I've written before about how casinos employ data and cutting-edge technology to make better business decisions. The gambling industry has always fascinated me, and that certainly hasn't abated since moving to Las Vegas. I've known for a while now that casinos are almost always early adopters. That is, they are by and large at the forefront of new tools to help them make more money and reduce what they consider to be fraud.
Popular Mechanics recently examined this topic in greater detail in How Las Vegas Anti-Cheating Security Tech Works. The article introduced me to something called non-obvious relationship awareness (NORA), software that:
allows casinos to determine quickly if a potentially colluding player and dealer have ever shared a phone number or a room at the casino hotel, or lived at the same address. “We created the software for the gaming industry,” says Jeff Jonas, founder of Systems Research & Development, which originally designed NORA. The technology proved so effective that Homeland Security adapted it to sniff out connections between suspected terrorists. “Now it’s used as business intelligence for banks, insurance companies and retailers,” Jonas says.
Here are a few pictures of NORA in action:
Sign up to continue reading this content.
