Word: amazoned
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Still, Relic Hunter is a masterpiece compared with Peter Benchley's Amazon, an adventure show starring former model Carol Alt and created by Benchley, who wrote Jaws. Not only is the series slow moving and badly produced, it doesn't show much skin. Instead of having fun with a story about a land of beautiful giant women, Amazon has six passengers of a crashed plane wandering aimlessly in the South American jungle. One would think the women's clothes would be shredded and useless after the first week, but somehow they always appear dry-cleaned...
...just over a year ago, Amazon shelled out $180 million for a price-comparison site called junglee.com They tinkered around with its virtual database technology until relaunching it last week as the more prosaically named All Product Search. Wall Street was buying, sending Amazon's stock...
...trouble with bots that get sold to big corporations, not surprisingly, is that they tend to get a little compromised. In junglee's case, the ability to compare prices at other book sites seems to have disappeared. Type in Tom Clancy in Amazon's All Product Search, and there's no danger of your buying Rainbow Six from Barnes and Noble or Borders...
...Bezos get away with that? Because he believes most nonproprietary shopping agents aren't yet ready for prime time. But there's a whole host of cool new bot technologies out there that may force Amazon to think again. Take mySimon.com the most successful of the independent bot sites. It's about to start a service that will e-mail you whenever any online merchant lowers its price for a particular item to an amount you're willing to pay. Feeling frugal about that $150 pair of binoculars? No problem; sit back and wait until the market takes it down...
What Maes predicts, you had better believe. After all, she was the pioneer of the earliest shopping-bot technology known as collaborative filtering, which became popularized as Amazon's ubiquitous "people who liked this product also bought X" link. Now she's helping to bring us an e-commerce world based on the Priceline.com model--in other words, every seller will act like an airline with constantly changing pricing and the ability to negotiate. It's auto haggling...