Finished the book Super Crunchers. Here is the short review: Awesome!

For a longer review, read on.

Super Crunchers is a fantastic survey of what companies are doing with real-time, on-the-fly, data mining. Some of it is just downright frightening and other aspects are fascinating. I was particularly intrigued by how Capital One is using consumer profile information, during a call, to determine the exact products and services you might be interested in. This is done by matching you against a persona that describes several attributes of your social status (i.e. black female, zip code 97303, annual income $150,000, pays bills within 28 days). This data helps Cap-One figure out what services are subscribed to by those matching your persona, that you happen to be lacking. The idea being that they will only mention services that people in your social standing find useful. This is good since it keeps seemingly useful services in front of the clients and does not attempt to sell services that may not meet the needs of other social groups.

On the disturbing side, a large casino chain uses the same type of data to determine when you are just about to stop gambling. At this moment, they send a "luck ambassador" to your table or slot machine to offer you a free dinner or night at the hotel. You are instantly filled with the feeling that you one and continue to gamble. This may just be the dark side of Super Crunching, but the innovation is eye-opening.

It's nice to see that companies are figuring out ways to tap into data, in real time, to better serve their markets.