MIS Research Center Seminar Series
8:30 AM - 11:00 AM
1st Floor Auditorium, Carlson School of Management

Abstract

Information technology innovations have had a dramatic impact on the capabilities that retailers have to offer products and that consumers have to search and find products. Dr. Andreas Weigend's presentation will focus on the idea of the “search society,” a new technology-driven business world in which we observe the costs of searching to have fallen so far and the new capabilities to have expanded so rapidly that new perspectives are needed to fully understand the opportunities. Some of the foundational observations that support the new perspective include the need to go beyond “faith” and “gut feeling” in various marketing program investment contexts on the Internet to the exploitation and analysis of rich and even real-time data to support effective decision making. This is supported by the digital convergence of Internet and mobile capabilities, universal and generic digital processing, and the technologies that support this business environment.

Despite the new and powerful search technologies that are available on the desktop, in the enterprise, and on the web (including X1 and Google's desktop), the technologies that support “horizontal search” and “crawling” strategies will not always locate the appropriate search materials in an effective manner. He will discuss vertical search in travel (e.g., Mobissimo, which provides meta-search services for the online travel industry) and in online dating.

In addition, Andreas will also be addressing a number of other related issues related to technology-based search capabilities and their broader social impacts. They include:

• In the marketing operations of firms, how will the new search technologies affect the balance of consumer and seller power in the marketplace? Will consumers be the new drivers of strategy for the firm? Will their purchase preferences be revealed or stated? What will be the price of privacy?
• What roles will these new kinds of technology-based strategies have on organizational culture within firms? Will the technologies support nearly real-time measurement of marketing performance for firm?
• Can the firm be instrumented to show performance in terms of increasing fine-grained strategic objectives? Can the firm become more “experimental” in terms of trying out new ways to maximize the value of its access to the Internet and mobile markets with their fast feedback loops?

Andreas will be using his recent experiences at Amazon.com and in his consulting activities in North America and China to illustrate some of the changes and transformations that he is forecasting will become more pervasive. He welcomes interaction with the audience, and offered to respond to participants' ideas about the future business models that new search technologies will make possible, and provide perspectives that will help participants to be better able to evaluate the future directions themselves. We also encourage Webcast and video link participants to email their questions.

Format

This seminar begins at 8:30 and ends at 11:00, separated by a break. It includes an open-mike discussion with the seminar attendees and the speaker.

Biography

Andreas Weigend, who served as Amazon.com's Chief Scientist until January 2004, is an expert in data mining and computational marketing. As an independent consultant, he now helps data-intensive organizations make strategic decisions based on analytics and metrics. His career as a scientist, data strategist and quantitative methods innovator gives him a unique ability to bridge the gap between industry and academia. His applied research is in fields including behavioral economics, time series analysis, and computational finance.

As the Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, he developed data mining techniques including session-based marketing, and designed applications ranging from heuristic cross-selling to customer network and lifecycle analysis. In 1999, he co-founded MoodLogic, voted "best music organizer" by C|NET. He also was the Chief Scientist of ShockMarket, creating information products and trading models based on real-time data from online brokerages, leveraging principles of behavioral finance.

He has published more than one hundred scientific papers and co-authored six books. He received an IBM Partnership Award and a National Science Foundation Career Award. He currently teaches the graduate course Data Mining and Electronic Commerce at Stanford University, and the executive course Technology, Information and Innovation in Shanghai. Prior, he served as a full-time faculty member at New York University 's Stern School of Business, and at the University of Colorado at Boulder .

His consulting focuses on enabling individuals and organization to make better decisions based on the analysis of behavioral data. Clients include Alibaba.com, Bank of America, BV Capital, Goldman Sachs, Hubert Burda Media, J.P. Morgan, Match.com. Morgan Stanley, PlanetOut, Siemens, Swiss International Air Lines, UBS, and Yahoo.

Andreas Weigend studied electrical engineering, physics, and philosophy at Karlsruhe , Cambridge (Trinity College), and Bonn University . He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in physics in 1991, and was a researcher at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) and at the Santa Fe Institute. He lives in San Francisco, Shanghai, Seattle and at weigend.com.

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