EBay to put China site into JV: source
23840
EBay Inc. will roll its China site into a joint venture run by a Chinese partner, a source said, in the latest example of a Western media firm ceding control of its China operation in the face of a tough market.
105571
SAN FRANCISCO : EBay announced late it has agreed to buy three million shares of South Korea&#39;s Internet Auction for 325 million dollars in cash.
342562
Text of report in English by official Chinese news agency Xinhua (New China News Agency)  ["Japan Lends To Environment, Development Projects in SW China" - Xinhua headline]  Guiyang, Feb.
700984
The China-specific online video gaming host is set to become a multigame operation.
699469
EBay Inc.  on Tuesday  confirmed it is forming a joint venture with Chinese partner  Tom Online  as the U.S. Web auction giant  switches strategies for tapping the promising China market  where it has so far struggled.
620380
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.
163008
EBay Inc. plans to announce soon  that it will shut down its main Web site in China and replace  it with one run by a joint venture with Beijing- based Tom  Online Inc., a person familiar with the matter said on Monday.
449850
EBay Inc.  on Tuesday  confirmed it is forming a joint venture with Chinese partner  Tom Online (8282.HK) as the U.S. Web auction giant  switches strategies for tapping the promising China market  where it has so far struggled.
5626
Blog: The Business.com site is on the auction block; it could fetch $300 million to $400 million, according to reports.
346937
(InfoWorld) - Yahoo Taiwan agreed to buy popular blog site Wretch.cc in a deal the companies expect to push them into the Web 2.0 era in Taiwan. Wretch.cc is the most popular site in Taiwan offering Web services broadly defined as Web 2.0, which entails mixing user-generated content and multimedia applications such as video. The site offers blogs, video blogs, and photo albums, and had announced plans to expand to video publishing similar to YouTube next year. Teaming up with Yahoo will help it invest in new services and give its users access to Yahoo technology and resources, the company said in a statement Thursday. Wretch.cc, Taiwan's most popular blogging site, with around 2.8 million members, will continue to operate independently, it said. Terms of the deal were not disclosed by the companies. Yahoo said the companies hope to finalize the deal early next year. The Yahoo-Wretch.cc deal requires approval by Taiwan's Fair Trade Commission and other regulatory agencies before it can be finalized. The deal highlights the continuing trend of U.S.Internet giants such as Yahoo to expand into new services by buying Web upstarts. Google, for example,Â agreed to pay $1.65 billionÂ for video sharing Web site YouTube earlier this year, whileÂ eBay acquiredÂ Internet phone company SkypeÂ last year in a multi-billion dollar deal. For Yahoo, it's one of many acquisitions, including Flickr, andÂ De.licio.usÂ in recent years. It's also another Yahoo purchase in Asia, where U.S. Internet companies have had a tough time attracting users on their own. Yahoo Taiwan grew out of Yahoo's 2000 purchase of Kimo.com, the most popular portal on the island at the time. And last year, YahooÂ agreed to pay $1 billionÂ in cash and transfer all of its Chinese businesses to Alibaba.com for a 40 percent stake in the company. Jason Chiang, an analyst at Access Rating Online (ARO), said the deal makes sense for both companies, but noted that Yahoo had already seen significant success with its own blog site in Taiwan. Yahoo opened its first blog site for users late last year, but by the end of August, had the second largest number of hits per month after first place Wretch. MSN Spaces took third, ARO said, followed by Yam.com's blogs and Xuite blogs.
250865
Spammers get T-shirt bazaar MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe has hinted the Murdoch-owned social network will bring in eBay to provide it with ecommerce features.â¦
206350
Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba.com is making final preparations for an initial public offering of shares on the Hong Kong stock exchange, set for Nov. 6. But most of the proceeds will go to existing shareholders rather than into the company&#39;s coffers to fund future acquisitions and other plans.Alibaba&#39;s prospectus said the listing price would be set within a range between HK$12 (US$1.55) to HK$13.50 per share. While the final pricing has not yet been announced, Dow Jones Newswires reported that the listing price had been set at the very top of that range.Nearly 859 million shares -- accounting for 17 percent of Alibaba&#39;s shares -- will be offered during the IPO, including 227 million shares owned by the company. The balance of the shares on offer are held by existing shareholders.&#160;The IPO&#160;attracted US$150 billion in orders from institutional investors and HK$453 billion in orders from individuals, making it &quot;the biggest offering in Hong Kong&#39;s IPO history,&quot; according to the Dow Jones report.Out of the HK$11.6 billion expected to be raised during the IPO about HK$3 billion (US$387 million) will go to Alibaba, which plans to use most of the money for acquisitions and to develop new technologies.Alibaba is one of China&#39;s oldest and most successful Internet companies, running a business-to-business trading portal under the Alibaba.com name, an online payment service, and China&#39;s most popular auction site, called Taobao.com. But while other Chinese Internet companies cashed in on investor enthusiasm for Internet stocks and China&#39;s growing market with listings in Hong Kong and New York, Alibaba -- which generated 73 percent of its revenue from outside China during the first half of 2007 -- remained privately held.A 2005 deal with Yahoo took some pressure off Alibaba to go public.&#160;Yahoo invested US$1 billion in Alibaba&#160;in return for a 40 percent stake in the company, and transferred control of its Chinese operations to Alibaba. Approximately $750 million of the proceeds from that deal went to shareholders, allowing early investors in the company to take a return on their investments.Yahoo&#39;s investment in Alibaba will likely increase, with the company expected to invest a further US$100 million through the IPO.&#160;
393147
China's top site has another big quarter.
497179
Macromedia is offering a new version of its Contribute 3 software that will make it easier for eBay sellers to create custom eBay stores.
694890
EBay looks set to complete the purchase of an online auction business in South Korea. On Thursday it filed a tender offer to acquire the remaining shares of Internet Auction (IAC) that it does not already own, in a deal valued at about $4m (Â£2.
481205
EBay Inc., the world&#39;s largest Web auctioneer, agreed to buy privately held Rent.com for $415 million in cash and stock as it expands into classified listings.
618808
(InfoWorld) - A massive computing grid helps eBayÂ make changes to its auction Web site on the fly while maintaining a 99.94 percent up time, said Paul Strong, a distinguished research scientist there. While eBay designed most of its grid infrastructure, the company also wants to participate in standards-setting communities to bring more improvements to computer grid technology, Strong said Tuesday during the GridWorld conference in Washington, D.C. EBay's core business is hosting Web-based auctions, not in creating new grid technologies, he said. "We don't see ourselves as an IT development shop for development tools," he said. By working together on grid standards, participants can help "transitions be less painful," he added. On Monday, the Open Grid Forum standards body officially opened for business, delivering on its commitment made in June to detail its goals during GridWorld. EBay has made great strides in its back-end technology since the late '90s, but the company still wants more improvements, including the ability to change the site's code nearly instantaneously, Strong said. Right now, the company, with more than 15,000 servers in its production environment, distributes new application code to its Web site every two weeks, he said. EBay developers write about 100,000 lines of code each week, and using a traditional grid made up of about 350 Windows, Linux and Solaris computers, the site takes about 20 minutes to update with the new features, Strong said. With 104 million items listed for auction on eBay every day, the company needs to keep the site running while those changes are happening, he added. "We can't afford to take the site down," he said. "It's like changing the engines on a jumbo jet mid-flight." About $1,608 worth of merchandise sells on eBay every second, and a vehicle sells every two minutes on average, Strong said. A trading card sells every six seconds, and a pound of the Korean food kimchi sells every minute. The site has seen huge growth since the late '90s, he noted. Ebay.com has gone from 54 million page views a day in June 1999 to 874 million in December 2005, Strong said. The site sent out 35 million e-mail messages a day in December, compared to 1 million a day in June '99. And the site's up time went from about 97 percent to 99.94 percent in that time period. Still, the company would like more grid functionality, Strong said. EBay would like to get closer to that mythical 99.999 percent up time, he said. "We break almost anything we use," he said. "We're pretty much at the extreme limit of what you can do with off-the-shelf technology." And eBay doesn't want to wait to update the site every two weeks, he added. "We want to be faster; we want to be more agile," he said. "If someone comes up with a cool change that's not that big, I'd like to be able to roll it tomorrow." Improvements in grid computing is where community standards can help, he said. "We believe everyone has something to contribute," he said to the GridWorld audience. "We'd like to share ... with the community." GridWorld is organized by IDG, the parent company of IDG News Service.