Future Web: What is eBay Focused On? March 4, 2007
Posted by Steve in : Technology , trackback
As church technology evolves, we need to look to bellwether representatives to see where technology (specifically the internet) is headed. Recently, Max Mancini, the recently appointed senior director of platform and innovation at eBay, spoke to IDG News Service about where eBay is devoting a majority of time and resources over the next 12-18 months. I love the name of one of the groups he heads — it is called the Disruptive Innovation team, which was started last year.
eBay started with innovating around consumer-to-consumer commerce and the auction format online, then progressed just to keep up from scale and growth perspectives, with its main focus on scalability, performance and also search — basically building up the platform. Now, with more than 12,000 employees, they continue to innovate around new business and feature ideas.
KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR THE TECHNOLOGY TREND WATCHER
“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.
We are also focusing on social commerce, although 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.”
Source: Infoworld
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