Mitsukoshi, Shiseido, and Fujitsu have teamed up to bring a virtual, real-time makeover machine into Japanese department stores in order to give women a chance to test out a smorgasbord of shades on their virtual face before throwing down their hard earned loot.

ENGADGET: Japanese department stores trialing virtual makeover machines

"I had to sell all my hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place to buy a time machine, " grumbled Atlantic City real estate tycoon and Fictional 15 newcomer Mr. Monopoly .

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Either way, factories have to take advantage of new capabilities enabled by the increasingly rapid convergence of mobility, real-time complex data processing and analytics, cloud based services and machine-to-machine intelligence.

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While IGT may have fallen behind in coming up with flashy new games, the company manages to keep its customers in line by dominating the back room with accounting software that keeps a real-time record of the money that's being won and lost on each slot machine.

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Technologies like Splunk were built to help IT staff search and summarize machine data, but with just a small amount of enhancement web server log data can track in real time the flow of customers through pages, the products that are going into shopping carts, and the rate of transactions.

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