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New Amazon Patents on Content Personalization
theodp writes "Defending its decision to concoct recommendations to steer customers to buy items at Amazon's new Apparel Store, a spokeswoman said Amazon "felt it would be evident to people that since the store was so new, we wouldn't have the transaction history to create database similarities." But in this just-published patent applicaton, Amazon earlier told the USPTO it's able to use product viewing histories to determine the similarity or relatedness between products for which little or no purchase history data exists. So which claim should you believe?"
for those of you who (like me) dislikes amazons use of patents, show it by buying your books elsewhere. two good examples of elsewhere are:
from europe: www.bol.com
from the us: www.barnesandnoble.com
time to put your money where your mouth is, of something to that effect...
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
For instance, the Tattered Cover is a great place to buy books on the Internet.
While Amazon does everything in their power to relieve you of choice, the Tattered Cover actually stands up for your rights.
Make Bezo get a real job.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
They can predict using other histories and a small bit of data about the new store.
Here's how it works... they already have your book and CD data, along with everybody else's. When somebody who has bought a Britney Spears album buys Levi's Jeans, it can cross link Britney with Levi's. Anybody else who has bought Britney music in the past is now presumed to like Levi's jeans as a result, until other data comes along to contradict that.
Yeah, the initial predictions will be wildly inaccurate, but quickly they will amass the base data with which to get some close-enough returns.
One little piece of info Amazon had better be quickly figuring out... which users are boys and which are girls.