ebay

Report: eBay CEO preparing to retire

Meg Whitman, chief executive of auction giant eBay, is planning to retire, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Whitman, 51, recently has been entrusting more of the day-to-day responsibilities to others and "is completing her succession planning, say people familiar with the matter," The Journal said. She has held the top post since 1998.

According to the newspaper's sources, the decision about her retirement could happen within a matter of weeks, but "the situation remains fluid." The report named John Donahoe, president of eBay's auction business unit, as the most likely … Read more

Proximic signs ad deals with Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com

Content-delivery network Proximic, which has a unique contextual matching system, now has ads to sell that can help bloggers and others monetize their sites.

The company was set to announce on Wednesday that it has signed deals to syndicate the product catalogs of the Yahoo Shopping Network and eBay's Shopping.com. This dumps nearly 50 million ad units into Proximic's advertising network.

Proximic, which launched in October, differs from Google AdSense and other keyword-based systems in that it automatically reads and matches relevant content according to "interconnected patterns" in documents that seem to be based more … Read more

The product Jobs won't announce, but should

Mac fans across the world are eagerly awaiting Steve Jobs keynote at Mac World with bingo cards in hand, but despite all the rumors of the " MacBook Air" and the iTunes video rental store, there is one feature that I wish Steve would announce but that I know will not materialize anytime soon. What I'd like to see from Apple in 2008 is an iTunes marketplace, a place where independent media creators can set their own price for their work and share the profits with Apple.

Yes, some independent artists have been able to sell their music in the iTunes store, but there is no means to sell video podcasts or other similar materials through Apple.

… Read more

How Nintendo kept eBay Wii prices in check

If you were trying to find a Nintendo Wii to give someone as a Christmas present and were counting on buying that Wii at a retailer like Best Buy or Target, odds are you came away empty-handed and frustrated.

That was certainly my experience when I spent a day looking to see where it might be possible to find a Wii near San Francisco.

But always, in the back of my mind, I figured that for those who were truly desperate to get ahold of one of the machines, a small mint would fetch one on eBay.

I remember, however, … Read more

Savoring Pez's sweet history

BURLINGAME, Calif.--If it wasn't for Pez, the theory goes, there would be no eBay.

It might surprise you, but urban legend has it that entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar decided to start his fledgling auction site to give his girlfriend a venue for selling off her collection of Pez dispensers.

Well, it's hard to know what the truth is. But I can tell you (since I spent Wednesday here at what may well be the world's only Pez museum), that there is definitely a set of eBay-branded Pez dispensers. Even some museum walk-ins think of Omidyar as the … Read more

He's back on eBay: Manny being hemi

Update: The Man-Ram's car is now up for bidding on eBay.

If you just missed out on buying the grill Boston Red Sox left-fielder Manny Ramirez was hawking on eBay this past spring, maybe you'll have better luck buying his car.

The Boston Herald reports Ramirez will be selling his 2006 Chrysler 300M SRT8 on eBay starting tonight. A quick search of eBay revealed Ramirez hadn't put the car up for bidding at the time of this post.

This isn't your standard-issue Chrysler. Ramirez's custom ride is chromed-out, fitted with 22-inch rims, and has a … Read more

GetItNext takes a smart approach to eBay's search

Lately I've been really impressed by some of eBay's latest Web gizmos, including their auction-sharing widget that's got both a standalone embed, and even their less-than-stellar Facebook app. There's also their Adobe AIR application that's both beautiful and useful at the same time. The one thing that I think needed some work was their search tool, which the folks at GetItNext seem to agree with. Their eBay search tool helps sort through results before you even see them. In essence, it's trying to overcome the inherent clutter that's come of eBay since the service became immensely popular.

If you had used eBay in its early days, the search experience was completely different, and searching for a cell phone would often actually give you handsets as the top results instead of faceplates, phone chargers, stick-on crystals, etc.

The best way to really see the difference between the two search tools is stacking them up against each other with a smattering of identical queries. All in all, I was pretty impressed with GetItNext, as it managed to come up with fairly similar results, but often the GetItNext results had less junk. Even better, GetItNext will include the shipping price in each result to help you avoid some of those great deals that have a less than great, or ridiculously high shipping price.

… Read more

Attention eBay sellers: Gussy up your photos

Imaging-software company Vertus announced software Tuesday to more easily add pizazz to photos of items you might want to look better for an online sale.

Bling It helps users substitute a bland background from an original photo with something more flashy. It also can be used to sharpen images, add drop shadows, logos, and text, and reduce image size for Web site publication. The company is aiming the software at individuals who do a lot of selling on online auction sites or at small businesses that want to gussy up product photos.

The software costs about $50. It's available … Read more

Rent your stuff to strangers with Zilok

I'm a big fan of selling things through Craigslist, which is why a pitch from a service called Zilok piqued my interest. The premise of the site is that you can make money by renting stuff you've got laying around the house instead of parting with it once and for all. For folks who have something like a $500 Dyson vacuum that you bought and use once every six months, this service could theoretically help take a chunk out of the original purchase price by letting you rent it out to people who live near you.

The service … Read more