The news out of Philly reminded me of the movie Minority Report, in which the government's Pre-Crime Department could predict a crime before it was committed. In the movie, police are sent out to arrest the future perpetrator prior to the commission of the crime.

Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, is reviewing the work done by University of Pennsylvania criminologist Richard Beck, a statistician who believes he can use data on parolees from the probation department to determine who is most likely to attempt murder.

Whatever the outcome in Philadelphia, this got me to thinking about the use of predictive analytics in more benign areas such as business and IT.

CopperKey, a company that offers hosted software for predictive marketing campaigns, represents a new trend in predictive analytics. CopperKey CEO David Castillo calls it "leapfrogging," in which the analysts with the Ph.D.s are bypassed and the tools are put in the hands of end-users.

CopperKey's solution takes a black-box approach to predictive analytics. A company uploads its customer list, saying, in essence, "Here are the people responsible for putting bread on my table, find me more like these." Within minutes, a list of potential customers similar to existing customers is spit out.