Quality is often measured in terms of accuracy (or Accurateness, according to this definition ) . For a shopping site, the closer you can predict what a customer likes, the more you can sell and the more inclined your customer will be to buy more and to stay loyal to you as a supplier. As any gambler knows, prediction is not a science but historical results can provide a best guess. Can you put a price on this? Who knows. One company has offered a prize to make it better though, one million dollars.

The technology stack on top of each tower looks impressive . The project is anything but impressive , with many of the issues typical in the IT industry: badly underestimated effort, not involving users, and not enough testing, While there was evidently a push for reuse of existing systems and components, it caused many difficulties: trying to base the system around a law enforcement dispatch system (!) that couldn't scale, trying to use off-the-shelf components that weren't designed to integrate, and a lack of standards for the sensors. The builder of the system, Boeing, has only taken 3/4s of the $20 million fee, granted a $2 million credit, and apparently paid $40 million to get this far on a project that will now finish in 2011, not the end of this year (which was already a year and a half past the original schedule). That will only be phase one!