L.L. Bean is a savy big-data user
A century ago, in Freeport, Maine, a shrewd outdoorsman named Leon Leonwood Bean decided to dox the guts out of some out-of-state hunters in hopes of taking their money.
Dox, that is, in 1912 terms. In that steampunk framework, doxxing meant that Bean got his hands on a mailing list of men who held nonresident Maine hunting licenses.
.. Many in the audience — programmers from around the world — had never heard of the Bean boots. But they knew about the company’s ravenous appetite for data. Specifically, they packed the standing-room-only Bean session at the Strata + Hadoop World “Make Data Work” conference to hear about L.L. Bean’s 10+ TB on-premise enterprise data warehouse and its newer deployment of (still more extensive) cloud data, fully 100 TB, which can be collected and used in realtime by customer-service reps on the phone, online and in stores.
.. As Chris Wilson puts it, the meticulous use of Big Data, running at top speed, results in — of all things — customer “delight.” More relevant content, better shopping and better service.