Overheard in the tech blogosphere » Web services

Overheard – Origins of Amazon Mechanical Turk

Margaret Rouse — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 15:24:29 +0000

“Mechanical Turk began life as a service that Amazon itself needed…Amazon had millions of Web pages that described individual products, but it wanted to weed out the duplicate pages.”

Jason Pontin, Artificial Intelligence, With Help From the Humans

Amazon makes money from Mechanical Turk by charging companies 10 percent of the price of a successfully completed HIT. For simple HITs that cost less than 1 cent, Amazon charges half a cent. ChaCha intends to make money the way most other search companies do: by charging advertisers for contextually relevant links and advertisements.

If you haven’t heard about ChaCha yet, it’s a free voice search service for mobile phones. It’s interesting that one of ChaCha’s investors is Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment firm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. According to marketing literature:

ChaCha, a free mobile answers service, allows users to call 1-800-2ChaCha™ or text questions to ChaCha (242242™) on mobile phones and receive answers within minutes. Its unique advertising solutions provide pay-for-performance opportunities for advertisers to precisely target and embed their messages within millions of text conversations.

Aha! So maybe Mechanical Turk isn’t so much about enterprise search — it’s really about mobile voice search! Makes sense. Amazon would have a revenue stream by serving highly targeted ads along with the search results.

Overheard: Application developers are voting SOA with their feet

Margaret Rouse — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:38:53 +0000

“This morning I received a message from TechTarget telling me that SearchWebServices.com is renaming itself to SearchSOA.com. According to TechTarget the move is in line with a shift of attitudes and efforts within the application development community. As I’ve written many times, SOA is not Web Services. This move is a signal that application developers are voting with their feet. I wish TechTarget well.”

Frank Cohen, SOA and Web Services In The Development Community

Overheard: Fast Infoset explained

Margaret Rouse — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:16:08 +0000

To effectively improve web service performance, you need to reduce the overhead associated with parsing, serializing, and transmitting XML-based data. Fast Infoset is an open, standards-based solution for doing just that.

Young Yang, Boost Web Service Performance in JAX-WS with Fast Infoset