Volume 37, Number 1, February 2010

Over the past decade, the Internet has created new channels and enormous opportunities for companies to reach customers, advertise products and transact business. In this well-established business model, companies fully control their own Web-based reputation via the content appearing on their Web sites. The advent of Web 2.0, with its emphasis on information sharing and user collaboration, is fundamentally altering this landscape.

• Prem Melville
• Claudia Perlich
• Vikas Sindhwani
• Steve Meliksetian
• Pei-Yun Hsueh
• Yan Liu

THE ANALYTICS X COMPETITION IS AN ONGOING, PUBLIC COMPETITION TO APPLY ANALYTICS, MODELING AND STATISTICS to solve social problems affecting our cities. It combines the fields of operations research and social science to further understanding of root causes of dysfunction in our neighborhoods. Challenges for the Analytics X Competition vary based on a city’s needs and may include topics such as identifying the best area to establish a commercial district, determining what combination of housing, commercial and recreational areas makes for stable and healthy neighborhoods, or identifying what type of new business establishment (restaurant, clothing, bookstore, etc.) has the best opportunity to thrive, thus improving the health of the community. All of these challenges are aimed at enabling social change and improving the lives of local city dwellers.

• John Toczek
• Manoj Pai

Sometimes, too much of a good thing is just too much. The first slice of pizza is excellent, the second slice is still delicious, but about the time that you finish the third slice, you are beginning to feel it. And, when you finish that fourth slice, you know that you have had too much of a good thing. In other words the “pleasure” of enjoying a pizza is not proportional to its quantity.

• Jerry Banks

SINCE OUR 2008 ROUTING SOFTWARE SURVEY, the world has suffered through a financial collapse unlike any since the 1920s. Sinking home values, overseas wars, terrorism, threats of global warming and turmoil in health care have capped a decade that many would prefer to forget. As we look forward, the global financial disaster has taught us one thing: simply moving money from account to account does not produce prosperity. Instead, our well-being depends on building economic activities that deliver goods and services to real people, when and where they need them.

• Janice Partyka
• Randolph Hall

I CAME ACROSS AUTOBOX a couple of years ago when I was looking for software featuring automatic time series analysis and forecasting. I was interested in software that can handle the challenges frequently found in time series data such as shift and trend changes, nonconstant variance, bad data and outliers, among others. Having used a variety of software for data mining and forecasting, at first sight, I was not very impressed by Autobox’s interactive interface. However, I was intrigued by some of the automatic features of Autobox, so I gave it a try. I am glad I did.