EBay to open Chinese Web site in shift
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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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EBay changes are designed to boost sales by making the shopping experience easier and safer.
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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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That&#39;s a lesson leveraged for tens of millions of dollars by minority investors in Internet Auction Co., the South Korean Internet site that eBay controls and tried to take private last year.
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EBay Inc., the world's largest online auction company, will upgrade its website to placate sellers and revitalize the company's slumping sales growth, chief executive Meg Whitman said.
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Wikipedia said the Chinese government is permitting access to most of the Chinese-language version of its online encyclopedia.
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(InfoWorld) - One of Jack Ma's companies has 27 million registered users, but the Alibaba.com chief executive officer can only think of the people not using his site. "We want to show how big the China market is," Ma said Saturday in an interview in Hangzhou, where Alibaba is headquartered. The group's auction site, Taobao.com, claims 27 million registered users and about 70 percent of China's consumer auction market. "I want the Taobao team to focus on getting more and more people and more and more transactions," Ma said, adding that "110 million [Chinese Internet] users are not using the site." To encourage use, Ma announced in 2005 that Taobao would not charge for transactions or listings. "Last year we said three years. Maybe next year we'll think about starting to charge," he said. He also projected that the auction company will account for 30 percent of Alibaba's revenue by 2010. Ma, whose Chinese name is Ma Yun, said he still has no timetable for the company to go public. "It is a golden time for Alibaba to get ready for the next wave of e-commerce in China." He sees that next wave as the large-scale adoption of e-commerce by small and medium-sized businesses. SMBs will be "the engine for the next five to 10 years of the Chinese economy," he said. E-commerce is the Internet's "third wave" in China, Ma said, having been preceded by revenue generated from short messaging service (SMS), which provided a way for Web portals to collect subscription fees, and then from online and mobile gaming. There is no rush for Alibaba to go public, Ma said. "We spent $750 million to buy out all the small investors and let our long-time employees cash out. This is why it's not urgent for us to go public," he said, referring to money gained from a $1 billionÂ investment in AlibabaÂ last year by Yahoo, which took a 40 percent stake in the company and handed over control of its China unit as part of the deal. Of Yahoo China's first year under Alibaba management, he said, "We're happy with the first year results. Yahoo survived." Headcount doubled from 400 to 800, he said. "I want to lower expectations for Yahoo China," Ma said, adding that he wanted to do something "new and fresh" with it. The site's new search technology would be ready at the end of September or early October, with which Ma said, "We can compete" with Baidu and Google's sites. "Next year, we want to make Yahoo China healthy. Then the next year, we make it a top-tier company, top three [in China]," he said. Yahoo shareholders are getting a good return on their investment, according to Ma. "Even if Alipay [Alibaba's online payment company] is zero, Taobao is zero, and Yahoo is losing money, Alibaba.com is already profitable." The group has over $250 million in the bank, and is cash-flow positive, Ma said. Speaking earlier in the day at the company's Alifest company event in Hangshou, Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang said "We are extremely satisfied with our cooperation with Ma Yun." He added that when Yahoo was re-examining its presence in China, "we looked for the most suitable partner, and we invested in Alibaba."
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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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The dominance of Google in the search space is almost written in stone in North America, but there may yet be some populous spots in the world where the market is wide open. Now its main Chinese competitor has launched a new assault.
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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.
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After spending millions of dollars trying to establish itself in China, EBay plans to shut its main Chinese auction site and instead partner with a Beijing company.
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Google technology will power China.com's online search engine under the terms of a partnership announced.
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EBay Acquiring South Korean Auction Affiliate  EBay Inc., according to news wire reports, has offered a price near $530 million to purchase the remainder of eBay South Korean affiliate - Internet Auction Co. Ltd. The move is seen as an expansion of the eBay strategy to push deeper into Asia. EBay ...
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EBay Inc. announced Thursday that it will keep its Half.com subsidiary open indefinitely, scrapping previous plans to shutter the e-commerce site in mid-October.
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Shares in China's online site Tom Online rose strongly on Tuesday, after reports the firm could join with eBay in China.
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EBay Inc. will close its primary China website and form a partnership with Beijing-based Tom Online Inc. to boost traffic in the world's second-biggest Internet market, a person familiar with the situation said yesterday.
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AIR CHINA will become the first new Chinese company in four years to trade on the London Stock Exchange today, in what exchange officials hope will be the beginning of a wave of listings from Hong Kong.