10 High-Tech Tools Powering Las Vegas
Las Vegas is a modern high-tech hub. Casinos depend on technology to keep guests happy -- and honest. Here's a look at some of the tech behind the magic, and the lessons that can pay off big for enterprises.
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When you're surrounded by the bright lights and hypnotic sounds of Las Vegas, your mind may not first run to all the technology that makes the casinos and hotels hum with activity. But technology of the highest order is behind the scenes, or subtly on display, all around those who gamble, eat, drink, and see the shows that draw millions to "The Strip" each year.
If you're heading to Las Vegas during the first week of May for Interop, you probably understand that you'll be surrounded by technology. (Editor's note: Interop is produced by UBM, InformationWeek’s parent company.)
Face it, anyone who's watched Oceans 11-17 knows how much casinos now depend on the latest high-tech gizmos to keep the money flowing and the slot machines spinning. What you might not know is how much of that technology is applicable to the enterprise (and of absolutely no interest to Brad Pitt or George Clooney).
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The technologies I'll be talking about break down into three broad functional categories: Communicating safely, getting the customer to spend more money, and preventing the customer from cheating. Your business might not have to worry about all of these issues, but there's a good chance that the solution that casinos have found to their problem might well be a solution to a problem of yours.
It's worth noting that, with one possible exception, none of these technologies are particularly exotic. There's a lesson in this. While we tend to think that innovative solutions can only be found in the newest, shiniest answers to problems, in many cases the key is using existing technologies in new (OK, and shiny) ways.
It's also worth noting that these technologies will all be absolutely unseen by virtually every visitor to Las Vegas. A couple of these items might involve components that hide in plain sight, but none of them will be obvious to anyone not incredibly familiar with their form and operation.
Which technologies are you most interested in when you head to Las Vegas? Are the reasons that you keep coming back to the city technology-based, or do you head to the craps tables for some good old low-tech fun? Which technologies are you most looking forward to seeing when you head out to Interop? There are plenty of possibilities on display.
Here, then, are 10 technologies that the hotels and casinos of Las Vegas have come to depend on. I'll see you at the end of the article for a few more thoughts and a couple of additional questions.
When large companies send data long distances at high speeds, they tend to use Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks to do it. These networks can be of almost any speed, but they will all send data from one router to another based on the shortest, fastest hop available for each packet. And when it comes to moving money and information about money around the globe, casinos want as much speed, reliability, and control as possible.
As it turns out, Las Vegas is one of the best places in North America if you want high-speed wide-area networking. For a variety of reasons, some historical and some geographical, backbone cables from just about every top-tier networking company go through Las Vegas, so MPLS connections are not just available, they're available quickly and on a competitive basis. Since the big casino operators are now global corporations, that's a very big deal for a very critical technology.
Once you start moving data around inside a data center, you want your inevitable bottlenecks still to be as fast as possible. When it comes to connecting the devices within an equipment rack or linking adjacent racks, "as fast as possible" is 40 gigabits per second -- at least for today.
40 Gigabit Ethernet (40GbE) is the key to a successful converged infrastructure, but you don't have to go converged to want 40GbE. Not long ago, 40 Gigabit Ethernet was seen as a short-term bridge technology that would quickly be passed over for the inevitable 100 Gigabit Ethernet. Although 100 gig exists, it's still in the realm of the exotic -- seeing applications primarily in large ISP implementations. For the foreseeable future, 40 gig will be the top of the data center heap. As long as that's true, it will be the networking technology of choice for Las Vegas data centers.
Encryption is highly political right now. The IT professionals in Las Vegas tend to be concerned less with politics than with safely moving money and information around their organizations. That safe transportation is in the technological hands of strong encryption.
Strong encryption is defined as a well-designed encryption system with a key at least 128 bits long. The point behind the requirement is that it would take too long for someone to "brute force" the key by simply trying every permutation. Of course, as computers become more powerful (and GPU-based systems more common) the "brute force" threshold climbs ever higher. It's a race -- and the odds favor the casinos' continuing use of systems that are secure against anything this side of a full-court press from a government agency.
Here's a Las Vegas secret: Casinos want to sell you stuff. If you aren't going to give them money by gambling, they'd really like for you to buy things in the boutiques, eat at the restaurants, and pay money for the tickets to the shows that cover the parts of their property not already carpeted by gaming systems.
They can most effectively help you do those things if they know where you are and if they can tailor messages to your precise location. Walking near the buffet? BING! An invitation to the VIP line appears on your smart phone. An elite member of the casino's rewards program? A staff member magically appears at your elbow as you're walking toward the lobby -- a staff member who escorts you to your room, sees to your luggage, and gets you back out on the casino floor as quickly as possible.
The people in IT at the casinos are keenly aware that they straddle the line between gaming and hospitality industries. If they can use location beacons, GPS services, location-aware WiFi signals, smart phone apps, and RFID to make your stay more pleasant (and, for them, more profitable), they will do exactly that.
Casinos hate a cheater almost as much as they love a whale, and they can tell the difference because of the sort of facial recognition software most people imagine only comes into use when a shadowy government agency has to pick Jason Bourne out of a crowd. There's no question, though, that when you go into a modern casino there's a system that is looking at your face to see just how rapidly management needs to adapt to your presence.
Casinos employ the same sort of facial recognition technology that's used by national security agencies, and they feed those systems with images from hundreds of cameras in every area of the casino and hotel. More than that, though, the casinos share information on known (and suspected) cheaters and those who have been barred from a casino for one reason or another. The days of being able to cheat at a table in one casino then walk to the next after being caught are gone with the algorithm.
The casino "chip" is a vital part of the Las Vegas experience. Who doesn't love the sight of a huge pile of multi-colored disks in front of a winner, or of the desperation inherent in someone pushing their last handful of chips toward the dealer? The only problem for the modern casino is this: How do you know that a chip is really yours?
Casino chip counterfeiting is a real problem, one that costs real money in the gaming world. Casinos are fighting the problem by embedding RFID chips in the brightly-colored representations of money used at the table games all over the world. Of course, RFID is in play in other areas as well. Loyalty program cards, employee IDs, and inventory control stickers are only a few of the places where you'll find tiny RFID chips. It's a radio-frequency world inside the casinos, and RFID helps keep all the players straightened out.
Here's something you probably didn't know: When video cameras are in operation, the circuits that provide the timing to synchronize all those video frames emit a high-pitched sound that is beyond the range of human hearing. It's not above the range of the microphones used in casinos' audio analysis programs to detect video cameras, though -- and casinos are pretty happy about that.
The fact is that all kinds of circuits create vibrations that translate into sound, and many of those circuits can be used in cheating schemes. Casinos use audio analysis, first to detect the presence of the circuits, then to pinpoint their location. What happens next has very little to do with audio analysis.
So far, all the technology I've written about has been fairly standard stuff, only used in a specific way by the folks in casinos. Non-Obvious Relationship Analysis (NORA), though, starts getting us toward the realm of science fiction -- Minority Report, to be specific.
NORA uses scores of video feeds to provide facial recognition, movement detection, location tracking, and other systems with data that is then combined and analyzed in ways that let casino security personnel know if two (or more) individuals are interacting more frequently than chance would predict -- and in different ways than their obvious actions would indicate. The implication is that those individuals might be up to no good and warrant closer scrutiny. While that closer scrutiny involves human judgment, it's judgment informed and supported by the highest sort of technology.
To the surprise of absolutely no one, casinos have figured out that Twitter exists. And Facebook. I've already told you about much of their surveillance and tracking technology. Now, take all of that data, put it in a data lake, turn big data analysis techniques loose, and you get technology that can give casinos a very full and accurate picture of what you do when you come to Las Vegas and how much you like to tell people about it.
When the casinos know what you do, and how much you say you like it, they can then develop plans to give you more of it -- or to use what you like about some things to convince you to do more of others. Either way, you have more fun and, in doing so, spend more money. From the Las Vegas perspective, that's a win-win.
So those are 10 technologies they use in Las Vegas to keep you coming back, spending more, and cheating less. Which technologies do you think I missed? Have you seen some high-tech tools in evidence? Or are you someone who keeps a finger on the pulse of gaming technology? Let's talk about it here, and plan to get together to talk about it in Las Vegas. I'll be the one nursing a club soda in the bar with a very quiet band…
To the surprise of absolutely no one, casinos have figured out that Twitter exists. And Facebook. I've already told you about much of their surveillance and tracking technology. Now, take all of that data, put it in a data lake, turn big data analysis techniques loose, and you get technology that can give casinos a very full and accurate picture of what you do when you come to Las Vegas and how much you like to tell people about it.
When the casinos know what you do, and how much you say you like it, they can then develop plans to give you more of it -- or to use what you like about some things to convince you to do more of others. Either way, you have more fun and, in doing so, spend more money. From the Las Vegas perspective, that's a win-win.
So those are 10 technologies they use in Las Vegas to keep you coming back, spending more, and cheating less. Which technologies do you think I missed? Have you seen some high-tech tools in evidence? Or are you someone who keeps a finger on the pulse of gaming technology? Let's talk about it here, and plan to get together to talk about it in Las Vegas. I'll be the one nursing a club soda in the bar with a very quiet band…
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