4 ms·

Here's my take on it and someone can chime in if I'm wrong on the details... Imagine you're a startup/inventor that manufactures a widget that you'd like to se

by jasode 10y ago

Here's my take on it and someone can chime in if I'm wrong on the details... Imagine you're a startup/inventor that manufactures a widget that you'd like to sell to the mass market, you could either (1) try to sell direct from your website (2) get on the shelves of national stores like Best Buy, Target, Walmart, etc. The "shelves" include the real ones at their brick & mortar stores and the virtual shelves on their online websites. (1) is hard to attract shoppers since nobody knows about your low-traffic website. Also, you'd have to handle the hassle of fulfillment yourself. Amazon Launchpad leverages their competency in global logistics to do this for you. (2) is difficult to get meetings with corporate retail buyers and convince them to carry your product. Sometimes, there are also "slotting fees" (sometimes aka "bribes") to get prime shelf locations (eye level vs the floor.) What Amazon is doing is opening up their "shelves" which includes the prime pixels real estate on their front page to promote startups' products. They are actively marketing your product. This is a different initiative from passively showing the 3rd-party marketplace sellers on amazon product pages. However, to filter out the low quality junk and avoid every garage warrior trying to sell their flavor of homemade barbeque sauce, the products have to come from "the approved network"[1] that includes firms such as a16z, Accel Partners, etc. If we scan that list of affiliates, we'd expect the products vetted by them to be "cutting edge" and "innovative". What's not specified in all the press releases and FAQ about Amazon Launchpad is the type of payment structure Amazon expects. Is it negiotiated on a product-by-product basis? Is it flat percentage? [1]https://www.amazon.com/gp/launchpad/network https://www.amazon.com/gp/launchpad/network [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slotting_fee

dandare 10y ago
I wish there was an AI bot that would summarize any marketing speak to such a useful summary like you did. Also I wonder what would such bot translate my product description to :D
- misiti3780 10y ago
  that is a nice idea, but i think we are unfortunately years away from that. i dont have time at the moment, but take this article and run it though this state of the art algorithm and see what comes out: https://research.googleblog.com/2016/08/text-summarization-with-tensorflow.html https://research.googleblog.com/2016/08/text-summarization-w...
- ycombinatorMan 10y ago
  This is more than just a summray
- deepGem 10y ago
  This is what the NLP community would call 'abstractive summary'. It fundamentally requires generating new sentences - which is an excruciatingly impossible task for current AI tech, at least as far as my understanding goes. The closest tech is the sequence-to-sequence deep networks. I am yet to dig deeper into this subject.
  - lrem 10y ago
    There was recently a Google result here[1] where they were able to summarise a paragraph into one sentence. It looked pretty convincing. How does your "excruciatingly impossible" stand when confronted with that? Were the paragraphs in that result particularly easy to summarise? Does the problem's difficulty grow super-linearly with length of the text? Is there something else in the way? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353955
    - daveguy 10y ago
      I would love to see that on some actual text (rather than published "samples"). I expect the more text it has to deal with the more unintelligible the result.
      - lrem 10y ago
        That's intuitive. What isn't is how much harder it becomes with longer text. Imagine there is an abstract measure of "smartness" of your algorithm (that would intuitively have some relations to your model size, teaching sample size and so on). My question could be worded as "what is the asymptotic smartness complexity of the summarisation problem?" Btw, I'm not aware of existence of such a measure, which I take as a signal it's infeasible to formulate (or I'm just ignorant).
  - derefr 10y ago
    Is language generation (following syntax and grammar and etc.) the hard part? Because personally, I'd be fine with a summary in the form of a series of small concept-token-graphs, as long as it was indeed a series of such graphs (akin to sentences, arranged into paragraphs), instead of one big jumbled graph.
- kristianc 10y ago
  PG's heuristic for this is 'write like you are explaining to a friend.' The problem is that that kind of clarity is rarely achieved on a corporate website because Conway's Law applies as much to marketing as it does to software design.
  - Excluse 10y ago
    For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
- andrei_says_ 10y ago
  A Mechanical Turk-based system could be a good middle ground.
softwarefounder 10y ago
"garage warrior" +1
mintplant 10y ago
> However, to filter out the low quality junk and avoid every garage warrior trying to sell their flavor of homemade barbeque sauce, the products have to come from "the approved network"[1] that includes firms such as a16z, Accel Partners, etc. In other words, Amazon will give preferential advertising space to those well-connected with the Silicon Valley elite.
egypturnash 10y ago
> the products have to come from "the approved network"[1] This network also includes crowdfunding sites. Kickstarter's been promoting their involvement in this a lot for the past couple months. I'll probably see if this deal can get my recently-kickstarted graphic novel some extra promotion once it's shipping, since I'm already planning to use Amazon for fulfillment anyway. Your thing has to be about a month away from shipping to consumers; if they allowed more of a lead time on that I'd have an application in progress. (https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/1920 https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/1920)
thaumasiotes 10y ago
> Sometimes, there are also "slotting fees" (sometimes aka "bribes") to get prime shelf locations (eye level vs the floor.) You say that like the floor is a bad location. Everyone can see and reach the floor; above eye level is where you don't want to be.

by jasode 10y ago

dandare 10y ago

I wish there was an AI bot that would summarize any marketing speak to such a useful summary like you did. Also I wonder what would such bot translate my product description to :D

misiti3780 10y ago
that is a nice idea, but i think we are unfortunately years away from that. i dont have time at the moment, but take this article and run it though this state of the art algorithm and see what comes out: https://research.googleblog.com/2016/08/text-summarization-with-tensorflow.html https://research.googleblog.com/2016/08/text-summarization-w...
ycombinatorMan 10y ago
This is more than just a summray
deepGem 10y ago
This is what the NLP community would call 'abstractive summary'. It fundamentally requires generating new sentences - which is an excruciatingly impossible task for current AI tech, at least as far as my understanding goes. The closest tech is the sequence-to-sequence deep networks. I am yet to dig deeper into this subject.
- lrem 10y ago
  There was recently a Google result here[1] where they were able to summarise a paragraph into one sentence. It looked pretty convincing. How does your "excruciatingly impossible" stand when confronted with that? Were the paragraphs in that result particularly easy to summarise? Does the problem's difficulty grow super-linearly with length of the text? Is there something else in the way? [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353955 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353955
  - daveguy 10y ago
    I would love to see that on some actual text (rather than published "samples"). I expect the more text it has to deal with the more unintelligible the result.
    - lrem 10y ago
      That's intuitive. What isn't is how much harder it becomes with longer text. Imagine there is an abstract measure of "smartness" of your algorithm (that would intuitively have some relations to your model size, teaching sample size and so on). My question could be worded as "what is the asymptotic smartness complexity of the summarisation problem?" Btw, I'm not aware of existence of such a measure, which I take as a signal it's infeasible to formulate (or I'm just ignorant).
- derefr 10y ago
  Is language generation (following syntax and grammar and etc.) the hard part? Because personally, I'd be fine with a summary in the form of a series of small concept-token-graphs, as long as it was indeed a series of such graphs (akin to sentences, arranged into paragraphs), instead of one big jumbled graph.
kristianc 10y ago
PG's heuristic for this is 'write like you are explaining to a friend.' The problem is that that kind of clarity is rarely achieved on a corporate website because Conway's Law applies as much to marketing as it does to software design.
- Excluse 10y ago
  For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
andrei_says_ 10y ago
A Mechanical Turk-based system could be a good middle ground.

softwarefounder 10y ago

"garage warrior" +1

mintplant 10y ago

> However, to filter out the low quality junk and avoid every garage warrior trying to sell their flavor of homemade barbeque sauce, the products have to come from "the approved network"[1] that includes firms such as a16z, Accel Partners, etc. In other words, Amazon will give preferential advertising space to those well-connected with the Silicon Valley elite.

egypturnash 10y ago

> the products have to come from "the approved network"[1] This network also includes crowdfunding sites. Kickstarter's been promoting their involvement in this a lot for the past couple months. I'll probably see if this deal can get my recently-kickstarted graphic novel some extra promotion once it's shipping, since I'm already planning to use Amazon for fulfillment anyway. Your thing has to be about a month away from shipping to consumers; if they allowed more of a lead time on that I'd have an application in progress. (https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/1920 https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/1920)

thaumasiotes 10y ago

> Sometimes, there are also "slotting fees" (sometimes aka "bribes") to get prime shelf locations (eye level vs the floor.) You say that like the floor is a bad location. Everyone can see and reach the floor; above eye level is where you don't want to be.