Word: bots
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first, store owners were very concerned that if their prices weren't low, people wouldn't buy from them," says Marcus Zillman, who tracks and lists electronic agents at botspot.com "That hasn't happened. Mainly, the shopping bot allows people to focus on what they're looking...
...much do the big guys want this technology? Check out the balance sheet. Firefly, one of the earliest bots, was swallowed by Microsoft for an undisclosed sum last year, as was CompareNet.com six months ago. Excite snapped up Jango.com for $35 million in stock. Lycos employs the services of a bot start-up called Frictionless...
...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...
...stage a so-called Turing Test--that is, he wanted to build a piece of software that could trick humans into thinking they were communicating with one of their own. It worked. "One guy hit on Julia for 13 days," recalls Mauldin, noting that although the bot was always brushing off her online Lothario, he interpreted it as coyness...