The Now Economy

AlwaysOn:

Online shopping revenue is estimated to grow by 25 percent this holiday season, with the most active shopping day on the Web — Black Monday, if you will, to the traditional retail world’s so-called Black Friday — now right around the corner.

Consumers, it has been estimated, will spend more than $15 billion on the Internet for gifts this holiday, according to comScore Networks. That’s up between 23 and 26 percent from the comparable November-December period last year.

Just as it does offline, holiday shopping activity kicks off around Thanksgiving.

But unlike the offline world, where Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is one of the most active shopping days, the Monday following the feast marks the day when the action really gets going on the Web.

Last year, more than $300 million was spent on the Monday after Thanksgiving. The reason consumers spend so heavily on that Monday, according to comScore, is that they’ve “returned to the workplace — long a favorite location from which to shop online.”

From the start of the year through Nov. 14, online retail sales have risen 25 percent to $42.9 billion. The fourth quarter is estimated to ring in about $20.1 billion to $21.1 billion in online sales.

The holiday season will account for nearly three-quarters of fourth-quarter virtual-cash-register sales on the Web, according to estimates.

The head of Yahoo ’s shopping operations, Rob Solomon, said online shopping this year is expected to peak Dec. 6. In an interview with

Two services Yahoo Shopping has launched this year are “attribute” search and “safe products,” said Solomon.

I just added a technical note to our Wiki extending the work of Dean and Ghemawat on MapReduce, a support library for programs that take advantage of large clusters such as those at Google. The fundamental problems of writing distributed systems like these — latency, naming (or memory access), partial failures, and concurrency are toy versions of most of the key problems of decentralized systems. (Agency conflict is the one problem that distinguishes decentralized systems from distributed systems, and it dramatically worsens the other four.)

It occurred to me that MapReduce has the capability to handle some of the agency problems of decentralized systems, particularly those that affect reliability, in a remarkably simple way:

In the usual case, where these functions are deterministic, they can be executed on two administratively-independent servers, and the results (which, in the Google case, are merely files) can be compared. If they differ, the same results can be recomputed on more administratively-independent servers to see which ones were correct.

Call for Papers:

All papers selected for this conference are peer-reviewed and will be published in the regular conference proceedings by the IEEE Computer Society Press. The best papers presented in the conference will be selected for journals such as the Journal on Information Systems and E-Business (ISeB), or the Electronic Commerce Research Journal (ECRJ).

· Submissions deadline: January 20, 2005 · Notification of authors: March 25, 2005 · Camera-ready papers: April 26, 2005 · Conference start: July 19, 2005

The Atomic Market:

Today’s electronic marketplaces are closed, centralized and inflexible.

We propose a new type of electronic marketplace, which we refer to as an “atomic market.” Atomic markets differ from today’s electronic marketplaces in that they are (1) open-ended, (2) decentralized and (3) component-based. The atomic market supports short-lived markets created around the individual components of everyday transactions. The traders in an atomic market are agents, software that acts as a proxy for an actual buyer and seller.

The atomic market allows expressive interactions among trading agents, leading to productive, automated agent-based transactions. The focus is on the technical infrastructure for atomic marketplaces, specifically the use of logic as a basis for the decomposition of transactions and the negotiations between the different agents.

The Atomic Market

S.M. Thesis, submitted August, 2001 to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences: Peer to Peer Transactions in Agent-mediated Electronic Commerce (1.7mb PDF)

NetLab Workshop Report, chaired by Charlie Plott:

The time for collaboratories for experimental research in the social sciences has come. It is encouraging to note that, with very limited funding, individual researchers already are struggling to develop collaboratories. We assert that larger group efforts will have substantially greater payoffs in knowledge development. There is now an opportunity to set the conditions which will speed the development of social science knowledge and revolutionize social science education for the foreseeable future. To do so will require a substantial infrastructure investment in collaboratories. The time has come for that investment to be made.

III.2 Long-term Support

There has been no tradition of providing long-term support to highly technical fields in the social sciences. As researchers make greater use of complex networked systems in their research, the need grows for technicians to conduct experiments. Like any large-scale laboratory in engineering or natural sciences, technical support is necessary. Traditionally this has not been the case in the social sciences (and only somewhat common in the behavioral sciences). In order to integrate current computational and networked tools into social science experimentation, technical support must be forthcoming.

III.3 Hardware/Software Support

As experiments are scaled up to incorporate many more subjects or as experiments are distributed across a number of sites, hardware and software innovations are needed. The needs of NetLab researchers are quite different from those of other engineers and scientists. As a consequence, hardware and software development is going to have to be directed towards those special needs, rather than relying on what has been developed for other sciences.

One of the barriers to current NetLab work is the relatively slow speed of the Internet. Experiments involving “real-time” interactions between hundreds of subjects, scattered across a variety of sites, are nearly impossible. Many of these experiments require that all subjects are brought up-to-date within 500 milliseconds of any action, and that many different actions may be taking place nearly simultaneously. If subjects are all tied to the same server, this is a relatively trivial problem. However, if subjects are widely distributed, then “real time” interaction becomes difficult. Moreover, server “crashes,” backlogs, bottlenecks and other threats to subject connectivity must be addressed. These constitute fundamental challenges to our capacity to scale up experiments.

A second barrier concerns massive data storage, handling and retrieval for large-scale experiments. Many experiments require that linkable, heterogeneous data be transmitted from individual sites and merged together. However, there are enormous problems with linking data that may include behavioral actions, physiological measurement and visual images. Moreover, if such data are collected for each subject and the number of subjects is very large, then the resulting data set will be extremely large. Transmitting that data will be difficult. For instance, consider 100 subjects engaged in a 60-minute experiment in which information is collected on: the mouse location in 10 millisecond slices; all mouse clicks; physiological measures such as respiration, galvanic skin conductance; EEG measures; and the complete video of the individual’s facial expressions throughout the experiment. Such data, digitally linked, will be extremely valuable, but their size alone will produce major difficulties for researchers.

Found this linking from Vorobeychik, a student of the current sigecom chair, M. Wellman. He wrote a great survey 5-pager at http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~yvorobey/2002/YABackground.pdf

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~yvorobey/professional.htm#projects

http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~yvorobey/

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/wellman/research/group.html

PhD Graduates (Chronological order) name (defense date) [current affiliation] thesis title John Cheng (Jan 1998) [Capital Networks] Essays on Designing Economic Mechanisms co-advised with Carl Simon Chao-Lin Liu (May 1998) [Taiwan Nat'l Chengchi University] State-Space Abstraction Methods for Approximate Evaluation of Bayesian Networks Tracy Mullen (Jan 1999) [Pennsylvania State University] The Design of Computational Markets for Network Information Services David Pynadath (Jan 1999) [USC Information Sciences Institute] Probabilistic Grammars for Plan Recognition Junling Hu (Jun 1999) [Talkai, Inc.] Learning in Dynamic Noncooperative Multiagent Systems Peter Wurman (Jul 1999) [North Carolina State University] Market Structure and Multidimensional Auction Design for Computational Economies David Pennock (Sep 1999) [Overture] Aggregating Probabilistic Beliefs: Market Mechanisms and Graphical Representations William Walsh (May 2001) [IBM Research] Market Protocols for Decentralized Supply Chain Formation Trading Agent Competition - TAC Classic - Game Description In the TAC shopping game, each “agent” (an entrant to the competition) is a travel agent, with the goal of assembling travel packages (from TACtown to Tampa, during a notional 5-day period). Each agent is acting on behalf of eight clients, who express their preferences for various aspects of the trip. The objective of the travel agent is to maximize the total satisfaction of its clients (the sum of the client utilities). Travel packages consist of the following: A round-trip flight, A hotel reservation, and Tickets to some of the following entertainment events Alligator wrestling Amusement park Museum Illustration of the environment a TAC agent operates within. To the left are its eight clients and their preferences, in the middle all its competitors lined up (7 competitors/game), and to its right are all the auctions (28 simultaneous auctions of three different types). There are obvious interdependencies, as the traveler needs a hotel for every night between arrival and departure of the flight, and can attend entertainment events only during that interval. In addition, the clients have individual preferences over which days they are in Tampa, the type of hotel, and which entertainment they want. All three types of goods (flights, hotels, entertainment) are traded in separate markets with different rules. A run of the game is called an instance. Several instances of the game are played during each round of the competition in order to evaluate each agent’s average performance and to smooth the variations in client preferences.

Yahoo! Research Labs Spot Workshop on Recommender Systems:

On August 26, 2004, Yahoo! Research Labs in Pasadena held the fourth in a series of Spot Workshops. Spot workshops are informal one-day gatherings of academics and Yahoo folks centered around a common theme. This workshop’s theme was “Recommender Systems”.

A recommender system is an automated algorithm for providing personalized recommendations (for movies, or music, or restaurants, for example) to a user, often by looking for relationships between that user and a large base of other users. In a sense, a recommender system automates the social process of obtaining referrals or recommendations from like-minded friends.

There were two invited academic speakers, Professor John Riedl and Professor Jon Herlocker, who are both are active at the forefront of recommender systems research (and who played a large role in the field’s creation, including founding NetPerceptions, one of the first startup companies in this area). Todd Beaupre spoke about recommendations on Launch Music — one of the Y! properties most successful at creating personalization that works, providing significant and measurable user value. Donna Boyer and Nilesh Gohel from Y! Network Products discussed the benefits of (and obstacles to) deploying recommendation services across dozens of Y! properties, including Movies, TV, shopping, personals, autos, and others. There was a technical session on algorithmic tools from machine learning and linear algebra useful for recommendation systems, with several topics presented by scientists from Yahoo! Research Labs. The workshop ended with a roundtable discussion. Turnout was excellent, including a number of people from Sunnyvale and Santa Monica. Many attendees felt that the workshop was productive and valuable, serving to successfully bring together a number of people throughout the company with similar goals and interests, and ending with concrete plans for continued interaction and collaboration. The invited academic speakers served as a bridge to the academic research community, helping us to assess the current state of the art, as well as make connections for future collaborative projects, student internships, and new hires.

I’m proud to announce the debut of a new website for zLab, CommerceNet Labs’s center for decentralization research. We’ve only been in business for a few months, but we’re already assembling a great team and a series of publications & technical reports

What’s more, we’ll be moving in to our new offices in Palo Alto after the New Year, so to celebrate the launch of our website, the holiday season, and to bid farewell to our ever-so-humble headquarters, data center, conference center, and webcasting studio, we’re inviting all of our readers to a zLab Open House & Holiday Mixer with food, drinks, music, and a wee, wee bit of speechifying about our plans for 2005! Please RSVP via eVite.

CommerceOne Patent Auction Teleconference

CommerceNet, a non-profit industry consortium, invites you to participate in an event on the CommerceOne bankruptcy auction of patents that cover key facets of commerce related Internet transactions. The conference will address the impact and possibility of these patents being placed into the public domain. Please register to attend this conference call The conference call will be held at 1:00 pm pst on Monday November 22, 2004. Use the following conference number:

1-866-613-5217 code: 6513935

Auction of Internet Commerce Patents Draws Concern

By JOHN MARKOFF November 16, 2004

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 15 - More than three dozen patents said to cover key facets of Internet transactions will soon be auctioned off by Commerce One, a bankrupt software company. But even before the sale, some technology executives and lawyers are worried that potential buyers might wield the patents in infringement lawsuits against companies that are engaged in online commerce, like I.B.M. and Microsoft.

The 39 patents cover basic activities like using standardized electronic documents to automate the sale of goods and services over the Internet. Some intellectual property experts said that these patents, which have broad reach, could be used to challenge Web services like the .Net electronic business system from Microsoft or Websphere software from I.B.M. Those companies declined to comment, saying any discussion would be speculative at this point.

Bidding for the portfolio of patents will begin at $1 million in the auction, which is scheduled for Dec. 6 in federal bankruptcy court in San Francisco. Earlier this month, the patents were carved out from the rest of Commerce One’s assets.

One of the inventors involved, Robert Glushko, who no longer holds the patent rights, fears the winner of the auction might use the patents mainly to impede other companies or to press competitors to pay licensing fees for practices already common in Internet commerce. He is not alone….

I kept meaning to post this but kept forgetting to do so. Allan Schiffman: “This is why the Internet was invented. Unbelievably cool: check out eMachineshop. Link courtesy of Survival Arts.”

If you enjoyed that link, check out my favorite Allan Schiffman lines from recondite thus far.