Go ask Alice.com if you want to buy toilet paper

Go ask Alice.com if you want to buy toilet paper

NEW YORK — If shopping for household essentials such as toilet paper and soap isn’t your favorite activity, a new Web site might eliminate the task — while saving you cash.

The recently launched Alice.com lets people buy all manner of necessities from different manufacturers. There are about 6,000 items to choose from so far. The site keeps an eye on the products you use, and reminds you when it’s time to replenish your stock.

Because Alice is run as a platform for manufacturers to connect directly to consumers, rather than as a traditional online retailer, founders Brian Wiegand and Mark McGuire say they can keep prices low and ship all items for free.

Of course, Alice benefits, too. Manufacturers pay the company for prime placement on Alice.com or to have samples, coupons and other marketing pitches offered to customers.

Wiegand and McGuire’s last startup, comparison shopping site Jellyfish.com, was bought by Microsoft Corp. in 2007 and has since been incorporated into its new search engine, Bing.

Their idea for Alice sprung from what Wiegand and McGuire saw as the lack of easy ways to buy household necessities online. As McGuire jokingly tells it, “we really wanted to sell toilet paper on the Internet.”

Alice, which is based in Madison, Wis., isn’t the first to offer these types of products over the Web. Drugstore.com Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. are competitors, and Amazon offers a “subscribe and save” service.

But Alice is streamlining things by letting manufacturers sell straight to shoppers. Product makers decide what to sell, set prices and collect all the proceeds from sales. Alice stocks products in a centralized warehouse, where workers pack the stuff up and ship it to buyers.

Group nears delivery of $1M Netflix prize

NEW YORK — A multinational group of researchers, scientists and engineers are close to winning a $1 million challenge to improve Netflix Inc.’s system of recommending movies that its subscribers might like.

The online movie rental company had launched the Netflix Prize contest in 2006 to improve its predictions by at least 10 percent. The idea was to farm out valuable research to thousands of enthusiastic participants.

A team called BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos submitted its solution recently, saying it has improved the predictions for what movies people will enjoy by 10.05 percent.

But the group must wait before being declared winners. The team’s solution kicked off a 30-day period during which other contestants can enter their best work and possibly beat the BellKor team’s threshold. Netflix spokesman Steve Swasey said, however, that the company had yet to receive any other submission breaking the 10 percent threshold.

There are 49,430 participants from 184 countries taking part in what Swasey called a “fierce global competition.”

BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos consists of two researchers at AT&T Inc., two engineers from Montreal, a research scientist at Yahoo Inc. and two machine-learning researchers from Austria. If this team wins, each of the seven members will get $142,857.

Chris Volinsky, director of statistics research and a member of the team, said Netflix has presented a really interesting analytic problem that’s couched in something everyone can relate to: movies.

And, he adds, it’s not about the money, rather, it’s an academic pursuit that’s also been “a lot of fun” in the competitive sense.

Associated Press