INFOBazaar: Electronic Shopping and Service Providing for the masses

Electronic shopping will be a large industry within a few years. Both the interactive TV and on-line service providers are rushing to bring this application to the home. Systems that have been built so far have a number of serious flaws that will limit their success. They are designed to support only a few vendors when vigorous competition to produce innovative "virtual" store design is needed. They are meant for efficient directed shopping, while many shoppers prefer to browse. The social component of shopping has been completely ignored by these systems. To be more interesting to browse we need to include not only vendors but also information providers. This thesis will describe the INFOBazaar system designed to solve these deficiencies and others. The INFOBazaar is a free-form, ever changing collection of vendors of goods, information, and services that encourages directed shopping and browsing that introduces socializing to electronic shopping. After expressing the ideas behind this system, the results of building a prototype interface will be examined. The prototype system, despite the limitations of the development environment, successfully recreates important aspects of the functionality of the INFOBazaar. Thesis Advisor: Walter Bender, Associate Director for Information Technology MIT Media Laboratory