ECOMMERCE
Pattie Maes knows her bots. And in speeches to audiences anxious about the fate of their online businesses, the MIT Media Lab professor and Firefly Network cofounder provides a handy way of categorizing the various shopping agents she believes will one day run our lives. Here's a look:
| Type of Shopbot| What It Does| Who Offers It| Who Builds It
| Product brokering | Alerts users to new releases or recommends products based on past selections or constraints specified by the buyer | Amazon.com, FastParts, Classifieds2000, Launch Media, and others | Firefly Network, Net Perceptions, PersonaLogic, BroadVision, and others
| Merchant brokering | Acts as comparison shopper by collecting information about price and availability | Yahoo!, Excite, BargainFinder, WebMarket, priceline.com, and others | Jango, Junglee, C2B/Inktomi, Frictionless Commerce, OptiMark, and others
| Negotiating | Buys, sells, and bargains with other bots about multiple aspects of a transaction based on user parameters | No one yet, although auction sites function as such | In research phase: Kasbah, Tete-a-Tete (MIT Media Lab), AuctionBot (University of Michigan), and others
Beyond these, there are other new technologies that can function like a shopbot. Alexa Internet (www.alexa.com/), founded by Thinking Machines cofounder and WAIS inventor Brewster Kahle, offers a toolbar that floats beneath Web browsers. When activated, the bar provides users with additional information about the sites they're visiting. Info on where a site originates and what other users think of it, as well as links to other sites, qualifies the bar, in Maes's eyes, as a "recommendation engine" or "merchant broker."
BusinessBots, the brainchild of computer game industry whiz Moses Ma, act every bit the part of shopbots, only in the enterprise space – i.e., business-to-business. Ma is mum about rollout plans, but hints that BusinessBots will further automate things like bidding for outsourcing contracts.
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