Word: bot
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Pretty neat, you think? Just wait until the third generation of shopping agents moves out of the lab. Even now, folks at M.I.T. and IBM are preparing for a world in which every transaction becomes a complex trade deal between a pricing bot acting for the site and a shopping bot acting for you. "Dynamic pricing, that's the big notion," says Professor Pattie Maes, director of the software-agents group at the M.I.T. media lab. "After all, fixed prices have been around only for a couple of hundred years...
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...
...This bot-driven universe won't arrive until a few kinks have been ironed out. Right now, says Jeff Kephart, manager of the agents and e-merchant phenomena group at IBM, price bots don't understand that undercutting your competitor is not always smart. "This gives rise to price wars," says Kephart, who in tests has watched the sell bots give the store away in a competitive frenzy. "They're pretty dumb," he notes. "We have to give them a sense of anticipation...
Which means that Bezos can breathe easily for the moment. However, most up-and-coming bots have just the sort of customizable features that made his site such a hit. You will, for instance, be able to tell your bot to transact only with companies that offer two-year-warranties or free shipping or that don't run sweatshops in Malaysia...