Congrats to Sergei Burkov of Dulance for creating the world’s first price-triggered RSS feed that “turns any newsreader into a personal shopping agent.”
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.
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
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.
Price-Triggered RSS Feeds
CommerceCongrats to Sergei Burkov of Dulance for creating the world’s first price-triggered RSS feed that “turns any newsreader into a personal shopping agent.”
Black Monday
CommerceAlwaysOn:
MapReduce for decentralized computation
DecentralizationI 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:
IEEE CEC Munich CFP — Jan 20
CommerceCall for Papers:
Jim Youll’s Thesis: The Atomic Market
DecentralizationThe Atomic Market: