in the pink section, though the spine color of the Stalin book appears to have faded over the years from an original, deeper red (try as I might, I couldn't find any strong correlations between spine color and book topic on any shelf). I love that sunlight can determine both the location of a book and the selection of those that surround it. Perhaps in another life, if this color-centric schema continued, Stalin art will eventually make it to the white section, though I must admit I didn't spend much time looking at those books since the pink and lime and teal spines were just so much more attractive.