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Many of these commentors have it backwards. I know this because I’m actively working on a similar project at AWS. It isn’t that Amazon wants your data to help i
by agentofoblivion 8y ago
Many of these commentors have it backwards. I know this because I’m actively working on a similar project at AWS. It isn’t that Amazon wants your data to help it make decisions, so it builds a clever product to get all your data. On the contrary, Amazon has so much damned data and years of experience turning that into a valuable asset, that it has started experimenting with ways to sell that value to other customers. The idea that it wants some mom and pops retail data is just silly. Our biggest problems are scaling the internal services we built 5 years ago to handle all the growth.
SageMaker was a ground floor service and you should expect to see many more services built atop it.
- dmitriid 8y agoAmazon’s years of experience usually end up recommending you the same thing you just bought or just glanced at and never came back to the same category
- jbrooksuk 8y agoThis is very true. I'm forever being recommended things I searched for once for a parent or a friend that I have no other interest in.
- hopler 8y agoIf you were CEO of Amazon, what would you do? As much h as Amazon would love to have you but something you don't really need/want every day, it's not going to happen in substantial numbers. But they need something to keep brand awareness so you remember Amazon is the place to go for everything. Even complaining about the ads is still word of mouth for the store. Even of you don't like the recommendations, talking about Amazon is t bad PR for shoppers.
- agentofoblivion 8y agoIf you could solve the problem better, at scale, I’m sure they would pay you a lot of money to come solve it. Along with Netflix, Google, and all the other places that use standard algorithms designed to solve these sorts of problems.
- FakeComments 8y agoThis assumes internal politics are a meritocracy with appropriate levels of prototype funding. I’m not sure that’s accurate — and there’s plenty of ways for organizational structure to strangle good ideas.
- java-man 8y agointroduce temporal component into your prediction model, similar to this: [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_temporal_memory
- eitland 8y agoI probably wouldn't pass the interviews at most of these places :-P But if they pay me (well the consulting company I work for) enough I might fly in to hold some session along the lines of - don't annoy power users for no good reason (a certain ad delivery company with an attached search engine might be interested in this) - how to please all your customers at once - the forgotten art of making your software configurable. Bonus session: sensible defaults (audience: every modern software company) - your customers might not be as smart as you but most of them aren't braindead - and other notes from the field (same audience) - continue to be the best - by not nerfing your almost-perfect product (same audience) - not storing data you don't need to serve your users [0] - a practical guide to not getting fined by EU while also getting rid of dumb disclaimers that won't help you anyway when regulators get fed up (audience: everyone who has a GDPR popup with default opt in to one or more likely more than 100 different trackers) - why customers who have already bought a dishwasher won't buy a new one however much you advertise for them the rest of the month (and other great secrets from marketing 101). (Audience: most adtech companies and ad buyers) - the long-term benefits of serving ads that actually provides value - or why you'd want to sell some ads to other companies than scammy dating sites even if they are currently the easiest ones to fleece by showing expensive ads to customers who aren't interested at all. (Ad-tech companies, and that big one with the attached search engine in particular.) Master class: - 1/3 Living in a global world: Europeans are also on the Internet and knows when movie and series releases are + other shocking truths. - 2/3 increasing digital sales by putting the content up for sale - how to increase sales and customer happines all while reducing piracy just buy removing stupid geo limiting - 3/3 the synergistic effects of making your content available to customers who wants to pay for it while it is still hot [0]: Deliberately talking about users, not customers here to avoid the ever-helpful response of "if you are not paying you are not the customer, you are the product". And BTW, I agree, it just isn't always helpful.
- JOnAgain 8y agoIf people stopped buying things they just bought, it would probably stop recommending them.
- Shivetya 8y agobesides finding it odd how they select what to recommend me, including stuff I rated poorly that comes back up, the "See something new, every day" bar that displays shows item thumbnails that are not actually of items you will see if you click there. so while they do somethings well there are just some odd choices made with how they present product. oh, with regards to that "see something new", reported it and got back that those thumbnails were not meant to represent actual products. call me confused
- bob_theslob646 8y agoso is this the equivalent of software as a service?
- cheeze 8y agoI mean, isn't that half of what AWS sells?
- stingraycharles 8y agoPeople here mostly appear to be criticizing the quality of the algorithm, not the fact that Amazon wants the data.