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BizBots, launched two years ago via a $5 million federal grant, is taking this view to its logical extreme by developing e-markets that aspire to what Ma calls "perfect transparency," in which each member can instantaneously act on every last piece of industry data. Ma's JAM is a real-time 24-hour automated "market of markets" that uses agents, or "bots"--software that travels through cyberspace performing often complex tasks--to link many sites in a given business sector, creating one Universal Market. JAM automates even very human processes, such as haggling, quality estimation and reputation management, on its way to delivering optimal deals for all concerned.
It is a beautiful vision whose rewards, friction reduction-wise, would be considerable. Of every $100 in chemicals deals, Ma estimates, $15 goes to marketing and sales costs, such as ads, travel and other Willy Loman expenses. These could drop 90% if product lines and updated inventories were sitting in universal markets for your customers' software agents to sift through.
Not bad--if he can really pull that off. BizBots is currently creating e-market pilots for the chemicals, financial-services, transportation and bandwidth arenas; so far their potential customers seem intrigued but wary. But given what the Web did for consumer commerce, Ma likes his chances. "This is bigger than just businesses," he says, scrolling lovingly through his alphabetized list of 300 target sectors, from Accounting to Watches and Clocks. "It's about owning entire markets." Joe Procurement and his broker pals will never know what hit them.