Four short links: 11 July 2016
Chatbot Challenges, Chatbots For All The Wrong Reasons, Chinese Counterfeits, and Virtual Discounts
- Ten Challenges in Highly Interactive Dialog Systems (A Paper a Day) — The second challenge is to layer different personalities or behaviour styles on top of the same basic functionality, and the third challenge is to enrich interaction behaviour. A good example of this is backchanneling (feedback given while someone else is talking “ok,” “yeah,” “uh-huh,” and so-on).
- Wrong Narrative, Wrong Mindset, Wrong Solutions — “Normal” people do not care about issues being faced by the apps developers. If you are not a developer, investor, or journalist, chances are, you do not spend a minute of your day thinking about dwindling app store revenues, worsening app discovery problems, or the fact that an average person downloads no new apps every month. So, if the motivation behind building a bot feels like something your non-techie friends and relatives don’t care about, it is safe to drop the bot product altogether.
- Amazon’s Chinese Counterfeiting Problem (CNBC) — Sales from Chinese-based sellers more than doubled in 2015 on Amazon’s marketplaces, while the company’s total revenue increased 20%. And recently, Amazon even registered with the Federal Maritime Commission to provide ocean freight, simplifying the process for Chinese companies to ship goods directly to Amazon fulfillment centers, cutting out costs and inefficiencies. […] Critics say Amazon hasn’t put the necessary checks in place to manage the influx of counterfeits. Reminds me of how YouTube achieved critical mass by ignoring copyright, then got pious and law-abiding only when there was enough volume to monetize.
- Quantity Discounts on a Virtual Good — The results of a massive pricing experiment at King Digital Entertainment […] involving more than 14 million consumers. […] We found remarkably little impact on revenue, either positively or negatively. There was virtually no increase in the quantity of customers making a purchase; all the observed changes occurred for customers who already were buyers. These and other surprizing findings.
