EBay revamps German site
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EBay launched a revamp of its auction  Web site in Germany on Tuesday, where it says it needs to raise  listings and the volume of goods sold.
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(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.
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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.
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Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c60776)  has announced the addition of eMarketer's new report: Germany: Online  Overview to their offering.
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eBay sellers have a new content management tool to help them post storefronts faster, thanks to a newly customized Macromedia toolset.
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eBay is reportedly pulling out of the Chinese market, instead opting to replace it with a new site that would be run by Bejing-based Tom Online, the Wall Street Journal reports. So far, the auction site has refused to confirm the speculation.
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Revamped website signals desire for broader customer base
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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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InfoWorld - EBay unveiled 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.
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The Mozilla Foundation has updated the German-language version of Firefox in a bid to defuse a growing controversy over the way its search toolbar handles private customer data.
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By Dave Flessner, Chattanooga Times/Free Press, Tenn.  Feb. 19--Like most of the 600,000 items it helped sell through eBay's online auction, NuMarkets itself is getting a new owner in a new location.
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Always wanted an 0day of your very own? A new Swiss site is taking bids.
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EBay launches a US classified ad website similar to its Gumtree site, which has proved popular in the UK.
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WASHINGTON: Online auction giant eBay Inc is toughening its offensive material policy by eliminating offensive words used as search criteria or in descriptions of items for sale.
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EBay changes are designed to boost sales by making the shopping experience easier and safer.
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Plus: eBay outlines policy on racist language. [News.com Extra]
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NetSuite has updated the e-commerce piece of its NetSuite hosted application suite, allowing users to manage sales efforts on eBay Inc.'s action site