There are a few more games left in the World Cup. What welcoming opportunities are so obvious that your casino can take advantage of? I can think of dozens and you don’t need to be a casino in South Africa!

By the way, Mykonos Casino did not have that flag missing. Maybe that’s why they’re such a popular destination. They send simple welcoming messages!

There are 10 days to go to the World Cup final. The first 5 people to reply to this blog post with the name of the country who’s flag was missing at the hotel will receive a World Cup shirt of the winning country (clue: they were knocked out by Ghana). Ayoba!

Having worked in the mining industry, I know that they are great when it comes to documenting safety and compliance standards but they fall short in being able to measure them.

In their continuing effort to provide a superior product, Apple recently released a new version of their operating system called “Snow Leopard”. Beyond Software is on the verge of releasing a new version of our dataveillance solution called “CheetEye“, a solution designed to “protect with insight”. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Mining disasters will continue to happen without oversight and insight. Both take time and money which effect the bottom line or does it really?

Cheeteye – Protecting with Insight

Gambling wasn’t on the cards afterward as I had two minors with me but I was keen to take them out for a meal.

The Grand Problem:
After leaving the arena, you join the casino cattle parade in an attempt to get casino floor walk through.  I don’t have a problem with this but they really need to learn from the internet  – “allow consumers to cut through the clutter and get to what they want in the easiest and quickest way”. That’s what made Google great and that’s one of the things making great casinos.

The solution was simple: Free those who just want to go home! Enough money has been made off them and nothing can be done to force them to gamble or stay longer. This would have allowed the rest who wanted to go for a meal or gamble, get to their destination a lot sooner.

I’m sure the very experienced surveillance department has witnessed this problem many times. Empower them to form part of the casino marketing team and give them mature dataveillance tools. The surveillance revolution has begun!

Secondly, our mind tries to explain to us what is happening when something different takes place. It’s a good thing in the context of surveillance that the mind is not content with randomness and needs an explanation. However, our minds can very easily lie to us. Not everyone’s explanation as to what they’re observing is correct, hence the importance of dataveillance software.

Dataveillace software that is setup correctly does a much better job than our minds can do when it comes to dealing with copious amounts of data and information.

Recent research on brain function has focused on four ways we’re able to deal with the significant amount of information we process each day. Firstly, we look for a difference. When we encounter something for the first time, we compare it to the status quo. If it’s not new, we ignore it. Frogs apply “the rule of difference” very effectively by only watching for changes in the environment. In fact it is so focused on this task at hand that it could be surrounded by dead bugs and still starve to death. The frog can only do one thing well and that’s watch for moving bugs. By ignoring the static environment and only focusing on what’s new, it can be far more efficient than humans when it comes to catching flies.

Humans use the same strategy far more often than we realize to keep up with the huge influx of data we wrestle with every day. Darwin’s strategy is not new to the human mind. He effectively made us aware of what the mind desperately wants to do when faced with the deluge of information flow. However, being like a frog is just the starting point as we will see in the next post on “what the mind wants to do when it notices change“.

I sat down with one of my clients today who is so grateful that they invested in dataveillance more than two years ago. We spent the day discussing how to mine the data in different ways. They’ve matured just like the mature wine I gave him! A fitting gift for a risk taker.

One speaker at the conference said that some casinos are starting to employ data analysts and have been able to justify the costs of such a person in a short space of time. However, you don’t need a data analyst when using a dataveillance system like ICOS because we have reporting tools that can do the analyzing for you. A surveillance manager is more than able to interpret the reports. A data analyst only becomes necessary when you don’t have a system to manage your data. Unfortunately many casinos have not invested in dataveillance systems and therefore don’t have any electronic data to analyze. Many casinos are starting to realize that dataveillance is no longer a “nice-to-have” but a vital partner to video surveillance. The tools we’re providing to detect things like collusion etc all require electronic data and that takes time to collect.

Below is an excerpt from an article I wrote at the beginning of the year which includes a quote from Jack Welch:
“Most of the information a manager will need to run a business will reside on a computer screen in a “digital cockpit”. It will contain every piece of real-time data, with automatic alerts spotlighting the trends requiring immediate attention. While information will be available as never before, it will always be human judgment that will make the organization go.” – Jack Welch (former CEO of GE). Until recently, most of the decisions we were called on to make were based on hunches, insight and a little bit of data. Today, the data is just a click away. Casinos that have digital data and the tools to mine it will have a huge advantage in 2010 and beyond.

We love providing dataveillance services. In fact, we enjoy it so much that we provided free dataveillance services to a casino for more than a year. If you still need to be convinced, contact us for a free trial. We look forward to drinking a glass of mature wine with you some day …

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