Mancini to boost eBay's innovation
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InfoWorld - EBay has big plans to provide more programming tools like new SDKs and APIs to its community of about 45,000 third-party developers.
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Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) is making its iTunes service a little more user friendly, by teaming up with eBay&#39;s (Nasdaq: EBAY) PayPal to facilitate payments.
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Auction site eBay is enjoying continued growth thanks to increased global sales and the success of PayPal.
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(InfoWorld) - As it battles competitors like Google and Amazon.com for the hearts and minds of application programmers, eBay this week will hold its biggest annual event for these computer professionals, its 2007 eBay Developers Conference, in Boston. This year the conference's theme is to "bring eBay anywhere." The focus will be onÂ motivating developers to build applicationsÂ that extend eBay's e-commerce services to third-party Web sites and new hardware devices. This emphasis shows that eBay, like other Internet companies, acknowledges it needs to adapt to a new world in which millions of people publish blogs and contribute to Web sites with text, photos and videos. With people devoting significant portions of their online time to maintaining and reading blogs, uploading and viewing videos, and posting and rating news articles, eBay must take its e-commerce services wherever users gather. To that end, on Monday eBay will introduce services and tools designed to let developers put eBay functionality in external sites, such as blogs and social networks, and in non-PC devices, like mobile phones and televisions. eBay, like most other major Internet companies, knows it can benefit greatly from allowing and helping external developers create Web applications and tools that extend and enhance the functionality of its sites and online services. While it's good for eBay to embrace Web 2.0 trends, such as application mashups and user-generated content, it should also focus on more basic issues that need attention, according to developers and analysts. "I'm very satisfied with the eBay Developers Program, but there's room for improvement," David Pesta, an eBay developer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, said. For instance, high fees continue to repel sellers from eBay's marketplace, leading them to set up their own stores or migrating to other, less expensive sites, Pesta said. A developer effort such as the one planned for this week should be combined with fee reductions, Pesta said. "Otherwise I'd have certain doubts about this effort's success," said Pesta, whose Auction Zealot application automates and simplifies eBay seller processes. There are also occasional kinks in eBay's backend systems. Pesta's pet peeve is when a seller lists a product and it takes several hours for eBay to index its keywords. In that interval, the product fails to show up in eBay search engine results, Pesta said. This affects users of Auction Zealot and of other seller applications. "This keyword indexing problem is one they need to get worked out," he said. John Andrews, an industry analyst with Evans Data, praises the eBay Developers Program as the best overall for its breadth, but points out that Google and Microsoft offer better programming tools. eBay also needs to significantly beef up its developer ranks, because other companies have attracted larger numbers of programmers, he said. The more developers eBay has in its program, the more innovative applications will be created to enhance its online services. "It's important for eBay to grow that developer base," Andrews said. The company has had its eBay Developers Program since 2000 and about 50,000 external developers have signed up for it. EBay's PayPal online payment unit has about 260,000 registered developers in its program. At this week's event, eBay expects about 500 developers to attend, a fraction of the 5,000 that flocked to Google's recent Developer Day, held in 10 cities around the world. Speakers will include eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and John Donahoe, president of eBay Marketplaces. Pesta will not be in attendance, nor will Dave Moniz, a developer who lives in southern Massachusetts, within driving distance of the event's venue. However, neither could come up with a good enough reason to attend, even though they seem like the type of developers that eBay should be attracting to the event. Both launched their applications early this year and both are active and satisfied eBay developers. Moniz, an eBay merchant for about seven years whose software store is called Generous Listings, wrote an application for himself to automate eBay searches. In January, he launched a version of it on the Web called Automated Searches for others to use. While delighted with the eBay Developers Program so far, he's interested in having eBay make more programming functions available to external developers so that he can add more features to Automated Searches, he said. It remains to be seen how excited developers will be with what eBay has in store for this week. Among the new services eBay will introduce is an API (application programming interface) to allow bidding on eBay from outside of its Web site. In addition to this Bidding API, as it's formally known, the company will also announce Shopping Web Services, a suite of APIs that accelerates searching on eBay and contains tools for creating buyer applications. Also on Monday, eBay will introduce Client Alerts, which it describes as "lightweight, near real time" notifications about marketplace activity. New JavaScript and Flash developer centers are also coming online. On the PayPal side, a new Certified Developer Program will allow developers to take a test and receive special credentials and inclusion in an official directory. Moreover, new mobile APIs will allow merchants to use PayPal's mobile checkout process. Finally, eBay's comparison shopping site Shopping.com, plans to release a revamped API in this year's third quarter with an enhanced interface and tools for faster implementations. The eBay Developers Conference ends Wednesday, and will be followed by eBay Live, the company's annual conference for merchants, from Thursday through Saturday. Both are being held at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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John Donahoe tries to make eBay easier to use for its shoppers and sellers â and more attractive to investors.
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It has been clear to investors for some time that eBay Inc. has been losing the luster that turned the online auctioneer into an e-commerce bellwether. Now, CEO Meg Whitman is finally acknowledging things have been off kilter and is hoping to set things right by raising fees on the online stores that had been diverting traffic from eBay's auctions.
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Hoping to not simply be the site notorious as an "eBay for 0days," Swiss-based WabiSabi Labi plans to offer an intrusion-detection system and will open up its auction site to a wider range of intellectual property, according to a company executive interviewed at this week's Hack In The Box conference.
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Like other Internet companies, EBay acknowledges it needs to adapt to a new world in which millions of people publish blogs and contribute to Web sites with text, photos and videos.
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Now that Amazonâs market value is nearly the same as eBayâs, it could buy the online auction site. That could help improve Amazonâs finances and eBayâs customer satisfaction.
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Online marketplace eBay has helped create hundreds of thousands of small businesses by offering huge audiences, a trusted interface, easy payment options, and even benefits like health insurance.
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eBay could be a good model for  government-backed online communities,  says a think-tank.
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The Firefox Companion adds a sidebar display to the browser that offers eBay-specific search, bidding tools, status alerts, an auction monitor that can be used by both sellers and buyers, and a page-view counter that tallies visits to an auction.
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LAS VEGAS - EbayÂ has brought together several technology industry heavyweights in an initiative to promote recycling of old computers and other consumer electronics hardware. The move also is an attempt by the industry to pre-empt further electronic waste legislation.ADVERTISEMENTReducing the Total Cost of OwnershipLearn how to reduce the total coast of ownership in enterprise data management in this case study.
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EBay Inc., which has been aggressively expanding in Asia, plans to increase its stake in South Korea's largest online auction company.
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By RACHEL KONRAD SAN FRANCISCO - EBay Inc. is expected to announce plans Tuesday to open a new Chinese Web site as part of a joint-venture with a Beijing-based Internet company, signaling a strategic shift in the online auction company's Chinese operations.
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(InfoWorld) - EBayÂ is on a drive to put its brand everywhere people experience the Internet, and it wants outside Web developers to help get it there. The strategy is a new one for a company that has emphasized its robust e-commerce transaction system in opening itself up to heavy-selling affiliates, and currently gets about a quarter of its listings from big sellers using third-party tools to connect into eBay's backend. Now the online auction giant wants to reach more buyers where they live, and is hoping developers will take advantage of lighter and faster interfaces to carry its flag to the user. "We need to shift our attention to supporting the buying experience," said Max Mancini, senior director of platform and disruptive innovation at eBay, in an interview at the company's developer conference in Boston this week. The new APIs (application programming interfaces) don't require authentication to acquire information from eBay and display it within other applications or Web pages, removing a significant obstacle to casual use of eBay listings for their information or entertainment value. The so-called "shopping APIs" are also up to 16 times faster at returning search results, eBay says. The company also released a bidding API that developers can use to allow bidding from other applications and sites, and established support centers for developers working in JavaScript and Flash, popular for interactive, customer-facing sites and applications. In putting together a suite of tools that will help spread its presence into blogs, social networks and deeper into the Web 2.0 world, eBay is acknowledging what eBay Marketplaces President John Donahoe called "an explosion of easy to use starting points." In pushing the eBay experience closer to users -- and making it easier for third parties to get information from the marketplace without necessarily engaging in transactions -- is the company risking its relationship with buyers? Donahoe said he isn't worried about that. "It's the opposite of disintermediation, it allows them to engage directly with eBay on their own terms, and in the mode and device they want," he said. That emphasis on the buy-side can also be seen in the company's recent acquisition of StumbleUpon, which has developed a Web browsing tool that uses user preferences and community ratings to recommend content. "We thought it was a cool technology," said Donahoe in an interview, adding that it fit into eBay's goal of improving the search and find experience. "We want to find ways to have search be more entertaining." EBay's efforts to get more face-time with buyers also include a new connected desktop application code-named San Dimas that opened for beta testing this week. Built using the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) tool, the downloadable application stays with users even when they are offline and gives eBay a "constant presence on the desktop" according to Donahoe. San Dimas also provides a kind of innovation laboratory, he said, giving eBay a place where it can experiment with changing the buyer experience without disrupting the millions of users comfortable with the status quo. AIR lets eBay provide a buying experience through San Dimas that's not constrained by browser functionality, the aspect of the project that is most exciting to Alan Lewis, the manager of platform evangelism who was demoing the application in Boston. Other developers could similarly use eBay's Web services to build a desktop application with AIR, and eBay is working with Adobe to pull together a code library to ease the process. Developers can also look forward to tools, coming later this year, that will help them scale their eBay applications, Mancini said. And it's possible that Web developers will see a simpler package of tools aimed at all three of eBay's core pieces -- the auction market, Skype and PayPal -- in the second half of the year, another company source said. Meanwhile in Boston, the focus was as much on promoting entrepreneurship as it was on coding tools, and developers seemed to be in that mindset. One young attendee from Japan described his objective as prospecting for business opportunities in the interfaces that eBay has opened up, and he said he was taking advantage of the conference to find out how other businesses are making money from the leverage that eBay is offering. For its part, eBay seems focused on giving entrepreneurial coders the tools -- and seeing how deeply into the social networking fabric of Web 2.0 independent developers can weave the eBay logo.
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In terms of usability and addressing the fact that most eBay users probably are not very efficient searchers, eBay has added this incredibly useful quick navigation tool for holiday shoppers trying to get their last minute hands on a Nintendo Wii or Sony Playstation 3:  It&#8217;s linear, yet non-linear, efficient and somewhat 2.0 in design, great [...]