What do they see as benefits of Media Lab sponsorship?
J.C. Penney’s image might be Old Economy, but if you look behind the scenes, it is quite a high-tech company. It uses every available means to foster communication between company headquarters in Plano, Tex., and its buyers and its stores. Some of it is maybe more showmanship than efficiency — they have robots that deliver the mail inside of J.C. Penney — but they take internal communications very seriously, more so than many high-tech companies. Q: What types of research do they use? A: A fun example is a collaboration we did with them around interactive television trials. It’s 100% product-placement television. We went down to J.C. Penney and shot a soap opera in their TV studios. Every single thing in the soap opera was from the J.C. Penney catalog. We had developed the technology to do image segmentation, so that while you’re sitting watching television, you could use your laser pointer or a mouse to click on anything you saw on screen, and it would automatically jump off to the
