NHTSA standardized the VIN to 17 characters, giving every car one fingerprint
A fixed 17-character VIN encodes manufacturer, model, year and plant the same way for every car, so decoding needs no per-brand manual.
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3,236 PUBLISHED CASES · REGULARLY UPDATEDTwitter and Cloudera's Parquet stored data by column and became big data's default
Parquet stores tables column-by-column instead of row-by-row, so analytics read only what they need and files compress far better.
Read the caseWeyerhaeuser's VISION simulator made sawyers test bucking cuts before cutting
Weyerhaeuser put a dynamic-programming log-bucking simulator in the woods, letting sawyers try cuts and see value, adding $100M+ in profit.
Read the caseA small brass distributor modernized with four OR methods at once
Merit Brass, a small plumbing distributor, combined forecasting, MRP, cells and inventory models to cut cost and raise service.
Read the caseV&A said if you are into it, it is in here to reach 18-35s
adam&eveDDB's hyper-targeted V&A campaign hid 70 objects in niche places and on avatar clothing, proving there's a 2.8m-object match for any interest.
Read the caseUNICEF sold free tap water a dollar to fund clean water
Droga5's Tap Project asked restaurant diners to pay $1 for the tap water they get free, turning an everyday act into 40 days of clean water.
Read the caseHappy Returns turns thousands of tiny returns into one consolidated shipment
Box-free Return Bars at 10,000+ stores let shoppers drop off returns; Happy Returns consolidates them so merchants ship far less.
Read the caseViterbi's algorithm made every mobile phone decode its own signal
In 1967 Viterbi found the most likely path through a trellis, the decoder hidden in almost every cellphone.
Read the caseThe Bloom filter traded a few wrong answers for a tiny memory footprint
In 1970 Bloom's bit array answered 'maybe in set' with no false negatives, using a fraction of the space.
Read the caseBritain's two-way power contract rewards low-carbon energy only when it is cheap
A Contract for Difference pays a generator the gap to an auction-set strike price, and claws it back when prices are high.
Read the caseIF Insurance's sat-nav swaps to a child's voice near schools
IF Insurance built a navigation app that switches to a child's voice near schools, using a protective instinct to slow drivers.
Read the caseAT&T reunited The Office cast to launch a company that kept failing
AT&T Business rebuilt small-business optimism by reuniting The Office cast to run a hilariously failing new company — and set a B2B record.
Read the caseAlibaba aligned forecasting, stock and pricing across every store channel
Alibaba ran demand forecasting, inventory and price optimization as one suite across its omnichannel retail, saving over $100 million a year.
Read the caseStella Artois turned the crush of a crowded bar into proof it's worth it
Stella Artois reframed the worst moment of going out — an overcrowded bar — into a reason to wait for a perfectly poured pint.
Read the caseShiseido canned a dying island miso to make it last past 2055
When Ogi Miso's makers were aging out, Shiseido canned the miso with 'BEST AFTER 2055' on the lid so the tradition survives its last maker.
Read the caseProgresso hijacked the cough drop aisle with a soup you can suck on
Progresso turned chicken noodle soup into a hard candy drop, stole the sick-day ritual from cough drops, and lifted category growth 5%.
Read the caseMicrosoft paired machine learning with optimization to cut e-commerce fraud
Microsoft's fraud system used ML and OR to accept good orders and block bad ones, saving $75 million a year.
Read the caseiFood turned its delivery data into a free mentor for its failing family restaurants
Over half of Brazil's family restaurants close within two years, so iFood mined its own order data to hand them a survival coach for free.
Read the caseConsul let poor families pay for a new fridge with the energy it saved
Brazil's low-income families couldn't afford efficient appliances, so Consul let them pay in installments equal to the savings on their electric bill.
Read the caseSalinas, in 1948, vacuum-cooled lettuce by boiling its own water in 30 minutes
Vacuum cooling pulled field heat out of lettuce in about 30 minutes by evaporating its own water, instead of packing it with ice.
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