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November 30, 2004
Black Monday
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.
Posted by adam at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)
November 29, 2004
MapReduce for decentralized computation
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.
Posted by kragen at 12:53 PM | Comments (0)
IEEE CEC Munich CFP -- Jan 20
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
Posted by rohit at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)
November 28, 2004
Jim Youll's Thesis: 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.
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)
Posted by rohit at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)
November 26, 2004
NSF Workshop Calling for Shared Infrastructure for Ec Experiments
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.
Posted by rohit at 02:34 PM | Comments (0)
Benchmarking Competition for Trading Agents
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 SimonChao-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.
Posted by rohit at 02:27 PM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2004
Recommender Systems Workshop
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.
Posted by rohit at 11:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 23, 2004
CommerceNet's zLab Website & Open House
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.
Posted by rohit at 07:14 AM | Comments (0)
November 22, 2004
CN to discuss C1's patents today
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
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....
Posted by rohit at 10:10 AM | Comments (0)
eMachineshop
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.
Posted by adam at 02:25 AM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2004
Online Reputation Systems
Jeff Ubois in Release 1.0 (October 2003) wrote an issue on Online Reputation Systems:
Some like to think of the Net as a digital village, but in fact it’s closer to a digital city. The ability to interact with a billion people on the Net comes with its own costs: Dealing with strangers is risky, and verifying their trustworthiness is expensive – especially on a case-by-case basis....
Companies can use reputation systems to enhance customer support while reducing its costs, and to establish trust, thereby increasing the number and quality of transactions. EBay’s feedback forum, which is used by millions of people for millions of transactions every day, is a good example. According to a study of eBay’s reputation system by Paul Resnick, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, highly ranked sellers can charge about 8 percent more than sellers with no reputation, for identical items.
Commerce is all about reputation. Online reputation transcends any single reputation system, but no online reputation system reflects that fact. Somewhere out there someone's designing a whuffie system -- the one ring to bind them all.
Update, November 29. Dick Hardt reminds us that Sxip enables online reputation systems. One Network to bind them all!
Posted by adam at 10:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 20, 2004
Innovative Uses of RFID Tags
Roland Piquepaille writes about Innovative Uses of RFID Tags:
When your newspapers write something about RFID tags, it's almost always about Wal-Mart or how these tags are threatening our privacy. But they often miss the important innovations brought by this technology. For example, in Florida, RFID drives highway traffic reports on more than 200 miles of toll roads. Or take DHL, which is tracking fashion with RFID tags on more than 70 million garments in its French distribution center. Elsewhere, in Texas, 28,000 students test an e-tagging system which promises better security for them. And what about RFID tags which could prevent surgical errors and have just been approved in the U.S last week? So, what do you think? Are these innovations promising a better future for us or not?
Posted by adam at 12:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 19, 2004
Mmmm... delicious...
I've been spending a lot of time with del.icio.us lately, and am struck by the "me-ness" of the service, as explained by peterme:
While del.icio.us thrives as a "social bookmark" site, it depends on the me-ness of the activity -- by and large, I'm saving items to del.icio.us that interest me, that I might want to return to later, and the posting-for-others aspect is largely secondary. It's an added benefit, but not the raison d'etre.One of the key emerging trends we're seeing with things like del.icio.us and Flickr is the merging of personal information architecture and public/shared/group/emergent information architecture. And one of the things we're seeing in the *use* of these systems is self-centeredness -- how else do you explain the prevalence of "me" on Flickr?
To get back to the notion of annotating space -- I would argue that people will annotate space much like they annotate the web, or annotate their photos... More in a notebook sense, a journaling sense. The annotations are explicitly *not* "meant for other people" -- they're meant for yourself, they only have to make sense for yourself, and if others stumble across them, great, fine.
Jon Udell called it: real-time bookmarking and tagging and tight feedback loops lead to better collective filtering and sharing of information in an increasingly interconnected world.
My delicious page is now something I think about whenever I visit a page and think to myself that I might want to visit that page again. It's like explicity pointing out parts of my personal web that I would highly recommend to others.
See also: How do you use del.icio.us?, by Roland Piquepaille.
Posted by adam at 02:14 AM | Comments (0)
November 18, 2004
Real Time in Intranets
Line56.com: Intranet Trends to Watch For:
One of the most overlooked business trends affecting intranets has been the delivery of real-time key performance indicators and customer information. Executives are asking for precise, real time information and see it as a necessary tool to make smart business decisions. As a recent Harvard Business Review article discussed, depending upon the nature of your organization, this real-time information need can take the form of real time customer transaction information, progress reports on product developments, productivity metrics, subscriber lists and cash flow. Delivery of select real-time information is not difficult given the right technology tools, the hard question to determine will be what information is really needed in real-time and for whom and how should it be delivered.
Posted by adam at 02:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 17, 2004
Active Grid
Peter Yared on Active Grid coming out of stealth:
After 18 months of hard work, ActiveGrid is finally out of stealth mode! Check it out at:There are details about the ActiveGrid Grid Application Server and about Adaptive Transactions, a new technology we are introducing to add intelligence into the execution of transactional applications on large grids.
See also:
- Application Servers 2004: A Big Muffin in a Donut World
- Web Services: "How We Gonna Get These Here Machines to Talk to Each Other"
Posted by adam at 07:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 16, 2004
Real Names
John Battelle points out that RealNames has relaunched. Founder Keith Teare writes:
The problem addressed by RealNames - that is the poverty of the DNS as a naming and navigation system for the world’s internet users - remains unresolved.
Posted by adam at 08:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 15, 2004
Market-based Macroprogramming
IBM Research - Distributed and Fault Tolerant Computing - Current Seminars at Watson
Matt Welsh, Harvard University Title: Market-Based Programming Paradigms for Sensor Networks Date: 10/20/2004 Time: 2:00 -3:30 PM Location: Hawthorne 1S-F40 Host: Fred Douglis
Abstract:
Sensor networks present a novel programming challenge: that of achieving robust global behavior despite limited resources, varying node locations and capabilities, and changing network conditions. Current programming models typically require that global behavior be specified in terms of the low-level actions of individual nodes. This approach makes it extremely difficult to tune the operation of the sensor network as a whole.Ideally, sensor nodes should self-schedule to determine the set of operations that maximizes that node's contribution to the network-wide task. In this talk, we present market-based macroprogramming (MBM), a new approach for achieving efficient resource allocation in sensor networks. Rather than programming individual sensor nodes, MBM defines a virtual market in which nodes sell goods (such as sensor readings or data aggregates) in response to prices that are established by the programmer. Nodes take actions to maximize their profit, subject to energy budget constraints. The behavior of the network is determined by adjusting the price vectors for each good, rather than by directly specifying local node programs. Nodes individually specialize their operation in response to feedback from payments. Market-based macroprogramming provides a useful set of primitives for controlling the aggregate behavior of sensor networks despite variance of individual nodes. We present the MBM paradigm and a sensor network vehicle tracking application based on this design, as well as a number of experiments demonstrating that MBM allows nodes to operate efficiently under limited energy budgets, while adapting to changing network conditions. This project is in collaboration with Geoff Mainland and David Parkes.
Biography:
Matt Welsh is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. Prior to joining Harvard, he received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and spent one year as a visiting researcher at Intel Research Berkeley. His research interests span many aspects of complex systems, including Internet services, distributed systems, and sensor networks.
Posted by rohit at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 11, 2004
Former CommerceNet CEO Resch Re-emerges
Congratulations, Mark!
Copyright-sharing group delves into science | CNET News.com
Creative Commons, a nonprofit group aimed at carving out ways to share creative works, is expanding from the realm of copyright into patents and scientific publishing.
The Stanford, Calif.-based organization said Wednesday that it hired former CommerceNet executive Mark Resch as its new chief executive officer. It also tapped entrepreneur John Wilbanks to be the director of its newly formed Science Commons division.
"Wilbanks' addition as leader of the new Science Commons branch...marks a very exciting new phase, as the Creative Commons model is tested in uncharted areas of intellectual endeavor," Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School professor and organization founder, said in a statement.
The group's move into the scientific sphere could help add new weight to growing criticisms that the current patent process has become too inflexible and often awards too much protection to ideas that aren't genuinely unique.
Posted by rohit at 01:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
W3C 10 Symposium
Rohit will be attending W3C 10 on December 1...
Speakers and panelists will discuss the history of the Web, W3C's central role in the Web's development, and their visions of the Web's future. The program is built on two themes:The world of W3C is leading the Web to its full potential. W3C is the steward of the World Wide Web. The organization's vision, mission, collaborations, and specifications have and will make a difference. During the symposium, speakers will relate stories about the Web's origins and describe its impact over the past ten years. Members will be thanked and congratulated for their accomplishments. Speakers will present their visions and dreams for the future of W3C and the Web.
One Web with access for all. The Web is a universal, open and easily accessible medium that empowers people. One of W3C's primary goals is to make the Web's benefits available to all people, whatever their hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability. W3C's Activities illustrate the consortium's commitment to universal access. During the symposium, speakers will present the Web of meaning — the Semantic Web — and Web access for everyone, everywhere.
Posted by adam at 09:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Market Based Resource Allocation
Fine is a former student of Ledyard's, who also Hanson's advisor.
Kevin Lai, Bernardo A. Huberman, Leslie R. Fine
HP Laboratories
Palo Alto, CA 94304
Abstract
P2P clusters like the Grid and PlanetLab enable in principle the same statistical multiplexing efficiency gains for computing as the Internet provides for networking. The key unsolved problem is resource allocation. Existing solutions are not economically efficient and require high latency to acquire resources. We designed and implemented Tycoon, a market based distributed resource allocation system based on an Auction Share scheduling algorithm. Preliminary results show that Tycoon achieves low latency and high fairness while providing incentives for truth-telling on the part of strategic users.
Posted by rohit at 08:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 10, 2004
eBay as Pricing Authority
Tony Gentile pointed eBay's move to release pricing data as a Web service:
eBay announced the availability of Pulse, a tool that aggregates bids to provide up-to-the-minute (and historical) values for goods (and some services).Yes, that's right... eBay, who, unlike your local newspaper, has transactions that clear (i.e., you know that the item was sold and how much it was sold for), knows the fair market price, globally, of millions of different goods... and they've just opened it up for mining!
Many implications:
1) We've seen the high-water mark for The Kelley Blue Book's value (and similar companies). Through Pulse, eBay Motors can be mined to provide near real-time and historical pricing information, on any make or model, in a narrow geographic region (i.e., local search), with car photos documenting the condition of the car, etc. Nice.
2) Data availability will impact marketplace participant behavior, likely resulting in Meta-marketplaces, 'day-sellers' and increased competition. For example, much as NexTag.com built a meta-marketplace by arbitraging SEM marketplaces (Google, Overture, etc) until finally finding a profitable niche in home mortgages, the ability to monitor demand on eBay for a particular good or service may result in speculative and opportunistic seller behavior, resulting in more (and more immediate) competition in eBay's marketplace.
Interestingly, just as with Overture/Google, tools that make the marketplace more efficient, as described above, may have a negative short-term impact on revenue (as anything that decreases the avg selling price of an item on eBay would), but will likely result in significantly greater long-term impact as the increased transparency leads to greater trust, allowing more transactions to move online.
3) eBay continues to ensure its Web 2.0 relevance by extending its existing services 1: Classified Listings and Transaction clearing (core marketplace), 2: Payments (via PayPal), and 3: Reputation (core marketplace), by adding its first data product service, Pricing.
Posted by adam at 06:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
UPC + Inventory + Mobile + Search
John Battelle writes in his piece, "The Transparent (Shopping) Society":
First, the entire UPC system, which I must admit I do not fully grok, must be made open and available as a web service. Second, merchants must be compelled to make their inventory open and available to web services. Third, mobile device makers must install readers in their phones, essentially turning phones into magic gateways between the physical world and the virtual world of web-based information. And fourth, providers like Google must create applications that tie it all together.
Ross Stapleton-Gray addresses these points in the comments section, and a lively discussion ensues, including Sergei Burkov of Dulance, which just announced an RSS comparison shopping application.
Posted by adam at 06:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 09, 2004
W3C released the TAG report
Architecture of the World Wide Web, First Edition was released as a W3C Proposed Recommendation on 5 November 2004.
Posted by rohit at 12:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Great Oneliner From a Schmidt Talk
Google allows weirdos to advertise to weirdos (e.g. Monkey hats and Bird poop ads)
Posted by rohit at 10:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 08, 2004
Troutgirl In Da House
We welcome Joyce to CommerceNet Labs; in the coming months, she'll be working with us on projects such as zClassifieds and declassifieds and other fun things to do with ad networks...
Posted by adam at 11:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 05, 2004
WWW 2005
We'll be not posting for several days so we can complete our paper about Nutch for submission to WWW 2005...
Posted by adam at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 04, 2004
Report On Election Market Making
Bettors for Bush
Political futures markets claim they're more accurate than opinion polls. So, how'd they do yesterday?
By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2004, at 12:15 PM PT
The exit polls were way off. The pre-election opinion polls weren't much better. But how did the markets do at predicting the outcome Tuesday night?
The past few years have witnessed the rise of political futures markets—online trading operations that allow you to bet on (or, if you prefer, "invest in") candidates. The theory behind the markets is that they ought to do a better job of forecasting elections than polls. After all, if stock investors efficiently factor all available information into the price of a stock, why wouldn't they do the same for a presidential candidate?
Posted by rohit at 10:32 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
November 03, 2004
Amazon SQS
Amazon Simple Queue Service is a simple, compelling service:
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Beta)
The Amazon Simple Queue Service offers a reliable, highly scalable hosted queue for buffering messages between distributed application components. The Amazon Simple Queue Service reduces the costs associated with resolving the producer-consumer problem that arises in distributed application development. Such costs include increased application development time, and potentially significant investment in server and network infrastructure to support distributed application messaging. Amazon has already invested in the large-scale computing infrastructure that runs the Queue Service, and since the Service’s interface is exposed via Web services, integration with applications is fast and easy.
Using the Amazon Simple Queue Service, you can decouple components of your application so that they run independently, with the Queue Service easing messaging management between components. Any component of a distributed application can store any type of data in a reliable queue at Amazon.com. Any other component or application can then later retrieve the data, using queue semantics. The queue acts as a buffer between the work-producer that is saving the data, and the work-consumer that is retrieving the data for processing. Thus, the queue resolves issues that would otherwise arise if the producer were producing work faster than the consumer can process the work, or if the producer or consumer were only intermittently connected to the network.
Registered developers have free access to the Simple Queue Service during the Beta, but storage is limited to 4,000 queue entries per developer.
Features
Basic Queue Operations
The Simple Queue Service employs a simple interface that is easy to use and highly flexible. The following operations are provided:
- CreateQueue: Create queues for your own use, or to share with others.
- ConfigureQueue: Modify the properties of an existing queue.
- ListMyQueues: List your existing queues.
- DeleteQueue: Delete one of your queues.
- Enqueue: Add any data entries up to 4 KB in size to a specified queue.
- Read: Return data from a specified queue. No data-key is required, and data is returned in roughly the same order it was added to the queue.
- Dequeue: Remove a specified piece of data from a specified queue.
Specifically Designed for Use by Distributed Applications
A single queue can be used simultaneously by many distributed application components. There is no need for components to coordinate with each other to enable them to share a queue. A configurable read-lock feature is included to lower the incidence of duplicate messages when two applications are concurrently reading from the same queue.
Implemented to the Highest Standards for Performance and Reliability
The Amazon Simple Queue Service is built with the same stringent standards for performance and reliability as the rest of Amazon.com’s technology platform.
Intended Usage & Restrictions
- The Amazon Simple Queue Service is designed for transitory storage of relatively small messages. A single entry placed in a queue cannot be larger than 4 KB in size, and cannot be left in the queue for more than 30 days (data left longer than this will be deleted).
- During the Beta period, users of the Amazon Simple Queue Service are limited to storing up to 4,000 queue entries at a time in all queues created by the same subscription ID.
- During the Beta period, there are limited security restrictions on access to individual queues. Access is granted to another user or application if they can provide your AWS Subscription ID and the corresponding identifier of your queue.
- Applications should be prepared for the event where the same message is read more than once from the queue. In particular: A message may be returned by Read even though it has already been dequeued; and concurrent Read calls may return the same message to multiple readers. This behavior is a result of prioritizing reliable data storage (even in the face of hardware failures), and we expect such events to occur very infrequently. One way applications can cope with these occasional duplicates is by making the messages stored in the queue idempotent – that is, by ensuring that the effect of repeated receipt of a message is the same as that of receiving it once.
Posted by adam at 07:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 02, 2004
Making a Living off Internet Auctions
New York Times has two interesting statistics:
An estimated half-million people make a full- or part-time living by auctioning everything from macramé to Maseratis on the Internet. In the online auction world, they are called power sellers, and they have succeeded by researching consumer trends, finding reliable sources for goods and not sparing the bubble wrap.eBay, of course, is not the only game in town, though it is clearly the largest and most popular Internet auction site. [eBay] has 114 million users, far more than competitors like Ubid.com, Bidville.com and ePier, as well as the auction sections of Amazon.com, Yahoo and Overstock.com.
Note that not all of the half million people making a living with Internet auctions use eBay, though it's likely that most of them do. The long tail of ecommerce, though in some ways decentralized, still heavily relies on eBay when it comes to Internet auctions.
Posted by adam at 02:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
November 01, 2004
zClassifieds
Dan Gillmor wrote in the 10/31/2004 SJ Mercury News:
Google will have all kinds of company in this expanding world of advertising. That will include, I would expect, many of the more traditional media companies that will see a chance to expand their advertising base beyond the equivalent of the blockbuster (expensive) model that now prevails.The competitors will also include big companies that have already shown an appreciation of Net-based economics. Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay and at least a few others will certainly be among them.
Google will also find competitors, small ones, out at the edges. And some of those will be new entrants that are figuring out ways to create targeted advertising without massively centralized infrastructures. The principles of peer-to-peer file-sharing will come to the ad marketplace, too.
Google is unquestionably positioning itself in a smart way. The critical mass it's creating may even prove unbeatable, or turn into a new kind of monopoly that sucks up an astonishing portion of all advertising dollars into its corporate coffers. (That would be a dangerous dominance if it happened.)
Today, eBay, online classified-ad sites and traditional media are the marketplace of choice for the single-item seller. Ultimately, Google and others could even go after that market.
How many dollars (and euros, yen, pesos, renmimbi, etc.) will there turn out to be in the low-end advertising market? It's a big, big number.
Google may not own it. But it's going to get a share, a large one. I wouldn't touch the company's stock at today's prices, but there's plenty of room for growth in its primary revenue base. Nothing grows to the moon, as the saying goes, but there's a fair amount of sky left.
A month ago we gave the name declassifieds to the concept of decentralizing ads. Now we give the name zClassifieds to an internal CommerceNet project to work on "targeted advertising without massively centralized infrastructures". Will post more as we learn more.
Posted by adam at 03:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack