wikked thoughts by Waqas Ahmed

This is what you’d get if Marie Barone ran the e-mail team.

Posted on April 10th, 2006 under Work. Comments: None

We did something stupid today.

Posted on April 3rd, 2006 under Work. Comments: None

I’m attending the Amazon web developer conference as I’m writing this. Long list of speakers for today, including Joel Spolsky and James Gosling.
See the details at the Amazon Web Services blog.

Posted on January 19th, 2005 under Work. Comments: None

Werner Vogels is our new CTO. He even has a cool blog. I hope he keeps up with it

Posted on January 13th, 2005 under Work. Comments: None

I want Amazon to offer RSS full text feeds for everything imaginable. There should be an RSS feed for each product detail page in multiple flavors so that you can subscribe to price changes, new reviews, availability, used prices etc. There should be an RSS feed for product categories and subcategories with filters supported so [...]

Posted on January 7th, 2005 under Work. Comments: None

Another great tool built using Amazon web services. Pricenoia lets you check prices for the same item (book, DVD etc.) on all the Amazon sites (.com, .ca, .uk etc.) while also showing you a price history.

However, it does miss out by not checking “used and new prices” from third party sellers. This A Camp CD [...]

Posted on December 15th, 2004 under Work. Comments: None

This is so cool. You’re standing in a store looking at a book or a CD and you wonder what the “real” price is (on Amazon.com of course). Until you manage to set up your cell phone to read the barcode and show you reviews on the Amazon site try www.amabuddy.com.

Posted on December 8th, 2004 under Work. Comments: None

Two very interesting articles on the “long tail” phenomenon of online sales for retailers like Amazon.com.
Venture blog has a post on the death of the 80/20 rule and Wired has an article about something very similar. Credit goes to Amazon’s personalization team for pioneering the use of product recommendations.

Posted on October 11th, 2004 under Work. Comments: None

A shameless plug for my employer. Come work for the Personalization team (or the P13N team as it’s known internally to give it a wam fuzzy feeling) at Amazon.com

We do really cool stuff. Honest. Take a look at this presentation on “Front Line Internet Analytics at Amazon.com“. It’s from a talk my boss gave at [...]

Posted on July 22nd, 2004 under Work. Comments: None