Info 202 Fall 2011

When tracking one’s expenses, there are now plenty of applications either on your computer or smart phone to help you track it. A more advanced application might even save the trouble of keying in the data manually. You would only need to take a picture of your receipt and it would fetch the data automatically. However, a new service called Slice has brought it to a different level. By collecting your electronic receipts, it would organize your shopping history for you without you even clicking a button.

            Here’s how it works. First, you register the email address that you use for shopping. You can also choose to register one on Slice and use it instead. When you receive electronic receipts, either from shopping online or at a physical store that provides them, Slice gathers information from your inbox without getting your confidential information and organizes it automatically. The user need only to login to the website and all their purchase information, including detail descriptions of the goods and shipping status, are waiting for their review.

            It sounds so amazing, however, Ann from The New York Times hit some snags when trying it out. While Slice also displays images of your purchased items, some of them turned out to be the wrong one on Ann’s page. According to Slice’s executive, some retailers provide truncated descriptions and Slice sometimes comes up with the wrong item when searching. This reminds me of the inter-enterprise data integration issue mentioned in class. Slice is currently working with over 1000 merchants and seem to be only parsing their ware info from the web. It would be a tremendous amount of work considering each of them might change their website layout once in a while. Right now they have the lowest level of agreement on implementation model. If Slice wants to improve on this, they could ask their partners to export a fixed schema version of their product catalogs. This would reduce the workload and error rate in retrieving item descriptions. If Slice becomes dominant enough, they might be able to define a spec and ask all partners to follow it, just like what Wal-Mart does. No matter how successful Slice becomes, it will be interesting to see how this issue develop.

More information is provided from: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/slice-aims-to-organize-your-electronic-shopping/?scp=1&sq=organize&st=cse