Word: hp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...understand the hype, take a look at Hewlett-Packard's experience with forecasting monthly sales. A few years back, HP commissioned Charles Plott, an economist from the California Institute of Technology, to set up a software trading platform. A few dozen employees, mostly product and finance managers, were each given about $50 in a trading account to bet on what they thought computer sales would be at the end of the month. If a salesman thought the company would sell between, say, $201 million and $210 million worth, he could buy a security--like a futures contract--for that prediction...
When trading stopped, the scenario behind the highest-priced stock was the one the market deemed most likely. The traders got to keep their profits and won an additional dollar for every share of "stock" they owned that turned out to be the right sales range. Result: while HP's official forecast, which was generated by a marketing manager, was off 13%, the stock market was off only 6%. In further trials, the market beat official forecasts 75% of the time...
Intrigued by that success, HP's business-services division ran a pilot last year with 14 managers worldwide, trying to determine the group's monthly sales and profit. The market was so successful (in one case, improving the prediction 50%) that it has since been integrated into the division's regular forecasts. Another division is running a pilot to see if a market would be better at predicting the costs of certain components with volatile prices. And two other HP divisions hope to be using markets to answer similar questions by the end of the year. "You could do zillions...
...product can be made most cheaply, how new laws might affect profit margins. There is such an undisputed advantage to knowing the future that corporations employ analysts and strategists, create committees and reports, conduct polls and pilots--all to figure out what will, and should, happen next. As HP's Huberman puts it, "A company that can predict the future is a company that is going to win." And if internal markets can refine those predictions, even incrementally? Well, then, the market signals a strong...
...millions of pixels tightly packed together. When struck by light, each pixel generates an electric current that is converted into the digital data that make up your picture. But not all pixels are created equal, and some cameras use larger ones than others. For example, the pixels on the HP Photosmart R707 measure just 2.8 microns wide, whereas those on the Nikon D70 are 7.8 microns wide. (A micron is tiny--1/24,500 of an inch.) The advantage of a larger pixel is that it is able to pick up more information about the image it is sensing...