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The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash., Dan Voelpel column: Jeff Bezos finds yet another way to mine data and sell you stuff(News Tribune, The (Tacoma, WA) (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) May 17--If you haven't found that special someone just yet, log onto amazon.com and order "Soulmates: Following Inner Guidance to the Relationship of Your Dreams." Or if you can hold your hormones awhile longer, let amazon.com find your soul mate for you. The online retailer -- who seems to know the perfect new products to pitch you every time you visit -- now thinks it can hook you up with a life partner. Based on what you buy. I heard Jeff Bezos say so this week. The founder and CEO of Amazon let slip during a question-and-answer session that his creative data manipulators have explored using Amazon's vast information storehouse to search the world for your "Electronic Soul Mate." By comparing your online buying habits with the gazillion other Amazon consumers "we say here is the person at Amazon who has the closest history to you in terms of purchasing, and, by the way, here are the five things that they have bought that you haven't." Bezos, clearly, wants to sell you those five things your soul mate bought that you haven't. But his revelation elicited the only burst of laughter from the crowd of more than 1,000 gathered for the Seattle Technology Alliance's 10th anniversary luncheon Monday at the Westin Hotel. Then the laughter faded into sort of a collective titter that seemed to indicate everyone simultaneously thinking, "Hmm, I'll bet Bezos could do it." And then wondering, "Omigosh, what have I bought lately on Amazon?" At least that's what I wondered. Who else would buy "Aristotle's Poetics for Screenwriters," a Cuisinart gold tone coffee filter and a pair of Champion royal blue, double dry boxer briefs? Bezos provided no additional details about Amazon's Electronic Soul Mate. No word on a launch date. No mention if you could specify a gender preference. Nothing about how consenting soul mates could arrange a face-to-face. I asked Craig Berman, Amazon spokesman, if there was more he could say about Electronic Soul Mate. "There isn't," Berman said. "That's about all I can tell you about it. We don't talk about stuff that is in the mix from a development (perspective). We don't speculate on anything that we are or aren't working on." But let's not underestimate Bezos. If he has proven anything in 11-plus years, he must have read the book on innovation. He wrote the original business plan for selling books on the Internet while riding shotgun in a 1988 Chevy Blazer his wife, Mackenzie, drove to Seattle from Texas. Look how that turned out. (No word from Amazon, however, on whether Jeff and Mackenzie met through a statistical analysis of online purchasing data.) Since 1995, Amazon has pioneered one-click ordering, recommending new products based on your past purchases, searching inside books before you buy, telling you what percentage of customers bought the product you're looking at after viewing the page, telling you what else customers bought who bought the product you're thinking about buying. Amazon even alerts you now when you're about to buy something you've already bought and might have forgotten. That service resulted in an immediate decrease in sales, Bezos said, because "not an insignificant number" of customers forget what they've bought. But the warnings build long-term customer loyalty. Now you can sign up for Amazon Prime -- for $79 you can get two-day delivery on all your orders for a year. That innovation, Bezos said, will lose money for a while too. But Amazon found that consumers who could afford to pay for two-day delivery wouldn't. "They felt it was overly indulgent," Bezos said. "So, now you can pay a fixed price for a year and get as much 'free' two-day delivery as you want." People once believed, he said, that gold was the source of wealth, but that's not true. "The source of wealth is ideas .... The source of wealth is invention," he said. "Innovation has always been part of our DNA (at Amazon)." If Amazon can use its DNA to get into your brain, maybe it can go through your brain to get into your heart -- and become the source of wealthier, healthier relationships. Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785 [email protected] |