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. 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
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Now in beta test, EffectiveUI's new eBay Desktop is aimed at letting users shop, search and buy from their desktops instead of inside Web browsers, as well as to simplify user tasks and 'optimize rich media' along the way.
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EBay is expected to unveil changes to its online marketplace Tuesday that the company characterizes as sweeping and historic and that are aimed at boosting sales by making the shopping experience simpler and safer.The changes, which include lowering some fees and raising merchant standards, will be announced at the company&#39;s eCommerce Forum by John Donahoe, who will&#160;succeed Meg Whitman as president and CEO&#160;in March.Donahoe said last week during a conference call to discuss eBay&#39;s fourth-quarter financials that the eBay marketplace business hasn&#39;t been growing as fast as he would like and that changes would be coming to make the shopping experience easier and safer.&quot;Buyers have become accustomed to streamlined purchasing experiences that put a premium on speed, convenience and reliability,&quot; Donahoe, president of eBay Marketplaces, said last week. &quot;While we&#39;ve made strides in these areas, I&#39;m clear we need to do much more.&quot;On Tuesday he is expected to announce that eBay will introduce an insertion fee reduction in the U.S. Feb. 20 by cutting the cost of listing items by 25 percent to 50 percent. By reducing the impact of items that don&#39;t sell, eBay hopes merchants will list more products. In turn, eBay is increasing the so-called &quot;final value&quot; fees it charges merchants when items are sold.EBay will also do away with fees it charges U.S. merchants for its &quot;gallery&quot; option, in order to encourage merchants to include more photos with their listings. Fee changes will vary by country.In addition, eBay will alter its search engine so that merchants with lower rates of customer satisfaction get less exposure on search results. Meanwhile, sellers with higher buyer satisfaction ratings will get better exposure in search results.EBay will also require a &quot;safe payment option,&quot; such as PayPal or a major credit card, from merchants with lower customer satisfaction and from those in product categories that generate many buyer complaints. Moreover, eBay will also raise the requirements for qualifying as a PowerSeller and update its feedback system.EBay&#39;s fourth-quarter earnings and revenue exceeded Wall Street&#39;s expectations, but its outlook for this year was considered generally disappointing. For example, the conservative 2008 forecast, coupled with slowing growth in the marketplace business, led Citigroup to downgrade the stock to &quot;hold.&quot;&#160;
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Macromedia is offering a new version of its Contribute 3 software that will make it easier for eBay sellers to create custom eBay stores.
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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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Blog: EBay takes the top spot as web services provider although Microsoft continues to have developer loyalty.
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Online auction leader eBay Inc on  Tuesday introduced price changes and tighter sales standards in  a bid to retain quality sellers, improve customer service and  revive flagging growth.
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Yahoo Inc.  and Web auctioneer  eBay  on Thursday announced a partnership designed to  boost their position against Microsoft Corp.  and Web  search leader Google Inc. , underscoring recent  speculation the two companies could eventually merge.
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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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Looking to boost the use of home electronics, company  provides funding to three companies.
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Successor has big pricing changes ready Ten years of hawking Britney Spears' used undies and Hummel figurines proved enough for Meg Whitman. The eBay CEO today announced her departure plans, as her company dished out solid fourth quarter figures.â¦Learn &amp; Contribute, Live &amp; Online - The Register Debates Green Computing
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A special version of Macromedia&#39;s Contribute Web publishing desktop application is designed to automate and simplify the creation and modification of EBay Stores.
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Blog: eBay takes the top spot as a Web services provider although Microsoft continues to maintain developer loyalty.
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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.
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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 UK think-tank.
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The incoming C.E.O.  of eBay says he is planning a new search engine to show users the best offers from the best sellers with low prices, fast shipping and high quality.