Amazon: How Bezos built his data machine

The next challenge was to decide what to sell beyond books. They picked CDs and DVDs. Over the years, electronics, toys and clothing followed, as did overseas expansion. And all this time, Amazon was building a battalion of data-mining experts. Artificial intelligence expert Andreas Weigend was one of the first. Before joining, he had published more than 100 scientific articles, co-founded one of the first music recommendation systems, and worked on an application to analyse online trades in real-time.