Sunday, April 20, 2008

Cutting Costs, Being Creepy

Providing customer-specific information and advertising is a definite advantage to any company trying to sell a product. Sungevity, and solar company, is utilizing Microsoft's Virtual Earth and other (non-specified) software to determine the cost of adding solar panels to a specific home, what that home would look like with the new technology, how much the technology would save its owners over the course of 25 years, and the value the panels could potentially add to the home. Not only that, they're doing it in less than one day -a fraction of the time it would take to send out a technician to estimate the costs- and are coming up with more accurate results.

Like I said, customer-specific advertising is effective...until a certain point. Personally, this creeped me out:

The data provides enough information to provide a fairly strong estimate even without customer input, [Danny Kennedy, head of Sungeivty] said. To prove its point, Sungevity is going to mail fliers to all of the homes in Albany, Calif. Each flier will come with a picture of the home that goes with the address on the flier, a picture of the home with simulated solar panels, and the cost savings. (To fine-tune the estimate, customers need to submit their power bills.)
(Article, here)

How would you react if you got that in the mail?

No comments: