CNET Channel (and Me)

You probably know CNET, but do you know CNET Channel? Indirectly, you do, because CNET Channel's content appears not only on CNET but also on Amazon.com, CDW, CompUSA, Dell, eBay, Gateway, HP, MSN Shopping, Yahoo! Shopping, and hundreds of other sites around the world.

CNET Channel's content is product data: detailed specs, images, descriptions, and related-product links. This is the stuff you see on product pages and comparisons all over the Web. Without it, millions of e-commerce sites would be empty shells.

CNET Channel's database comprises more than 2 million computer and consumer-electronics products, growing at 45,000 new products per month. If you're an e-commerce site, having manufacturers spray this information at you from all sides is not an answer. The scale of data is a problem, but the show-stopper is rampant inconsistency in the content provided, specs included/omitted, and terminology used. It's the e-commerce Tower of Babel.

And thus the opportunity for a win-win: CNET Channel does the heavy lifting of acquiring, normalizing, and internationalizing a world's worth of product data; each customer pays a small fraction of the total cost to get the full benefit.

Put another way, in an era of infinite shelf space, CNET Channel allows sites to keep the cost of merchandising that space under control.

I entered the picture at the end of 2004, when CNET acquired a company I co-founded, ExactChoice. We specialized in creating software applications that did analytics and mining of complex product data. Now, as CNET Channel's Analytic Products Group, we have the largest product-data operation in the world as our foundation.

The CNET Web-site people are carrying forward one of ExactChoice's example applications, a personalized computer recommender. Meanwhile, as VP of Analytic Products, I am in charge of defining and executing a new line of business and a series of products for CNET Channel. Stay tuned.

Comments

[brad peek]

Steve,
Although I've enjoyed playing with the last.fm service... I've found myself still returning to my launch.yahoo.com radio. Granted as part of my ISP, I don't have to deal w/ the commercials, but it appears to allow greater "granularity" in rating music and the ability to include and rate multiple genres during setup. At least at this point, it feels like a better experience.

thanks, jbp