In Brief: eBay buys e-commerce tools from Kurant
106206
InfoWorld - EBay will buy the technology assets of Kurant, a company that makes e-business software for small and medium-size businesses. The online auction company was primarily interested in acquiring Kurant's software relating to online stores, the companies said in a statement Thursday. Terms of the cash deal, which is expected to close by the end of March, were not disclosed. Kurant's flagship product is StoreSense, a software package for building e-commerce Web sites that includes software for supply chain management, secure transaction processing and wireless shopping. EBay expects to hire nearly all of Kurant's employees and to support its current customers.
100830
San Jose-based Internet auction site eBay, Inc., says it had net income of $182.3 million or 27 cents per diluted share on revenues of $805.
301434
A month after its unpopular price hikes, the auction site seeks to smooth some ruffled business feathers. Also: Kuwait blocks radical websites to combat terrorism.... Google loses a legal round in France.... and more.
102309
EBay Inc , the world's largest  online auctioneer and payments company, launched on Wednesday a  Web site allowing ordinary investors to buy securities aimed at  improving conditions in the world's poorest countries.
72525
EBay Inc, the world's largest online  auctioneer and payments company, launched on Wednesday a Web  site allowing ordinary investors to buy securities aimed at  improving conditions in the world's poorest countries.
471304
EBay, the world&#39;s largest Internet auction house, increased its stake in Internet Auction, the biggest online auction company in South Korea.
303210
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.
347811
Online retail giant eBay Inc. plans to increase its stake in Internet Auction, South Korea&#39;s top online auctioneer, to 85.61 percent, the Korean firm said Wednesday.
102364
(InfoWorld) - After making a series of decisions that frustrated some merchants, eBay is wooing store owners. If a speech from Bill Cobb, president of eBay North America, hints at future relationships between the company and its sellers, the message is toÂ keep your doors open. During a Thursday keynote at eBay's annual sellers convention, Cobb pledged not to increase merchant selling fees this July and said that the stores category will return to the eBay page header within 30 days. In addition to offering its main auction listings, eBay allows merchants to set up shops and sell wares at fixed prices. Last July relations between store owners and eBay grew contentious when eBay announced an effort "rebalance the overall eBay marketplace," which had seen store listings eclipse auctions listings. The rebalancing meant higher store fees as of last August, and in April the stores tab was removed from eBay page headers. "For eBay Stores, the last 10 months have been a transition. We are committed to the long-term success of eBay Store owners," Cobb said. While store owners didn't welcome last August's fees, Cobb said he is pleased with the realignment's progress. Additional efforts to court store owners include 24-hour phone support for Featured eBay Store owners and a reduction in Anchor Store monthly fees. Among a raft of other initiatives for sellers, Cobb announced a temporary reduction in the Final Value Fee, a charge tacked on to an item's final selling price. Visual navigation, in which photographs play a prominent role in navigation, will be introduced to more categories. PayPal president Rajiv Dutta addressed merchant security during his portion of the keynote. "We heard the message on fraud. We know it's a top challenge. I am personally committed to keeping fraudsters off the site," Dutta said. In an effort to combat phishing, PayPal, eBay's payment division, will make theÂ PayPal Security KeyÂ available to all eBay and PayPal users on Friday. The security key device, previously in beta testing, generates unique security codes in 30-second intervals. Users then enter the code when logging on to their PayPal or eBay account. In August PayPal will launch a payment review system that flags "transactions that pose a risk." The questionable transaction is highlighted, and the seller is told to wait on shipping the item until PayPal confirms that the buyer's account contains adequate purchasing funds. Meg Whitman, eBay president and CEO, opened the keynote and emphasized that the company is suited to reach its goal of connecting people through three of its divisions. Finding, buying, communicating, entertaining, and paying are main Internet activities, she said. eBay fulfills the buying aspect, PayPal handles payment functions, and VoIP provider Skype, which the company purchased in 2005, provides communication services. "The lines between finding and buying are blurring. At the core the company is about connecting people," Whitman said. As eBay executives discussed staying linked and protected, some sellers said theyÂ felt a disconnectÂ from the company. "I'm happy to hear that stores are going back in the header," said Maria Ginter, who sells furniture and home decor on eBay. Ginter was less impressed thatÂ eBay is no longer advertising on GoogleÂ after a spat this week over a Google event to promote its own online payment system, Google Checkout. "That's how people find my furniture," she said. Deb Martin, who sells collectible figurines on her store wanted to hear of security efforts to crack down on dishonest buyers who create new user identifications solely to commit more fraud. "Buyers have no incentive to keep their name. They just restart their IDs and log back in." She also questioned the merits behind the temporary fee reduction and saw it as an effort to boost quarterly revenue and benefit shareholders. Although eBay is emphasizing its auctions, one merchant thinks that form of e-commerce has faded. "A lot of people are over bidding. They're just buying now," said Judy Pykhoff, who operates the Red Cougar Trading Post store on eBay.
210849
EBay Inc., the world&#39;s largest Internet auctioneer, said third-quarter earnings surged 77 percent as the number of listings rose and the company expanded its PayPal e-mail payment service in Europe.
51765
NEW YORK, September 2 (New Ratings) - eBay (EBAY.NAS) intends to continue with its expansion in Asia with an increased stake in Internet Auction Co.
254675
EBay Inc., the world's largest online marketplace, on Wednesday posted a 77 percent increase in quarterly profit, fueled by strong back-to-school shopping and growth in its international and PayPal businesses.
222355
eBay (Quote, Chart) has acquired a popular online classifieds Web site in the Netherlands, the company said Wednesday. The San Jose, Calif.
550044
Internet auctioneer eBay Inc. said on Tuesday it has agreed to buy $325 million worth of shares of South Korean online trading peer, Internet Auction Co.
506418
LONDON (CBS.MW) -- EBay (EBAY) said Tuesday that an executive with its India subsidiary has been released on bail. The manager of Baazee.
234112
(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. The goal is to help external developers increase the volume and variety of applications they create for the company's marketplace and in particular to increase applications for eBay buyers. Max Mancini, the recently appointed senior director of platform and innovation at eBay, spoke to IDG News Service about these developer plans and about another group he heads called the Disruptive Innovation team, started last year. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. IDG News Service: What does the Disruptive Innovation team do at eBay? Max Mancini: If we look at the evolution of innovation on eBay, it started with innovating around consumer-to-consumer commerce and the auction format online. Then over the last 5 or 6 years, eBay has had to innovate around technology just to keep up from scale and growth perspectives. So it has been focused on scalability, performance, and also search. In that sense, many of our investments and efforts around innovation have been focused on building up the platform. Now, as the company has gotten up to about 12,000 employees, what we need to do is make sure that we continue to innovate around new business and feature ideas. We have teams for each of the major eBay areas like our Buyer team, Seller team, and eBay Express team. Each team works on its own innovations, which are focused on keeping up with the customer demands and, as the market evolves, on what comes next. That's part of their normal product road maps. But my team is looking 12 to 18 months out to identify trends that we think are relevant to our business. We're creating a more structured innovation program so that when people come up with ideas, they can submit them to a database and an environment that we review on a regular basis, usually weekly or bi-weekly. And if things are pretty interesting, we're able to bring people into a rotation on an innovation team to work on their ideas. My Disruptive Innovation team is part of this. IDGNS: You head both the Disruptive Innovation team and the Developers Program. Why? Mancini: We feel that, organizationally, it made sense to combine the Developers Program and the Disruptive Innovation team because the Developers Program and Web services are things that enable us to innovate on top of eBay's marketplace platform. IDGNS: Are there any specific projects currently ongoing at the Disruptive Innovation team? Mancini: Yes. As part of our 2007 strategic planning for the company, the innovation team identified what we felt were the two most important areas for us to invest our time in: buyer experience and social commerce. Overall buyer experience is very important to us as a business, but independent of that, it's one of those areas we need to invest in because from a technology trend perspective, there's a fundamental shift in the way people expect to interact on the Internet, and we need to get ahead of that. Internet users are evolving past just going through page flows, in other words, clicking on five links to get something done: filling out a form here and going to the next page and so on. They're going to more of a rich media, interactive experience that we have traditionally seen on desktop applications but that can be delivered to the Web. Think AJAX and Flash. So we're spending a fair amount of time investing in buyer experience, specifically around rich media experiences delivered via the Web. Regarding social commerce, it's not social networking. If you look at things like LinkedIn, Plaxo, your Skype client, your AOL client, your Yahoo address book, your e-mail, all of these things define relationships you have. But no one is looking at how these relationship definitions affect trust relationships in commerce. Let's say you have tickets for sale for a local sporting event but don't want to go through the hassle of listing them. You know you have friends who might be interested in the tickets but you don't want to spam all your friends. Making those tickets available to your buddies in your IM buddy list or your address book, and letting them discover what's available out there is an interesting model. The other piece is if you're going to transact with somebody and you don't have a relationship with that person. The fact that people are comfortable sharing and defining their relationships online makes that a potential disruptor to a reputation system [like eBay's feedback system]. So it's very important from my perspective to explore and understand how these trust definitions can affect an online reputation system. IDGNS: Would this be taking eBay's feedback system to the next level? Mancini: Yes, absolutely, but it's a different angle on it. Our feedback system is based on transactions, as opposed to determining whether I can trust this person through some other relationship other than a transaction. We need to stay on top of this trend. IDGNS: A developer told me he's happy with the eBay Developers Program but that sometimes when you make changes to APIs, it forces him to adjust things on his application. Is this issue something you keep in mind when tweaking APIs? Mancini: Change management is very important to developers because they have to react and update their applications. So one of the first things I did at the Developers Program was staff up our product managers so that things don't slip by. This has happened in the past because we've had very limited product management support on APIs, and that's changing now. I've got a good team focused on that. Our general direction is that anytime we release a feature on the site, that feature should be API/Web services-enabled because our [external] developers can innovate more than we can because there are 45,000 of them and 12,000 eBay employees. So there are definitely great advantages to having a robust developer program, and we want to make sure those developers aren't getting left behind. Developers also want us to help them market their products to buyers and sellers. They invest money, time, and effort to create applications that work on top of eBay and they want some help reaching eBay users, so we're bringing aboard a full-time person to focus on nothing but helping our third-party developers market their tools to eBay users. Â
392151
The recent wave of mergers spread into the e-commerce space today when auction giant eBay said it would acquire Rent.com for US$415 million in cash and stock.