SCENARIO:
Buy the cheapest eggs within in 10 miles without going below 30mph or using more than 1 gallon of gas.
SOLUTION:
Grocio and MySupermarket (UK) allow you to browse/shop (and use coupons) from major retailers and compare prices on exactly the same products. Then, the soon to be released (updated- live on your phone now) Google side street traffic maps will allow you to take the most efficient route possible (Google crowdsources information from phones to determine speed of traffic on smaller streets.)
WORKPLACE Implications:
Not every meeting or workplace collaboration is as 'commoditized' as eggs, but there is a ton of information living on corporate servers and conference room (and personal) calendars that could be analyzed to increase and improve our collaborations. This could even be correlated with the on-time and overall success of projects.
Have you ever tracked group work? Surveys show the success or failure of a moment or session, but have you taken it further and fully analyzed data? We would love to hear from you.
Some other outside the office analysis we can learn from:
+ Open Calais is attempting to "make all the world's content more accessible, inter operable and valuable." They are simply connecting content.
+ Wolfram Alpha is trying to compute knowledge.
+ Some companies give Myers-Briggs Tests
+ Some companies give drug tests, but there is little evidence that this changes anything according to the National Bureau of Economic Effectiveness
+ A recent Harvard/Nature Genetics article shows "the potential power of computational biology to connect disparate sets of data."
+ Google's chief designer quit because of to much analysis and data centered research into designs.