Bulletin Board

A collection of short articles about technology. Topics include boosting sales with a Web site affiliate, emotional computers, and gathering customer data with prepaid phone cards.

Shark Bytes

Internet vendor Rudy Socha is a flouter of norms. He doesn't promote his Web site. He discards customer data. And he gives away money. Lots of money. Yet in spite of--or more accurately, because of--those practices, Socha expects his Dolphin Whale & Shark Gift Store to sell more than $7 million worth of marine-themed jewelry, books, and gifts by year's end. His buyers will be people who click to Dolphin Whale from the sites of wildlife-oriented organizations--many of them nonprofits. The deal: The wildlife organizations get a copy of Dolphin Whale's site branded just for them plus 10% of each order placed through those sites. Dolphin Whale gets a steady stream of visitors with expendable income and an interest in all things flippered.

Dolphin Whale was conceived a year ago by Socha and Carolyn Darrow, single parents who live near each other in north central Ohio. Socha was intrigued by Amazon.com's affiliate model, which rewards Web sites that send customers to the on-line bookstore with a percentage of the orders those referrals generate. "They're tied in to 70,000 Web pages," says Socha. "We decided rather than having to deal with all the accounting and computer programs we'd need to track that many sites, we'd just go after the large nonprofits." He and Darrow are now pursuing for-profit organizations as well and are negotiating with AT&T and Discover Card.

Dolphin Whale went on-line in March as a stand-alone site with no promotion; in May the owners created their first affiliated site--for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The ASPCA's Web store is a slightly customized version of Dolphin Whale: the nonprofit's name has been added to the home page, and the book section has been removed. (The ASPCA can sell only books reviewed by its own staff.) Orders placed on the site travel over the Internet to Dolphin Whale's fulfillment house; the company automatically sets aside 10% of payments for the ASPCA. Customers can also make donations through the store.

Socha and Darrow are trying out a few other novel ideas, including trolling for suppliers on the site (they've signed up two so far) and holding drawings for $25,000 every time they sell $1 million worth of merchandise. Most Web businesses that offer prizes do so in order to collect customer data, but Dolphin Whale is accepting entries only through the mail and trashing them after each contest. "We don't want to maintain a database of someone else's clients," says Socha, referring to the nonprofits' memberships. "I personally feel uncomfortable with that, and I don't want it to become an issue down the road." --Leigh Buchanan

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A Motherboard's Love

In the future, PCs, like presidents, may be able to feel your pain. Or at least they'll recognize it, thanks to new software that lets computers observe and react to users' emotions.

Such "emotional intelligence" is the subject of Rosalind Picard's book Affective Computing (MIT Press, 1997). Picard, NEC Development Professor of Computers and Communications at MIT's Media Lab, argues that our work lives would be more productive and humane if computers could read and respond to our moods. Say a new computer-based training program has an employee on the verge of tears. A PC reading his or her expression might respond by slowing the program's pace.

Affective computing software can "sense" emotions in several ways. It might, for example, work with a digital video camera that records when a user smiles or frowns. Picard is also experimenting with glasses that track eyebrow movements and a mouse that senses how hard it is being clicked.

Those devices feed information to a system that contains rules about nonverbal cues (for example, that a furrowed brow means confusion). Since people have different expressions, the software adapts itself over time to a user's signals. Taking into account the task being performed, the computer can then determine the best way to help that user. For example, it could learn to delay the delivery of E-mail from a user's ex-husband when she starts gritting her teeth, indicating that she's in a foul mood. Affective computers will also be able to tailor how they present information on the fly, offering to switch to graphs or charts when users confronted by long lines of numbers start tearing their hair out.

Associate editor Emily Esterson spoke recently with Picard about the potential of empathetic machines:

Q: Why would we want computers to be emotionally intelligent?

A: Most people use computers like tools. But in the next 20 years, more people will delegate more complicated tasks to computers. For example, they may ask software to go out on the Web and find the best deal on a specific piece of furniture. When you're dealing with software that doesn't necessarily wait for you to tell it what to do but that takes initiative and offers suggestions, it behooves that software to have emotional intelligence--decision-making and prioritizing skills.

Q: How is affective computing different from artificial intelligence?

A: Artificial-intelligence agents don't recognize what a person is feeling. They may watch what you're typing, but they don't know how to apply emotion when it comes to acting on it. In affective computing, the software has the ability to see not only what you typed but also how you typed it, and to know what that means. For example, you might have pounded the keys, which would tell the computer that you're angry.

Q: How will the way we interact with emotionally intelligent computers differ from the way we interact with the insensitive variety?

A: The key thing is that the software has the potential to adapt to a person. As the computer learns about you, it will seem a little smarter each day. It will make work a more engaging and productive experience.

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Will Work for Food

David Lessnick was hungry for technology expertise. Mark Farrar was just plain hungry. Theirs was a match made in heaven.

In 1996, Lessnick founded the Custom Cook, a $300,000 company in Las Vegas that dispatches professional chefs to cook and freeze dinners in customers' kitchens. When his customer base hit 100, Lessnick began looking around for an experienced information-technology person to build a database. Unfortunately, everyone he talked to charged too much.

Then, last December, a friend introduced Lessnick to Farrar, who was launching his own Internet company. Farrar, a self-described workaholic with no time to cook, agreed to do the work in exchange for two weeks' worth of meals each month.

Farrar spent 30 hours over three months creating a database that does everything from tracking inventory to scheduling home visits. He also created a sales-automation tool that let Lessnick display digital images of his delicacies to customers and enter their selections into a laptop.

Lessnick sold the company in June to Joseph Giancaspro, who so far has forged a deal with Farrar in cash, not carryout. However, the new owner said he "would not rule anything out." --Shane McLaughlin

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Something for Something

Prepaid phone cards make great giveaways, but they're also good for getting something back: customer information. In the past someone dialing the toll-free number imprinted on a phone card heard only a greeting. Now companies that distribute the cards can ask users to answer a handful of questions in exchange for free minutes.