We love Google’s new Desktop Search. We’ve been arguing about something like this for a year or more. The idea of searching everything you’ve seen — not just your hard drive, but everything hyperlinked to it (such as your surfing history) — is so intriguing we’ve built something similar for ourselves.
We’ve modified Nutch to search not just CommerceNet’s website, weblog, and wiki, but also everything we link to. Go ahead and try our index of CommerceNet’s Neighborhood. If you query for Nutch you won’t just see pages from our sites, but Nutch’s home page and even an application of it at CreativeCommons…
We’re also exploring a bunch of other ideas that GDS and other desktop indexing projects like StuffIveSeen haven’t tackled yet. Foremost is ranking — just like the AltaVista engine that Google itself dethroned, GDS doesn’t have anything like a PageRank for the gigabytes of information on your disk. Like many researchers, we suspect that a users’s social network is the key to discerning which hits are likely to be most useful. After all, if the Web is drowning in infoglut on any given query term, a user should be such an expert on the terms of his or her art that there ought to be even more hits to rank on localhost. One cure may be collaborative filtering with your friends…
Secondary aspects of the problem include tackling the fact that many of us have multiple computers and identities on the Internet, so we’d need networks of personal search engines. Or that a local-proxy-server approach might be better at capturing the ”dynamics” of our interaction (how often we re-read the same email over IMAP, say).
But rather than rattling off a longer list of half-baked hypotheses, I’d like to cite GDS for at least one idea that never occurred to us: integrating it seamlessly with the public site. Sure, we thought AdWords-like ads were the key to a better revenue model for the Fisher category of PersonalWeb products.
No, what’s cool is that Google’s ordinary results pages from the public website automatically include hits from your hard drive. How’d they ”do” that?! Read on…
CommerceNet Labs Wiki : FluffyBunnyBurrowsIntoWinSock
…we found that Google Desktop Server actually hooks into Windows’ TCP/IP stack to directly modify incoming traffic from Google’s websites to splice its local results in. Once you install GDS, there’s a bit of Google’s code running inside every Windows application that talks to the Internet.
It’s done using a long-established hook in WinSock2, its Layered Transport Service Provider Interface (SPI)…
The Winsock LSP is mostly only used by spyware and censorware; it’s a surprise to see a positive use for it. Spyware detectors like HijackThis consequently detect it.
[An aside: why is Rifkin’s GLAT posting more relevant on the query “rifkin fisher” than Rifkin’s actual Fisher posting? I think it’s Battelle’s fault, for increasing the GLAT’s PageRank! :-]
https://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.png00amshttps://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.pngams2004-10-18 21:03:042012-03-26 17:16:17“Fluffy Bunny” is a WinSock-puppet
Steve Wilhelm served as the development manager for Tibco’s MarketSheet for Windows, which was a Reuters-inspired spreadsheet for real-time information. Using those insights and looking at what has changed in the years since, Steve describes a hypothetical product called OpenSheet that takes into account the advances made in mobile computing, social networking, and open source in the last half decade.
As described by Steve, OpenSheet is a compelling product vision, and it makes me wonder: could there be a new kind of spreadsheet for real-time data that takes a three-dimensional view rather than the traditional spreadsheet table view, so that you could see the history of a stream? In other words, a “StreamSheet” visualization?
This can probably be derived from the total number of UPC codes issued, or something. (We can probably ignore products for which no code of any type has been issued.)
Is there an estimate how many different products are sold on the world’s markets today?
According to Peter Hurtubise at QRS, the QRS Catalogue is now up to 100 million entries (up from c. 80 million a few years ago). NB that QRS is GMA-focused [GMA being General Merchandise and Apparel], so some large swath of that will be every variation of every size of a particular article of clothing, say.
I’ve a couple of my own questions that would help illuminate this space; most could probably be answered by a QRS, or one of the major retailers, but they’d unfortunately see them as rather sensitive. A big one would be (for Target, or Wal-Mart): what is the total SKU or product code count for what you carry (my guess is that it’s in the several tens of thousands… perhaps several times higher if they’ve got a lot of apparal)? Of that, how many manufacturers would account for 90% of the total product count? Of 99%? My guess is that a relatively smallish number (say, 500) might produce the 90% coverage. That’s distinct from (though these would be other numbers worth knowing) the *unit* count of goods inventoried/sold.
And so we continue the search for an answer of how many products are out there…
Kragen notes that most products don’t come from companies or even people rich enough to be assigned product codes, as related to his essay on the long tail of ecommerce. Also, if we take into account that, for example, in a pack of colored markers each marker should have its own product code (and not just the pack), or that a Spiderman-contest-branded can of Diet Dr. Pepper should have a different product code than a regular can of Diet Dr. Pepper… well, there are likely to be at least an order of magnitude more products than we think of as “product coded” today.
https://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.png00amshttps://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.pngams2004-10-13 10:50:272012-03-26 17:06:58How many products are there?
Use ScoutPal with any web-enabled cell phone or wireless PDA and find out the Amazon Marketplace value of books, CD’s, DVD’s, Video Tapes, or any other Amazon Marketplace Merchandise, while you are out bookscouting.
How many times have you come back from bookscouting with essentially worthless books? How many times have you passed over a book, only to find out later, when you look it up again on Amazon, that it was valuable and in high demand?
Bookscouting with ScoutPal is like hunting with Radar
You can quickly comb through stacks of books, zero in on the gems, and find the treasure!
ScoutPal is simple and easy to use. Just enter the ISBNs or UPCs, and ScoutPal will “Fetch” the information you need, and quickly present it to you in a concise form. Results include a summary of market prices and quantities, sales rank, editions and availability, and used/new/collectible details. You can customize the content and format of your results, and switch formats at anytime. You can also be alerted if there are Buyers Waiting.
Jeff Bezos mentioned this company at Web 2.0 as an example of the kind of one-person innovative offering that Amazon Web Services unleash.
It’s interesting to see an CommerceNet alum Bob Glushko in the news. The comment, though, is a telling one, since if anything CommerceNet is firmly on the same side as Halsey in its committment to open business service networks. On the other hand, a decentralized aspect of that vision is that you should always be able to run your “own” GrandCentral-like service, too.
Not to mention that we need to all work together to continue to evolve WS interoperability to include real-time, async events — the need for a two-way GrandCentral with notifications more powerful (& scriptable) than, say, email…
Moreover, there is a nagging question confronting Grand Central and every other company pursuing the on-demand model. Will large corporations ever feel comfortable with a solution that means placing valuable data outside their computer security systems, or will they stick with solutions that remains safely inside their networks and delivered on individual computers?
“The Grand Central hosting approach might appeal to small firms that need just a few services, but most big enterprises aren’t going to yield this control to a third party,” said Robert J. Glushko, an entrepreneur before taking a teaching post at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley. “So there’s a business model there, but it may not be a very big one.”
https://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.png00amshttps://commerce.net/mindystaging/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/commercenet-logo-1.pngams2004-10-10 10:31:262004-10-10 10:31:26[NYT] Glushko on Halsey’s new fund
“Fluffy Bunny” is a WinSock-puppet
DecentralizationWe love Google’s new Desktop Search. We’ve been arguing about something like this for a year or more. The idea of searching everything you’ve seen — not just your hard drive, but everything hyperlinked to it (such as your surfing history) — is so intriguing we’ve built something similar for ourselves.
We’ve modified Nutch to search not just CommerceNet’s website, weblog, and wiki, but also everything we link to. Go ahead and try our index of CommerceNet’s Neighborhood. If you query for Nutch you won’t just see pages from our sites, but Nutch’s home page and even an application of it at CreativeCommons…
We’re also exploring a bunch of other ideas that GDS and other desktop indexing projects like StuffIveSeen haven’t tackled yet. Foremost is ranking — just like the AltaVista engine that Google itself dethroned, GDS doesn’t have anything like a PageRank for the gigabytes of information on your disk. Like many researchers, we suspect that a users’s social network is the key to discerning which hits are likely to be most useful. After all, if the Web is drowning in infoglut on any given query term, a user should be such an expert on the terms of his or her art that there ought to be even more hits to rank on localhost. One cure may be collaborative filtering with your friends…
Secondary aspects of the problem include tackling the fact that many of us have multiple computers and identities on the Internet, so we’d need networks of personal search engines. Or that a local-proxy-server approach might be better at capturing the ”dynamics” of our interaction (how often we re-read the same email over IMAP, say).
But rather than rattling off a longer list of half-baked hypotheses, I’d like to cite GDS for at least one idea that never occurred to us: integrating it seamlessly with the public site. Sure, we thought AdWords-like ads were the key to a better revenue model for the Fisher category of PersonalWeb products.
No, what’s cool is that Google’s ordinary results pages from the public website automatically include hits from your hard drive. How’d they ”do” that?! Read on…
CommerceNet Labs Wiki : FluffyBunnyBurrowsIntoWinSock
The Winsock LSP is mostly only used by spyware and censorware; it’s a surprise to see a positive use for it. Spyware detectors like HijackThis consequently detect it.
[An aside: why is Rifkin’s GLAT posting more relevant on the query “rifkin fisher” than Rifkin’s actual Fisher posting? I think it’s Battelle’s fault, for increasing the GLAT’s PageRank! :-]
OpenSheet
Event Driven ArchitecturesSteve Wilhelm served as the development manager for Tibco’s MarketSheet for Windows, which was a Reuters-inspired spreadsheet for real-time information. Using those insights and looking at what has changed in the years since, Steve describes a hypothetical product called OpenSheet that takes into account the advances made in mobile computing, social networking, and open source in the last half decade.
As described by Steve, OpenSheet is a compelling product vision, and it makes me wonder: could there be a new kind of spreadsheet for real-time data that takes a three-dimensional view rather than the traditional spreadsheet table view, so that you could see the history of a stream? In other words, a “StreamSheet” visualization?
How many products are there?
CommerceSergei Burkov of Dulance asked via email:
Ross Stapleton-Gray responded:
And so we continue the search for an answer of how many products are out there…
Kragen notes that most products don’t come from companies or even people rich enough to be assigned product codes, as related to his essay on the long tail of ecommerce. Also, if we take into account that, for example, in a pack of colored markers each marker should have its own product code (and not just the pack), or that a Spiderman-contest-branded can of Diet Dr. Pepper should have a different product code than a regular can of Diet Dr. Pepper… well, there are likely to be at least an order of magnitude more products than we think of as “product coded” today.
ScoutPal
CommerceCool use of Amazon Web Services: ScoutPal…
Jeff Bezos mentioned this company at Web 2.0 as an example of the kind of one-person innovative offering that Amazon Web Services unleash.
[NYT] Glushko on Halsey’s new fund
CommerceIt’s interesting to see an CommerceNet alum Bob Glushko in the news. The comment, though, is a telling one, since if anything CommerceNet is firmly on the same side as Halsey in its committment to open business service networks. On the other hand, a decentralized aspect of that vision is that you should always be able to run your “own” GrandCentral-like service, too.
Not to mention that we need to all work together to continue to evolve WS interoperability to include real-time, async events — the need for a two-way GrandCentral with notifications more powerful (& scriptable) than, say, email…
The New York Times > Technology > Is It Still Called a Venture Fund When You Use Your Own Money?