Product Wars

I really love The DVD Wars, and I know that I’m not the only one…

During my recent visit to Tokyo, an executive with a major consumer electronics company actually brought a printout of the site’s front page to the meeting. He told me that the site was a regular hangout for him and for his colleagues within the company and within the industry. That’s pretty cool.

Now, the basic idea behind the site — providing insights into the relative sales of two or more products by amalgamating multiple pieces of data pulled from the Amazon catalog using the Amazon E-Commerce Service — has grown into eProductWars, a whole family of interesting comparisons.

You can easily see how well the three major console or handheld game systems are doing, check on the popularity of the three front-running operating systems,  MP3 players, satellite radio formats, or political books.

Spies call this kind of thing open source intelligence. Instead of digging through trash cans and conducting furtive meetings in sleazy bars, you can now discover all sorts of relevant, interesting, and useful information using some simple web services calls!

— Jeff;