grep le miette

East Coast vs West Coast

2012-01-02T10:29:00.000-08:00

This anecdote from Mark Suster's Right side of the Haimish line blog clearly lays out the social interaction differences between east coast and west coast.

"You know, I should have told the story that I learned in college. I went to UCSD and lived in Del Mar, one of the more affluent parts of the country but also full of college students.

You could eat in a dive Mexican restaurant, sit next to a guy wearing ripped shorts & a Hawaiian shirt and drink beers together all night. He'd leave before somebody told you he was a millionaire and owned a huge mansion in Rancho Santa Fe.

I'd contrast that with many people I know who went to Harvard Business School who find a way to weave the fact that they're HBS alum into the first 5 sentences after meeting people. Not to pick on HBS (a fine establishment where many of my friends went), but you do meet people who quickly have to establish their pecking order with you.

I prefer the Del Mar attitude."

Mark Suster is quickly becoming one of my favorite bloggers. If you don't read his blog, start in 2012. He speaks plainly, writes well and is a great observer and listener. This combination is not as common as you might think

Consuming APIs securely: Stop disabling SSL protection with cURL

2011-10-06T09:34:00.000-07:00

Great advice from Brian Fenton for API developers consuming APIs using cURL and SSL -- and that API providers should consider thoughtfully the data sets that make sense to offer through SSL, highlighting the foursquare API as an example of doing it right.

Simple, common sense advice for developers and providers, but not followed as often as you'd think.

The Wuss of Steel: Stop disabling SSL protection with cURL:

Several months ago when I was working on FoursquareNotifier, I was made aware of a fairly significant issue with using SSL through cURL. API calls to Foursquare require SSL, which is perfectly fine and a good idea for many API-driven applications. However, all the common examples for how to make API calls to Foursquare (including the PHP classesrecommended by Foursquare itself), included setting some innocent-looking, poorly-explained, and potentially dangerous settings. Namely,curl_setopt(CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false). This tells cURL to stop caring who answers its request, as long as they use SSL, breaking one of the basic cryptography assumptions that SSL is supposed to provide.

read the full post here

API Metrics: Focus on Hidden Value, not Loud Voices

2011-08-09T06:09:00.000-07:00

Just wrapped up my summer blog post series on API metrics, and my recommendations for measuring top 3 most commonly reported numbers:

There are lots of other numbers I recommend measuring as well, but getting these basic three right -- and measuring them correctly -- can reveal a lot of value attributable to an API platform.

The two major learnings I had in writing this series are:

a) counting partner developers (biz dev partnerships, vendors, agencies, consultants) as "internal" developers because they are building an internal project for you (read: your iPad app) undervalues the reach and extension of your API. Internal development should be designated for core roadmap projects being built by employees of your company. If their paycheck doesn't show your company name on it, then they are an external developer that has been hired to work on an internal project. External developer value is a lot greater when you break it down into internal/partner/open segments instead external equating to third party developers exclusively. Many partner developers get exposed to your API initially through external-facing touchpoints (blog, twitter, discussion threads, hackdays, FAQ, Knowledgebase, events) and use it to evaluate the value potential of consuming your API using your basic open developer portal. If you think you have the answer to all your business challenges within the walls of your company, and don't want to fund or support an API platform for external developers, the value of your API will be much harder for you to justify.

b) analyzing data grants you the perspective to prioritize your roadmap based on where value is being created, not just reacting to the loudest voices. Too often companies and organizations let a minority of customer opinions weigh proportionally higher than the value of their usage would otherwise indicate. Listening is always good, especially when they are fresh perspectives without a lot of value history built up yet, but incorporating implicit behavior patterns in addition to explicit feedback is too often overlooked. "Do as I say, not as I do" is a uniquely human condition that it is wise to recognize and compensate for with actual usage data.

Off on vacation!

API Ecosystem: Quarrel, Kiss, then Makeup

2011-04-06T18:31:00.001-07:00

Work 2.0 Hackday SF, a photo from 3/20/2011 by delynsimons

Ben Kepes recently wrote an interesting blog post on The Flip Side of an API Economy that inspired a great discussion about the relationship between API providers and API consumers.

This tension between developers consuming APIs and building applications (and in many cases businesses) around open platforms predates the dotcom boom of 1995. Be it the latest examples of Twitter pulling back on new acceptable terms of use for their API in 2011 or Apple dictating 3.3.1 to developers in 2010, or even back to Skype Developers Program “eating their young” in 2005, or Apple “being a lousy lover” to developers in 1994, the key is to make sure no one party in the ecosystem — API developer or API provider or App consumer — is extracting all the value out of the ecosystem.

If your company launches an open API platform, developers are a smart, opinionated, entrepreneurial new set of customers. They can provide product agility, innovation, velocity, and device/channel distribution.

In exchange for this value from developers, API providers need to provide a generous Terms of Service, commercial opportunity, and services that are easy to get started with and a pleasure to use.

Too many API providers only think of the API ecosystem merely as a means to extract value for their business. But developers are quick to move to new opportunities for value. With more than 3000 APIs available on ProgrammableWeb, developers have lots of options. It may be “developer beware” today as Sam Ramji so beautifully states, but history is long. Lousy lovers of developers in 1994 learn from their mistakes and win developer hearts and minds today. As long as the business model and market opportunity are healthy enough to provide value for the entire ecosystem, then API consumers and API providers will continue partnering in order to create value. Just as lovers inevitably quarrel, the successful long-term partnerships always find a way to kiss and make up.

Don't Be a Lemming: You Can be Open and Integrated

2010-10-19T11:53:00.000-07:00

"In reality, we think the open versus closed argument is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue, which is, “What’s best for the customer – fragmented versus integrated?”

- Steve Jobs, Apple Q4 2010 Earnings Call

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

- Inigo Montaya

First, to appease the many fanboys, colleagues, and friends that may take issue with this post, I have the utmost respect for Apple as a company that walks its talk when it comes to real innovation. According to its fiscal Q4 2010 earnings report that came out yesterday, crossing the $20B revenue threshold for the first time ever, over 60% of its revenue today is coming in from products that didn't even exist 3 years ago. To quote Asymco, the source of this chart below, remember Apple before the iPod? This is an impressive record of product development and innovation leadership. They've also listened to developers and backed off of their 3.1.1 TOS mistake after evaluating for five months, and created the iAds opportunity for developer app monetization. Well done.

But just because you have a product genius for a leader, trying to reframe the open vs closed debate into a fragmentation vs integration debate is "disingenuous," to use Jobs' own words. First, I agree with Eric Nolin's post as he chronicles the overuse of "open" to the point where the buzz threatens to "openwash" everything. Second, by painting Microsoft Windows and Plays for Sure music strategy as proof that "Open doesn't Win," Jobs himself just might be at the pinnacle of personal disingenuity, as pointed out by Kevin Marks. Open. This word does not mean what he thinks it means.

Being open does not make a bad product strategy better. But I reject the false choice that good product strategy needs to be either open or integrated. Parts of the Android, Chrome, #newtwitter, and Facebook OpenGraph strategies show that you can have a balance of both. You will never get a 100% overlap between open and integrated, but you can -- and should -- have elements of both on your product and platform strategies. Too closed or too fragmented doesn't work.

So, if you are truly a fan of Apple, call Steve Jobs on his framing of the open vs closed debate. Don't be a lemming. Any who follow his logic of Open cannot also be Integrated unquestioningly are blindly following a benevolent dictatorship of product vision where you are being offered the integrated experience of those who know better.

Help your developers make money

2010-06-28T13:10:00.000-07:00

(Reprint from my Mashery blog post)

Coders who work with APIs often have a strong entrepreneurial streak. Many have tried out just about every monetization model out there for app development. One-time paid subscription. Affiliate. "All-you-can-eat" monthly paid subscription. Advertising. Free-mium. Custom development fees. Just in the last two months, I've spotted some new trends in monetizing app development thanks to the help of a couple of smart guys, Steve and Neil. Both have great insights around how platform providers who offer APIs can focus on creating value for developers who build great apps.

Photo credit: WWDC Live Keynote Coverage, gdgt.com

1) Steve the Platform Provider: As shared at WWDC earlier this month, “Why are we doing iAds? For one simple reason: to help developers earn money so they can continue to create free and low-cost apps for users.” Steve recognizes that the deflationary nature of App Stores for mobile application developers has even the largest platform providers looking for alternative revenue models for app builders. The downward pressures on paid-app fees have interesting parallels with the music industry, where downloads are loss leaders for a variety of upsell and marketing opportunities. As confirmed in The Economist, in each case some make it big, but most never become hits. And apart from evergreens, such as games, utilities and programs to use Facebook and Twitter, even the most successful mobile apps often quickly fade into obscurity.

With emerging ad platforms like iAds, AdMob, and Promoted Tweets on the rise, it is clear that platform providers understand that more developers building great apps for customers need a clear path forward for making money. More attention will be given by app developers on how to use advertising (over subscription fees) to monetize their app development. This will have big consequences for the landscape of app development looking forward.

2) Neil the Coder: Neil Mansilla, a successful Web application developer, gave his own point of view at our unconference API Panel Discussion at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last month. Neil shared with our audience that that platform providers offering him marketing opportunities to potential users of his app have turned out to be more valuable than structural differences in revenue share or access fees. When an Apple or Facebook or eBay or Salesforce.com select an app to showcase for their customers, the resulting awareness and downloads/registrations are at a scale developers generally never could have afforded on their own.

So, Steve signaled that advertising is positioned to play an increasingly important role for app monetization for developers, implicitly acknowledging the downward pricing pressures on paid apps. While Neil gave me a lesson in the value of app marketing to app developers, sharing that in many cases the most valuable offer that platform providers can extend to developers is actively promoting the best quality apps to their customer base.

Savvy app developers out there are quickly going to get a lot more comfortable with the role that marketing and advertising has in the overall value of their app development projects. Savvy Web and mobile platform providers with APIs should pay close attention.

f8: a wakeup call for the open web

2010-04-30T16:44:00.000-07:00

f8, Facebook's developer event was Weds, April 21st at the Design Center. Mark Zuckerberg and Bret Taylor, Director of Platform Product led off the opening keynote with 3 main announcements:

· Open Graph – combining the graphs of other companies with the Facebook Social Graph

· Social Plug-ins – 100,000 sites have already adopted, making other sites on the Web instantly social and spookily prescient

· Graph API – an elegant re-architecting of an existing API to take the burden/method proliferation off of developers, and major adopter of OAuth 2.0 open standard

My take on the opening keynote, Graph API session, Open Tech session and closing keynotes with links for more information if interested:

· Facebook’s overall positioning is they are ready to take on Google. This is a Big Deal. Feels like a watershed moment in the realpolitik relationships that make up the Web

· Old Web is about referring hyperlinks model; the new Web where “the default is Social” is about connections, putting people at the center of the Web.

· Open Graph = 75 content partners to connect Facebook’s social graph with the graphs from other verticals, such as Yelp (small business & restaurants graph), IMDB (movie graph), CNN (news graph), ESPN (sports graph), integrating and making their sites instantly social, and pointing people off of Facebook.com’s news feed to external sites for the first time

· Graph API (“all you need is a Web browser and cURL, don’t have to wade through 2000 lines of PHP code”) will replace the old, complicated, method-proliferating API

· No more 24-hour cache policy limit, to make use of Real-time Updates, a callback url so developers don't have to poll constantly to catch user updates for their apps and Facebook platform doesn’t get slammed with unnecessary API calls

· Graph API Real-time Updates will use a push alert, WebHook concept, but did not adopt the open standard PubSubHubBub proposed by Google

· Facebook has been on the defensive from open standards leaders who are not sure that Facebook's version of open meets the developer definition of Open:

· Could end up being a huge step forward for the Semantic Web vision, a la Microformats:

· Facebook Connect API (100 Million users) eventually going away, but will continue to be supported for now

· Google is the new “evil empire” to be feared, running into the arms of Microsoft, who is less of a perceived threat:

SxSWi 2010: the art of balancing social with substance

2010-03-29T10:48:00.000-07:00

I attended my first SxSWi this month with the great folks at Team Mashery, showing off API demos and prototypes from Circus Mashimus lounge sponsors Best Buy Remix, CafePress, Hallmark, Giiv as well as Geek Sideshow participants Netflix, The New York Times, and Billboard.

Having attended numerous tech events & hack days, I felt both the kudos and growing pains that attendees have described as SxSWi seeks the events balance between of social and substance. At any tech event, you a) need both and b) can't overload one at the expense of the other.

SxSWi 2010 was:

a great networking event where I met and reconnected with loads of Web and mobile application developers and designers who work with APIs.
a fun venue where the Austin event staff (both union AND volunteer) actually smiled and were proactively helpful (take that, Javitz and Moscone).
too long (5 days? really??)
a forum where online trends, particularly around location-based and social networking, gained momentum and solidified into generally agreed upon directions for 2010

From TIME Magazine's Ten Tech Trends for 2010 out last week, “South By Southwest Interactive is nerd paradise — Austin's annual tech smash has minted its share of Internet darlings. (Foursquare in 2009; Twitter in 2007.) While this year's conference didn't have a clear breakout star, it did offer insight to the trends and ideas that will be shaping the Web in 2010.”

SxSWi 2010 was not:

a "tech" event, by which I mean the majority of attendees code at the event. If the relatively-balanced gender ratio on its own didn't give it away immediately, let me be more explicit. This is not the event where engineers gather in programming language BOFs, sessions have code in the preso decks, and multitudes of coders hunker down in hallways huddled with their laptops around power outlets.

full of meaty content. I personally went 1 for 5 in terms of good sessions (good presenter + informative content). Even after last year's Zuckerberg keynote fiasco, the Evan Williams keynote has the dubious distinction of out-sucking the previous year's keynote. Bad sessions + bad keynotes = bad substance. I think O'Reilly events, on balance, do the best job of producing tech events that scale (over 2,000 attendees) and also provide good substance and social opportunities.

terrible. Some bloggers have already let fly their usual "cooler than you" pronouncements that SxSWi about social castes now that it has gotten so big. (Interesting that both bloggers recently left their gigs at ReadWriteWeb and Valleywag.) Snark makes for good SEO and reality TV, but both are too one-sided in their analysis.

Being an event where the year's upcoming tech trends are called out in a great town like Austin is great for social. I do hope SxSWi ups their game in 2011 by hiring a great content manager to deliver on the substance.

The SxSW music festival has done a good job for the last twenty years at being the must attend event for its industry, where business gets done. Perhaps musicians are less distracted by the spring break atmosphere of groupies, fanboys, beer, and the perils of popularity than their geek brethren, having been sufficiently inured long ago? I'm rooting for SxSWi, and hope they fine the right social/substance balance.

Photo attribution: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

"let's hear it for new dorks"

2010-03-09T12:07:00.000-08:00

"The new swag is irony."

Entrepreneur State of Mind. Go Grasshopper! It is at once both Jay-Z cool and Valley ego-deprecating. Hilarious.

send them valentines: love & your API developer community

2010-02-08T10:15:00.000-08:00

If you don't know what love has to do with API developers or your platform, take a gander at this classic Dave Winer developer rant from October 1994 on companies (Apple, Microsoft, HP, etc.) with platforms trying to woo developers.

(Acknowledgement: Dating metaphors in general are fraught with potential PC-violations. I get it. The message is still worth it.)

This DaveNet rant is a developer classic from 15 years ago -- the anger of a type uniquely inspired by unrequited love still comes through loud and clear today. "It's great when the platform you're developing for is taking good care of you, and it's equally lousy when the platform treats you like an antibody -- something to be defined, then isolated and defeated. Yuck." ...

"Developer relations is a mating game. The platform vendors are the guys. Developers are the girls. Send flowers. You always score big. Like wives and girlfriends, developers just want to be cared for. It's the little things that count. That's a big secret. You sent flowers last week? So what! You gotta send them every week, rain or shine. " ...

"Many thanks to Guy Kawasaki, Bill Campbell and Jean-Louis Gassee, who understood very well that a good developer is worth a hundred promiscuous girlfriends. In those days my mailbox overflowed with floral arrangements. And I cooked some great meals!"

So... one more time: Be an attentive lover to your valued API developers. They notice the little things when they are appreciated, and when you are just not that into them.

photo attribution: flickr/ideaconstructor

Shopping API as canary in Yahoo!'s coal mine

2010-01-12T09:20:00.000-08:00

Falling under the category of "is it still news if it is no news to anyone?", there has been quite a bit of buzz around yesterday's shocking, simply shocking announcement that Yahoo! is shuttering its Shopping API and transitioning Yahoo! Shopping to outsourced shopping syndication service PriceGrabber by March 2010.

What Yahoo! did right: They gave API developers 60 days notice of the upcoming Shopping Web Services closure, and let them know up front that a PriceGrabber shopping syndication service, and not an API, would be handling the feeds from now on.

What Yahoo! could have done better: handle some of the initial legwork for developers currently using the Y! Shopping API to smoothly transition to the new PriceGrabber shopping syndication services. If you can't make the migration backwards-compatible to make the transition seamless for developers, then auto-create new PriceGrabber accounts for developers who have built applications using the Y! Shopping API to help migrate to Yahoo!’s new method, then supplement with easy-to-use documentation for any "last mile" customizations developers need to handle themselves. Yahoo! has done this type of "make the transition easy on your existing userbase" migration with the egroups and flickr acquisitions in the past.

More than straight news, this is a potent example of a company where their compelling platform strategy cannot save them from a flailing business strategy. Yahoo! has made numerous successful and enviable overtures to developers, with internal and public hack days, the Y! Open Strategy of 2008, and useful data in the form of useful developer Web services and APIs.

Ben Metcalfe (subject of photo above and whom I apparently met at the public Yahoo! Hack Day on the Yahoo! campus in Fall 2006) has a great write-up on the Y! announcement from a developer POV. While I don't predict a spreading deadpool of public APIs as Ben does, Yahoo! as a company definitely will feel the chilling effects of developers being more hesitant to build on Y! APIs like delicious, flickr, YQL and BOSS. I thought this section of Ben's write-up quoted below is spot on, straight out of the implicit agreement between platform providers and platform participants from John's Hagel & Seely Brown's Shaping Platform Strategy theory published in Harvard Business Review:

"API Vendors need to consider their long-term strategy of what they are propositioning. That big “we’re so open it hurts” fanfare is going to cost you down the road if you can’t maintain it. In many ways, removing an API is worse then not offering it all.

API consumers need to consider carefully the viability of the services they are using, especially if they are leveraging them for commercial use or as an intrinsic part of their value proposition. Look for freemium models that indicate viability, or build agile adapters that can be quickly swapped out to a different vendor at short notice (assuming there is one)."

Yahoo! is the latest example that a company's platform strategy can only ever be as compelling and healthy as the business strategy it supports. Closing down the Y! Shopping API is less a comment on the state of public APIs generally or on the commitment of Yahoo! to API developers, and more of a signal about the overall health of the Yahoo! business. Y! is making tough business choices right now -- I don't think it is a surprise to anyone that Y! Shopping is being outsourced to PriceGrabber, so it makes sense that the API would also transition to PriceGrabber. What is unfortunate is that Yahoo! chose an outsourced shopping syndication solution that does not support an API, and that Yahoo! did not make the transition to their new outsourced solution more seamless for developers. Respect the ecosystem.

photo attribution: flickr/dotben

2010 prediction: cloud to benefit from less haze and hype

2010-01-04T10:17:00.000-08:00

The warning signs have been around since about 2008. My own truly worrying signal that the increasing buzz around cloud has officially kicked up too much dust came when, flipping through my beloved Economist recently (how will my new Kindle ever give me that crisp, snappy-paged satisfaction?), I read through The Economist Cloud Briefing: "Clash of the Clouds: The launch of Windows 7 marks the end of an era in computing—and the beginning of an epic battle between Microsoft, Google, Apple and others."

Attribution: Illustration by Ian Whadcock, Economist.com

Let's get this straight. The Economist -- as close to a journalistic beacon of integrity and excellence as exists, IMHO -- "and othered" Amazon to include Apple in its Top 3 battling it out for cloud dominance. DRM-imbued, closed loop, opaque Apple. Then, led its list of Top 3 cloud titans with Microsoft, who arguably is just getting started with cloud efforts, and is not yet apace with Google or Amazon. Or Salesforce.com for that matter. Isn't this the business equivilant of awarding Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, signalling sky-high expectations of players, most of whom haven't delivered much of anything yet?

You'll need to read the article to get a sense of the restricted way the author seems to define cloud computing solely as a mainframe-to-PC-to-cloud evolution, completely missing the context of cloud as a platform that is leveraged by other parties to create customer-facing applications (nicely echoed by vzach and AOtto -- benefits of the Web edition include the exposing of kindred reaction. :-)) Dion Hinchcliffe of ZDnet makes more accurate, compelling points that the clash of the clouds will be a "winner-takes-all" battle similar to previous platform battles, where immature battlefield rules of engagement, standards and definitions are still being solidified.

On top of leading and well-respected business publications clouding our understanding, additional murkiness came in the form of a pre-holiday duststorm around the December 18th Rackspace "cloud failure" that brought down major sites for the better part of an hour (again) when Rackspace failover plans seemingly did not include data center and peering redundancy for AT&T when their backbone failed ("FailT&T is the Ford Pinto of the internet" via @shamptonian.) Isn't redundancy a key prerequisite for something to be considered cloud, therefore making this not a cloud failure, but a hosting redundancy failure? (read: is it OK for virtual private server hosting to be re-branded as ‘cloud’ hosting when it is not in fact cloud-based via @john_mason_?)

My wish in 2010 if for cloud standards to grow up a bit, and for cloud as a platform to become less "developer-beware". May the best titan win, may they be as open as possible but not more open, and may cloud not suffer the fate of becoming the most overhyped, least delivered upon term of 2010.

getting san francisco to love you back

2009-12-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

Great article in the SF Chronicle today that pretty much sums up how I'm feeling being in the midst of our riduculous SF kindergarten hunt, realizing the vast sums we spend on property tax don't trickle down and make any impact on the local schools. Our children's future is based on a broken pyramid scheme. Thank you, Howard Jarvis.

"When I mention this escape fantasy to other urban-dwelling friends, it often turns out they're harboring a similar desire. And their yearning is usually tinged with melancholy, in the way that you might talk about leaving a significant other -- not because you don't love them, but because they're just not that into you."

change is the constant

2009-11-11T15:34:00.000-08:00

5 years, 3 months. The approximate age of my firstborn child. November 2009 marks the official end of an era in my household, and the beginning of a new one. A month of bidding farewell to our beloved nanny who became a member of our family, as well as my awesome work team who have become my friends over the last five years -- plus, the first week of my youngest starting preschool (gulp!) After over five years with eBay (capped off with a few rounds of leaving drinks @Lazslo's in the Mission), I've joined a new platform service provider start-up in San Francisco. Mashery powers APIs for e-commerce, business services and media companies, and I am looking forward to meeting with many of them at the Business of APIs Conference in New York next week.

This week so far has been about meeting with members of the Mashery team (less than 30), settling into my new space at Maiden Lane and Kearny, and acclimating to my shorter commute (my new favorite benefit so far). I've already bumped into 2 people I know on Muni in just 2 days of commuting -- you sure don't get to connect like that in a car! Start-up life is also different. IT Support, changing the water cooler bottle, and clearing out the fragrant fridge are now team-building opportunities.

To coincide with my season of change, I've decided to experiment with busting out of stealth twitter mode, and dip my toe into the public stream since my first attempt in 2007. Resolving the tension between what I want optimized for natural search and dealing with twitter request spam is elusive, but I'm always open to experimenting. Change -- let's give it a try!

Back from Microblogging, Web 2.0 Expo reg codes

2009-03-23T21:27:00.000-07:00

140 characters at a time is just so much more my speed these days. But sometimes a girl just has to bust out from these confines and post on her long neglected blog.

What is the occasion? I'm looking for friends to join me at the eBay booth at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2009, March 31- April 3 in San Francisco at Moscone Center West. eBay is speaking, keynoting, sponsoring and looking forward to checking in with some of our developers at the event, like Terapeak, HostedSupport, ahTEXT, and Cloud Conversion. I've been under a social rock for the last 8 weeks planning our presence, and I could use a friendly face or 2!

If you are attending Web 2.0 Expo, don't miss our keynote by eBay Marketplaces CTO and SVP of Platform, Mark Carges on Wednesday, April 1 @ the afternoon keynote.

Another don't miss talk is being given by Farhang Kassaei, Lead Platform Architect at eBay and David Glazer, Director of Engineering at Google, who will be giving a talk on building commerce applications based on the gadgets specification as defined within Open Social. Their talk will be on Wednesday, April 1 @ 1:30pm.

If you haven't registered for Web 2.0 Expo yet, register with websf09ecm1 if you want to register for a FREE Expo Hall pass, a $100 value. Or if you are looking to register for a full conference pass that will get you in to see all of the sessions and talks at Web 2.0 Expo, register with websf09spr35 to get 35% off of your registration.

If you know me, you know I can't resist buying a new pair of sweet kicks to get into the spirit of being a booth monkey. So first one to accurately predict or relate (whichever comes first) which color sneakers I wore to all 3 days of the event, first round is on me.

Conversational Marketing in a Web 2-dot-over World

2008-10-16T15:56:00.000-07:00

I spent the last 2 days at the Conversational Marketing Summit 2008 San Francisco at the beautiful Golden Gate Club in the Presidio. Federated Media put on a great event in a spectacular setting.

Heard from a great line-up of speakers, including Evan Williams of Twitter, Jay Adelson of Digg, Scott Heiferman from Meetup, Richard Jalichandra of Technorati, John Batelle and more. The crowd was mostly marketing and ad agency folks looking for more information about experiential and conversational marketing and how to measure it.

Three keynotes/panels stood out for me: Face-to-Face: Merging Events and Digital panel on Day 1, which went into the convergence of online and offline marketing, Evan Williams keynote conversation with Batelle, as well as The Next Wave of Social Media panel on Day 2. Chas Edwards was a a great panelist as usual -- i loved the moderator's intro of the panel as the "godfathers of conversational marketing." striking!

Great event and content, but the crowd was pretty distracting to me (me not being the target audience and all) -- all potential advertisers and agencies looking to justify their spend on social media mixed with the figureheads of the companies looking to take their dollars diluted from learning anything new about social media. Making money can go from entrepreneurial to crass in a flash, and I witnessed several cross overs. Capitalism ain't always pretty, but it sure is entertaining.

Web 2.0 Expo New York: I heart New York

2008-09-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

Let me start off this much delayed post by coming clean. It had been since September 1998 since I had last been in New York City. A full decade. Tragic really. And it was for Fall Internet World 1998. Back during the ramp up of the first bubble when I was still doing biz dev for TechWeb/CMPnet. Yikes.

This time, my trip was because of another trade show, Web 2.0 Expo New York last week, where I put together the booth showing off the eBay and PayPal platforms to web developers and designers. The fact that I flew in on Black Monday 2008 did not do anything to quell my fears that another web bubble might be bursting soon. Ironically, due to a number of post-bubble mergers, TechWeb is now the name of the business unit who puts on the show with O'Reilly (United Business Media bought an Events company and gave it the name of the old tech portal site I used to work for, when it was CMP Media -- separately bought out by United Business Media). Do you see all the paths converging and crashing in on each other now?

But I digress. At our booth, attendees learned and got demos about eBay Developers Program, PayPal certifications, VUVOX, eBay Desktop, Firefox Companion for eBay and more. But the best part of the week was definitely getting to know some more of the developers building applications with the eBay and PayPal API platforms, such as Glaxstar, EffectiveUI, JDT Technologies, Aduci and Payloadz, who added their perspective and testimonials about their experience with the eBay development and PayPal certification process.

Rolf Skyberg packed his session on Platform Wars: A Brief History on Wednesday, and we also got to catch up with developers like WatchCount.com (aka helios825 on the Developer Forums), WidgetBucks/Mpire and Guru of Sales, who stopped by our booth as well. You can also check out InformationWeek and VentureBeat for what our fearless leader, Max Mancini, had to say from the show floor.

Of course, since it IS New York, I had after hours fun, too, including dinner at Otto Pizzeria Enoteca (Mario Batali's restaurant), DB Moderne Bistro (Daniel Balaud's restaurant), as well as an invitation to partake in house seats for South Pacific, currently the most sought after tickets on Broadway (apparently -- I'll have to take my friend's word for it). I even enjoyed a few cocktails at trendy Manhattan clubs and bars - something I don't even get to do in San Francisco anymore.

This trip, even though it was hard to leave my 10-month old behind for the first time, made me swear not to wait another ten years before I return. I heart New York.

Photo Credits to Delyn Simons and Lanz Tsang

euro 2008: the beautiful semi-final game

2008-06-28T15:29:00.001-07:00

Philipp Lahm with the last goal put Germany in the final
Originally uploaded by đồng chí Fresh

san francisco is a great town to gather with fellow soccer aficionados and watch some good football go down.

the euro cup 2008 has been some of the most exciting soccer i've witnessed -- with 3 of the 4 favorites going down in the quarterfinals. i know that purists will tell me that the spain v italy quarterfinal was a mesmerizing display of tactical defense. but to me, italy just looked like a bunch of thugs fouling in the penalty box taking advantage of the referee's reluctance to call fouls in that zone. and don't even get me started on luca toni, the most overrated striker/primadonna in the tournament.

to me, the germany v turkey semi-final game was the best match of soccer i've ever witnessed. keep in mind that i watched this game 1) at home, 2) hours delayed on TiVo (not live), 3) I had already heard the outcome of the match, and 4) there were 3 blackouts that caused the international TV feed to go down and caused all the stations covering this game around the world to miss 2 of the 5 exciting goals.

germany going in were the heavy favorites; turkey, the cinderella team that had come from behind 3 times in the tournament, had nearly all of their key players out due to yellow card accumulation or injury.

but turkey played their hearts out, like they had nothing to lose. the turks tied it up with a beautiful goal at 86 minutes (4 minutes left in regulation) and the crowds went nuts. then, the experienced germans answered back with a give & go up the left side with a defensive fullback who took it and drilled it "like a $40 million dollar striker" into the back of the net. at 89 minutes. with less than 30 seconds in regulation left to go (not accounting for injury time). by a defensive player who hadn't scored a goal since a qualifying match in 2006. sure, the team with the experience and poise under pressure won out, but the turks deserve a ton of credit for going on the attack with a bunch of upstarts who collectively had 20% of the international major game experience of the germans. they played audaciously, with heart.

sure the right team won. but turkey made them fight for it up until the very end. this game would turn anyone into a soccer fan for life. there's a reason the brazilians call this "the beautiful game", and it was reinforced to me on my TiVo on Wednesday night, @ home with my 2 sleeping kids, cheering silently and jumping up and down in my living room with a smile as big as philipp lahm's here.

ps. does anyone else think that schweinstieger looks like the bad guy in rocky 4? he gives me the willies.

highlights from ebay devcon in chicago

2008-06-19T04:51:00.000-07:00

Boy I'm pooped. Ever since I returned from maternity leave back in March, I've been working non-stop on a little developer event we call the eBay Developers Conference in Chicago, from June 16-18. If you are friends or family who haven't heard from me in 3 months, here's why. :)

On Monday, the major buzz for the show and the blogosphere was around Project Echo and the opening keynote demo showcasing the ability for developers to embed their applications built on the eBay platform where hundreds of thousands of sellers manage their businesses on eBay.com. On Tuesday, Mike Shaver, Chief Evangelist for Mozilla spoke to developers on the same day that Firefox 3.0 browser launched, celebrating Download Day 2008 right here at eBay DevCon and giving a shoutout to the Firefox Companion for eBay. woot woot!

eBay also honored ten members of our developer community, who are building applications on the eBay platform for achievements in improving user experience and customer service, increasing platform engagement and extending eBay in exciting new directions:

eBay Star Developer Award winners:

• DSR Rockstar: ShipRush by Z-Firm (USA)
• Most Innovative Application: Jaast for Wii by Scendix Software (Germany)
• Early Adopter: iRibbit by Aduci (USA)
• Service to the Developer Community: Joe Fox (elzorro) of BD Network (UK)
• Best Design: Kyozou Widget by Kyozou (Canada)

Runners-up:

• DSR Rockstar: ezSupport for eBay by HostedSupport (USA)
• Most Innovative Application: Mobile Alerts for Sellers by ahTXT (USA)
• Early Adopter: GarageBuy by iwascoding (Germany)
• Service to the Developer Community: Anthony Sukow of Terapeak (Canada)
• Best Design: Video advertisements for eBay listings by Vzaar (UK)

For those of you keeping count, we've got winners represented across 4 countries from our global e-commerce platform. Congratulations to our 2008 winners!!

For full coverage of all the news out of eBay Developers Conference 2008, you can check out the eBay Developer blog.

developers got social at ebay devcon

2008-06-19T04:48:00.000-07:00

We all know that sometimes the best part of conferences is what happens outside of the sessions. Developers got social this year at eBay Developers Conference on our eBay DevCon Twitter. Chicago is a fun town and so was looking into the thought cloud surrounding all of the ideas and conversations happening in the hallways of our DevCon event. Blogging, photo sharing and adding friends from our Facebook event were also popular ways to spend time in our Developer Lounge.

Of course there were also offline ways to network as well, including our Beer Bash and PayPal Party at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. Online or in person, the eBay developer community is a social bunch.

eBay devcon 2008 in chicago

2008-06-16T00:24:00.001-07:00

Reflecting thing- Chicago art.
Originally uploaded by rinklefree

I'm here in Chicago for the eBay Developers Conference. I challenge you to name a better city for kick ass public art. Check out my favorite below, called Cloud Gate.

See you all for the keynote tomorrow @ 9:30AM, McCormick Place West!

Make sure all of you blogging and taking photos are tagging them ebaydevcon and ebaydevcon08, and follow the devcon twitter at ebaydevcon08 to jump in on the microblogging.

web 2.0 expo: design your API to support ...good design

2008-04-23T15:14:00.000-07:00

Managed to break out of my 7 weeks back at work, either working-or-sleeping rut and check in at Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday. Besides setting up meetings with some of my industry peeps who i've been missing and haven't seen the post-baby, post-blonde me, I was able to squeeze in a quick round of the Exhibit Hall and an afternoon session from Michael Migurski of Stamen Design and Alex Payne from Twitter on "Design Your API: Learnings from Twitter and Stamen." Their session was basically aimed at how companies providing platforms to developers can enable good design with accessible languages such as Flash, JSON, PHP, etc. that enable good looking tools.

I've been a big fan of Stamen Design data visualizations in the past - was totally wowed a couple of years ago at the Digg v3 party by their Digg Labs visualizations for looking at popular stories in a simple, informative way. They also designed the Digg API that accepts accepts simple REST requests and offers several response types: XML, JSON, Javascript, and serialized PHP.

Most of their API tips are geared the broadest use case of simple GET calls -- not so applicable to big, complex transactional API platforms, such as eBay Trading Web services. But their presentation has takeaways for anyone involved with platforms - make it easier for third party developers to make their applications look good.

To appeal to the broadest swath of Web app developers and avoid having to invest in a lot of technical support resources, they recommend to avoid SOAP and XML -- "too much overhead".

Two examples Mike used in his preso were: Oakland Crimespotting (I know some friends who could get addicted to this) and how they made data more accessible to users, and Digg Labs and how they made data more accessible to developers via API.

make your API easy for flash, PHP, JSON, JavaScript and Actionscript developers to use
should just work in a browser
Key registration is a hassle to be avoided: (avoid the overhead if possible)
do all of your dates as Unix timestamps
stick to these core formats: XML, JSON (combo of python and JavaScript in practice, AJAX-friendly, avoid XML parsing issues
serialized PHP, JavaScript callbacks
Cross-domain XML standard makes things easier for Flash developers
REST - just web-jargon for Moving Things (GET) instead of Doing Stuff.
Python: Unit tests are the single best way to coordinate design and development. Expect your database to change.
Developer Support - delegate so that you can scale your developer community. Give developers who provide support to others additional support in-kind

Mike also talked about the emerging standard of OAuth - delegated authentication to make it possible to let people in provisionally and API call rate limiting, but revoke when necessary. Sounds an awful lot like a pared down version of the Authentication & Authorization standard that eBay developers have been using since 2004.

My bandwidth being what it is at the moment, I was not able to make it back to the event for more session, but after talking to several folks during the "hallway track", it sounded like the quality of most sessions was much better than last year. I'll definitely be coming back next year in better form, non-sleep deprived form, when I can make the most of the after hour activities again.

Photos accredited to Scott Beale/Laughing Squid and ana/g.

give your inner dork a warm fuzzy

2008-03-12T11:29:00.000-07:00

Attention all Gen Y'ers -- Back in the day, before there were any video games more sophisticated than Ms. Pac-Man or Asteroid or Donkey Kong, you had to use multi-sided dice and your imagination to play fantasy games.

I won't wax poetic about how much Gary Gygax's passing yesterday impacted me personally. I can recall playing Dungeons & Dragons only a handful of times in the 4th grade, being an annoying sister, allowed in my brother's room only because my parents made him, holed up on rainy afternoons, trying to convince him and his gathered friends that Charisma should always trump Strength and Dexterity. That should tell you right there it was never really my thing. Turns out, however, that most of the XY-people I tend to admire, respect and choose to surround myself with in my personal and professional life have D&D and Red Slurpee-thons in common. I have inherent dorkness in my character, so I am drawn to other kindred latchkey kids who had to entertain themselves with creativeness and flair and artificial red coloring in their beverages.

So, for all of you important people in my life, I present you with this D&D flow chart by Sam Potts from Wired/NY Times obituary of Gary Gygax. It is hilarious and insightful and an obvious labor of love for a time before Gen X'ers were hopelessly jaded and not embarrased to express genuine excitement for something. Embrace your inner dork.

working parents tip #4: keeping your sense of humor

2008-02-11T04:43:00.000-08:00

working parents need to maintain their sense of humor so they will root for each other, stay sane and not kill each other or the kids. here are some of my favorites.

books: Baby's First Tattoo memory book and Baby, Mix me a Drink be of use guide

clothing & gifts: Wry Baby: i'm partial to the Wheel of Responsibility - " Have Fun! Stay Un-Divorced!"

music: Rockabye Baby!: lullaby renditions of Metallica, Coldplay, Radiohead and more.

youtube overture of motherhood phrases you never thought you'd say, but do:

working parents tip #3: surviving without sleep

2008-02-08T15:23:00.000-08:00

when you're trying to work productively without sleep, it is a crusher. your child often tries to make up for the time you're gone by saving their alert time for when they see you -- at night. exhausting doesn't cover it. welcome to being a working parent.

but the end game for sleep, as my friend, alix, mother of a 6 and a 3 year-old, recently reminded me is not to get your kids to sleep through the night. that's right. even though that used to be one of the mid-century hallmarks of being a good mother (along with getting your child eating solids and out of diapers as soon as possible). sleeping through the night in the long-term is a parenting myth, a phantom ghost from your life before kids. medically-speaking, sleeping through the night is 5 hours at a stretch (my former twenty-something self always gets a kick out of that), and various things like illness, teething, developmental milestones will KEEP waking them up well after infancy and well into grammar school. you may get cocky at the beginning when you get a couple of weeks or even months of sleep for 8, 9, 10 hours. don't get used to it.

the end game as a working parent is to eventually get your kids to 1) fall asleep and stay asleep by themselves, and 2) have sleep be an enjoyable, relaxing state they look forward to, not dread or fear or eventually require ambien to attain enough of later in life. for working parents, the best advice shared with me revolves around a short, 20-30 minute bedtime routine that provides bonding time, but doesn't revolve around elaborate, lavender-infused bathing and massage rituals that you won't be able to maintain. a bedtime story, pajamas, share your favorite part of the day, then kiss goodnight is simple, nuturing, and reassuring - and blissfully manageable when you're getting almost no sleep yourself. that and a half-caf drip with milk no later than 10AM gets me through most weekdays. what about you?

working parents tip #2: swaddling

2008-02-04T11:56:00.000-08:00

every new parent knows that the art of swaddling a baby is both essential and elusive to master. how come the nurses at the hospital can wrap them tight as a burrito in less than 10 seconds? basically, the working parent who can swaddle the quickest and tightest will generally have the calmest, cooiest baby most quickly. good for working parent nerves. while dads tend to be better at swaddling b/c tend to be stronger, we found through experience that the blanket, not so much the technique, is the key to the perfect swaddle.

ironically, most baby blankets are terrible for swaddling. the are cute and fleecy and soft -- good for strollers, in the sling or while holding them. but they do not hold a swaddle wrap worth a darn, nor or most of them long enough to do a complete swaddle wrap.

tip #1: for the daytime swaddle:

get yourself a swaddledesigns blanket specifically for swaddling. buying 2 is better, for the inevitable times when the first one gets dirty. they are worth every penny for the extra naptime they will buy you. their secret is that they are extra-large yet thin material, and also made of 100% cotton. even a rookie swaddler can get a baby swaddled in one of these bad boys very quickly, and baby won't get overheated being wrapped up so tightly in pure cotton.

tip #2: the nighttime swaddle:

how much would you pay for 30 minutes longer sleeping time at each stretch at night? how about an hour? yes, newborns generally get up to feed every 2-3 hours anyway, but in a tight swaddle, you can extend those glorious minutes of sleep time easily 30-60 minutes at a stretch. this is where you bring in the big swaddling guns - the kiddopotamus swaddle me infant wrap.

we didn't find them so useful during the day when you needed to unswaddle more frequently for feeding, changing, etc. but when you want them to stay swaddled for hours at a time at night to reinforce the message "nightime is for sleeping", these things are great. they have a little pouch for the legs and then you velcro the arms in place for the duration.

we tried both cotton and fleece, small and large. i would recommend the fleece ones only if you gave birth to a winter baby (in the late fall through february), and need a little extra warmth at night. otherwise, cotton is preferable to avoid overheating. also, if you've got an average sized newborn, you'll grow out of the small size and into the large size in about 2 months, so you might want to buy both sizes up front. from personal experience, there's nothing worse than growing out of the small size and not having this available at night until you buy the larger size (which you can get at ebay for good price, but need to wait for up to a week to ship). there are sleepless nights and then there are SLEEPLESS NIGHTS. the kiddopotamus swaddle me will help you stay in the former category.

working parents tip #1: cradle cap

2008-02-01T11:32:00.000-08:00

for my first tip in honor of working parents month, i'm employing the time-saving caveat that i won't be defining most of the terms in these posts. not enough time. as the daughter of a librarian, while growing up i heard all the time from my two working parents as a response to my endless questions, "go look it up". which in my childhood meant go to the leather bound encyclopedias in dad's office and look it up. here, go look it up here means google it or wikipedia it.

tip #1: cradle cap

both of my children were blessed with full heads of hair. which makes them photogenic and cute when most babies are bald. but it also makes them susceptible to cradle cap. after scouring my usual sources for information on how to rid my babies of this benign, but oh-so-maddening scaly skin condition, through trial and error, i have found a good solution - jojoba oil.

benefits:

- not petroleum-based like baby oils made from mineral oil
- not olive oil, which was on the right track, but too gooey, didn't absorb well into the scalp and didn't seem to prevent it from coming back
- not an adult-shampoo like selsum blue or head & shoulders that can get into and irritate baby's eyes
- widely available and inexpensive at trader joe's ($6.99) or local health food stores

how to:

1) drip jojoba oil on your baby's head and lightly rub it
2) let it sit for at least an hour
3) wash baby's head with washcloth and baby shampoo. you can do this quickly by holding baby's head under the kitchen sink faucet with lukewarm water without undressing/doing the whole production of a baby bath. you working parents know what i mean.
4) dry vigorously with towel
5) use softbrush to brush out sebum flakes and encourage scalp circulation

repeat nightly for one week or until cradle cap is gone. once gone, repeat every 3-4 days to prevent return.

cradle cap is also common behind the ears and along brow line, which makes the skin very sore looking and even crack in the creases. do this scalp treatment on all affected areas to treat and prevent.

february is working parents month

2008-02-01T11:08:00.000-08:00

in the spirit of making it so, i am declaring february working parents month. this is the first day of the last month of my maternity leave, so i'm going to spend february posting as many of the helpful tips i received as a working parent as i can in between feebly short newborn napping times. please excuse the copy editing and brevity of these entries as i try to churn them out.

i received all of my tips from two sources: 1) word of mouth recommendations from other busy working parents, or 2) books or websites that were recommended by other busy working parents. if you are a working parent, please chime in with tips of your own.

as a working mama of 2 kids under 4 years old in a two-parent working household living in an expensive city with no family in the area, i know from experience that your very survival depends on sharing this knowledge freely. b/c it probably ain't gonna come from your fictitious extended family you've created in your wishful mind of nearby grandmothers, aunts and cousins who are always available for great parenting advice and free babysitting.

holy schmokes

2008-01-22T11:49:00.000-08:00

thought i'd break my online fast and do a quick check of the world while Duncan is sleeping.

1) stock markets are going crazy because of the credit crisis,
2) Fed slashed interest rates 3/4 of a percent a week before their scheduled policy meeting (can we say quarterly and 2007 annual earnings statement week, boys and girls?)
3) the writers strike is threatening the Oscars
4) Obama is looking iffy for South Carolina
5) Meg is retiring after 10 years.

I'm going back into the baby bubble.

duncan edward jones

2007-11-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

welcome to the latest addition to our clan - duncan edward jones. he was born on his due date (right on deadline), 29th october 2007, at 8.45am. stats: 8lbs 1oz. 22 inches. 36 cm head. (translation for those who don't collect baby stats: above avg size. tall. big noggin.)

blythe has decided to call her baby brother "baby punkin", which not only rhymes with duncan but she feels adds a seasonal flair, since we all left the hospital on halloween). she's pretty cute with him.

daddy and mommy are both well. this peanut arrived in 3 hours (versus 21 hours), so it's difficult to say who was more on edge when we burst into the admitting room 50 minutes before we gave birth -- the one with contractions or the one driving the one with contractions, racing down divisadero and up california to cpmc at 7.45 in the morning.

dramatic entry, mister jones. we love you.

stella surprise? fun with doggie dna

2007-10-28T14:32:00.000-07:00

after reading about penny's surprising test results on leslie's blog, i am so getting this done for stella. after all if dna testing can prove that barack obama and dick cheney are related, i'm certain i can turn up something fun on our pup.

any bets?

we adopted our pup from the marin spca 4 years ago when she was 8 weeks old. they found her feral mommy, in a cave on a marin county beach, feeding a litter of pups. her mom was determined to be a 35-lb "cattledog mix" - stella is up to 60 lbs with lots of energy to spare after a 2 hour doggie playgroup session and was the alpha dog of her litter (more on that in a different blog post). so daddy must have been a big boy.

and that's all we know about the "breeding" that went in to our lovable mutt, stella artois mccartney jones. so far.

clean. graffitti. guerilla. marketing

2007-10-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

here's a creative offline marketing idea straight from ChasNote spotted on the streets of London that's a little more responsible than the ill-fated 2001 IBM Linux "Love, Peace & Linux" street art campaign: Springwise, a British firm called Street Advertising Services “uses high-pressure cleaning machines to wash brands, logos and adverts onto dirty pavements.” (that's 'sidewalk' if you don't speak Brit).

The one of the far right is from eBay Kijiji classifieds site for UK, Gumtree:

successful innovation? fail faster! don't always listen to your best customers!

2007-10-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

Illustration by Noma Bar

The Economist (you know by now my passionate feelings for this publication, oh loyal grep le miette audience) released their special report on Innovation in the October 13th issue. It is wonderful.

a few gems for you, gentle reader:

1) get better at fast failing: "Harold Sirkin, of the Boston Consulting Group, is the co-author of “Payback”, a book on innovation strategy. He scoffs that “firms have too many ideas and too much emphasis on creativity—more ideas merely choke the funnel even more.” In fact, the more ideas a firm comes up with, the more important it is for bosses to decide early on which of them to kill off. This is to avoid heading down countless and costly dead ends. As Ron Adner of Insead, a French business school, puts it, “Innovation is a loser's game, as we know most initiatives fail. But the truly innovative companies know how to deal with losing.”

That is why failing fast and learning from those failures is so important for companies. Niklas Savander, of Nokia, argues that given today's accelerating pace of global innovation firms “need really harsh discipline to weed out ideas quite quickly—we are working at fast failing, but are not there yet.”

2) Turf wars are another obstacle to fast failing. Employees in one part of a company often reject ideas and advice from a different part. Mark Little, GE's head of research, confesses that getting his boffins to kill off unviable projects is the hardest task he faces: “Like a dog with a bone, people don't want to give them up.”

3) Peter Drucker, an eminent management guru, argued decades ago that innovation and entrepreneurship are “purposeful tasks that can be organised—are in need of being organised” and should be treated as part of an executive's job.

4) Giant Toyota enables innovation with the Prius hybrid-electric car. "It was a risky bet on an unproven technology, but it has been a huge success. It was a long-term vision, says Mr Reinert, that overcame the firm's innate caution. And in the future the company is going to have to make similar bets again. 'We are convinced that we are entering a disruptive future, and we want to be ready for it,' he says."

5) Even if firms can overcome the stigma of failure, how exactly are bosses to know which potential innovations to kill? Clayton Christensen, author of “The Innovator's Dilemma”, believes he has cracked the code. He says it can require unlearning some of the things that managers often accept as golden rules. The chief one is the belief in listening and responding to the needs of your best customers.

This seemingly sensible strategy can be a dangerous siren song, Mr Christensen argues. His influential book shows how even successful firms can get into trouble by trying to please their best customers. Because there may be only a handful of highly profitable, high-end buyers who want and can afford more features and better performance, firms can invest heavily in trying to deliver what this elite group wants even though the resulting products may end up beyond the reach of the majority of their customers.

That, argues Mr Christensen, allows upstarts to enter the market and offer inferior (although perfectly adequate) technologies and products at much cheaper prices and push incumbents into ever smaller niches—and ultimately out of business altogether. He cautions this “disruptive” innovation is not the same thing as “radical” or “breakthrough” innovation, although the notions are often conflated.

6) Clustering is still where it's at: "It is not much of an exaggeration to say that, aside from mobile telephony, Europe has not come up with a globally disruptive innovation in decades—although Skype, an internet-telephony firm that is now part of eBay, once looked like it might qualify."

7) Incrementalism can be the enemy of radical change: "Visit Wal-Mart's headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and you will be greeted by a large plaque in the lobby which says: 'Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy! We don't want continuous improvement, we want radical change. .'.. But ask Linda Dillman, a senior official at the firm, about innovation at Wal-Mart today and she concedes that radical thinking was easier when the firm was young. Meg Whitman, eBay's boss, says the same. She concentrates on incremental improvement within the online auctioneer while looking outside to acquire radical ideas by buying start-up companies, including ones in other markets that imitate eBay."

community next: embrace the chaos

2007-10-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Trisha Okubo, Choon Chong and Sunny Li from eBay's Platform & Innovation team attended the Community Next conference in early October, a Silicon Valley event about social network platforms. It turned out to be a hands-on lesson in how to create a viral community application. Choon entered the conference’s Iron Coder competition, where he was tasked to build a Facebook application and recruit as many users as possible — all within 24 hours.

Read the full post on eBay's Innovation blog as Trisha and Sunny re-cap their learnings from the event and 3 top tips for building a truly viral app (Gesundheit!) like ForeignPoke about how to create a viral application. What is ForeignPoke? This Facebook app allows you to do stuff to your friends in the language of your choice. So—you can smack your friends in German, kiss them in French, or bite them in Italian.

At the 24 hour mark, ForeignPoke, was far from first place (with 25 users to the winner's 147)—and the $5,000 prize.(It seems that the friends we contacted to add the application don’t check e-mail on Friday night.)But now, less than 2 weeks later, ForeignPoke has grown on it’s own to over 2,000 users, and an ardent fan even volunteered to translate the actions into his native Swedish!

just back from UK

2007-09-17T08:05:00.000-07:00

wiltshire family wedding, devon cream teas, paignton zoo, walkers salt & vinegar crisps ... these are a few of my favorite things.

and next time we go, we can be in paris in less than 2 hours. waterloo, eat your heart out.

A Eurostar train completed the journey between Paris and London in barely two hours on September 4th. Travelling at 186mph on Britain’s first high-speed track, which runs for 68 miles from the mouth of the Channel Tunnel in Kent, the train arrived at London’s restored St Pancras station, carrying journalists and rail executives. The exact journey time was two hours, three minutes and 39 seconds. The new line, which shaves at least 20 minutes off the current journey between Paris and Waterloo station (two hours and 35 minutes), opens officially on November 14th.

bay area officially recovered from 2000 dot bomb?

2007-09-17T07:51:00.000-07:00

The Economist City briefing for San Francisco reports that residents of San Jose and San Francisco are the richest in America, according to new figures from the US Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. In a measure of median household incomes in large American cities in 2006, San Jose, the seat of Silicon Valley, topped the list; its 1m residents had a median household income of $74,000. San Franciscan households came second, boasting a median income of $65,000. San Jose's leaders are crowing that this means the city’s economy has recovered from the dotcom collapse of 2000. Some claim further that the numbers show the recovery trickling down to working- and middle-class families.

They also had a fantastic write-up last week about Google, giving it historical context within the rise of the banking industry & privacy concerns over popular comparisons with technology competitors like Microsoft.

(sigh.) i [heart] The Economist.

UCSB in the Top 10

2007-08-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

i may be getting a little long in the tooth with a 3-year old and one on the way, but it still made this Gaucho proud to see we've retained our status as a Top 10 school according to Princeton Review.

I'm not sure why the author was so shocked at us finishing above UCLA (sorry, Greg) and USC ... As my fellow gauchos know, it's a proud tradition. I was a little shocked, however, that no other California school finished in the Top 10.

Go Gauchos.

"The 2008 Princeton Review released its annual list of the top party schools in the nation ... While many of the usual suspects are on the Top 20 list (Ole Miss, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Penn State) we’re more shocked at the University of New Hampshire which came in at No. 7, and UC Santa Barbara finishing above USC and UCLA. Here is the Top 10:

1. West Virginia University
2. University of Mississippi
3. University of Texas
4. University of Florida
5. University of Georgia
6. Penn State University
7. University of New Hampshire
8. Indiana University
9. Ohio University
10. University of California, Santa Barbara"

entertaining write-up of internal Y! Hack Day

2007-08-05T17:59:00.000-07:00

Internal Yahoo! Hack Day ethos for Y! employees (check out public Y! Hack Day in London):

"It's the difference between practicing piano after school in a regimented way versus smoking pot and jamming with your friends in a garage," Horowitz said.

From August 5th Sunday SF Chronicle

For Yahoo's Hack Day last month, employees submitted 120 ideas that they showed off in a black tent set up on the lawn at Yahoo's headquarters. The preliminaries had the air of a science fair, with individual teams made up of everyone from Yahoo attorneys to product managers, touting their ideas and asking that fellow colleagues vote for them so that they would make it to the finals.

Because some of the products could ultimately be put into development, Yahoo asked that no specifics about them be publicized. Although some seemed pretty far-flung, or would have only niche appeal, several seemed to have potential, according to Horowitz and several of the day's judges, who included Yahoo co-founder David Filo.

During the finals, held in a vast meeting room, with a 90-second timer ticking down on a whiteboard, one presenter gave an impassioned appeal to elevate his idea to the big time, saying, "If you let me push this tonight, we'd be beating Google tomorrow morning."

However, nothing is that easy at a big company. Anything released must first be thoroughly vetted for privacy, security, patents, licensing and adequate infrastructure, even when innovation is a priority.

larry the windorph

2007-06-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

Make your own Windorph

Top Ten from eBay DevCon in Boston

2007-06-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

We were so busy blogging, photosharing and video clipping at eBay DevCon on the Developer blog, this is my first chance to write anything on my own blog!

Got to touch base with all the familiar faces and voices I talk to during the year, plus meet some new ones, like GetItNext, AuctionAds, AuctionBlox, Silk Systems, San Luis Computer Services and more.

Here are some of the photos and blog posts from attendees of the event if you want to get the word on the street. Here's my unofficial take on

Top Ten from eBay DevCon in Boston:

10) Fast, free wireless internet access at the new BCEC
9) Power strips in session rooms! Save your battery power
8) Extreme Jenga Towers and old skool video games
7) Unveiling of Shopping API
6) Shoulda saved $150 and gotten PayPal certified
5) Kicked off eBay Widget contest
4) Kevin Lynch's live keynote demo of Adobe AIR (formerly Apollo) on the day they entered beta
3) Rolf's Web 2.0 session and Jeremy's SEO session
2) PayPal Party - Beer + Blue Man Group + Bowling.
1) Never knowing for sure whether the 90-year old Cliff Claven impersonator was actually drunk up stage for the Star Developer Awards

Virgin Airlines lets Boing Boing users name a plane

2007-05-21T08:49:00.001-07:00

Another fun sponsorship opportunity harnessing social media sites: Virgin Airlines held a name our planes contest for their soon-to-be-launched US airline (which will have a major hub in San Francisco, btw)

One of the planes was up for grabs by readers of the popular blog, Boing Boing. The winner? Unicorn Chaser. Makes a little more sense when you read the comment on the Boing Boing blog. Another unconventional sponsorship idea from Federated Media.

I don't know if this is already obvious information, but the name "Unicorn Chaser" is also appropriate for an airline called "Virgin" because of traditional medieval beliefs about unicorns--that they could only be caught or tamed by a virgin. Wikipedia mentions this in the article on unicorns: Link.
I don't know if their are a lot of art majors who read boing boing, but that's the sort of thing that's useful to know for art history.

Chas notes reports that it had its own Wikipedia mention under the Boing Boing entry within an hour of the results being announced.

digg gets sponsor for Digg Arc beta

2007-05-21T08:28:00.000-07:00

Last week, Digg Labs rolled out the latest in its suite of tools that help Digg readers “visualize” the movement of news stories through the Digg ecosystem — a Flash visualization called Digg Arc — with Intel as the exclusive launch sponsor. (Chas from FM Publishing brokered the sponsorship deal.)

Cool way to match up advertising sponsor with a beta project from an innovation labs group within a company.

From Daniel Burka’s post at Digg the Blog:

“Exciting new update to Digg Labs today. Thanks to the hard work of stamen design and support from Intel, we’re launching a new animation, Digg Arc. While the other animations in Labs are at the story level, Arc is the first app that provides a view of Digging activity at the topic and subtopic-level. Presented as a circle, Arc shows the most recently Dugg stories on the outside of the circle, with width indicating the relative popularity of that story against its peers. The middle ring is the sub-topic for the stories and the inner ring represents the topic. As new stories are Dugg, the story, sub-topic, and topic are highlighted with a quick flash….

“We’re excited to have Intel as our first partner in Labs and want to thank them and stamen design for helping us develop Arc.”

eBay Flash widget launches: eBay To Go

2007-05-01T16:33:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't already read the news on Scobleizer or TechCrunch, eBay has just launched a slick Flash-based widget named eBay To Go. It takes about 20 seconds to create your own custom widget for your blog or personal webpage. This widget is built on eBay Web Services, the same open platform of API calls for interacting with eBay that we make available to the eBay developer community.

My favorite is the search widget, where you can add a widget to your blog or site that displays all the items for sale on eBay by keyword. Here is the widget for "pez dispensers":

Make sure you check out the video podcast of Stephen Chang from eBay's Buyer Engagement team giving a demo to Robert Scoble for his Podtech show. It is a nice tour of the features and functionality of eBay To Go. Looking good, Stephen! :-)

web 2.0 expo: how did it play for peoria?

2007-04-24T10:05:00.000-07:00

Back in my chair from Web 2.0 Expo last week. This event officially answered any lingering questions I had about whether Web 2.0 has hit the mainstream yet. This crowd of aspirational entrepreneurs grew from expected 4,800 to estimated 11,000 by the end of the event. Step right up! Who wants to be the next Kevin Rose?

Besides the WSJ article that broke first morning of conference, I enjoyed Kevin Lynch's keynote demo of San Dimas and John Batelle's chat with three entrepreneurs: Joe Krauss of JotSpot, Mena Trot of SixApart and Jay Adelson of Digg. Jeff Bezos also sparred a little with Tim O'Reilly at the beginning, whose interview-style is entertaining in that excruciating, David Brent, avert your eyes kind of way.

Also, learned a few fun things, such as:

Jay from Revision3 talking about user "snacking" on video clip snippets that currently may happen mostly on a computer screen, but deeper video content, hosted shows are increasingly being viewed on devices like iPods and set-top boxes like DVRs

companies are currently able to target content at individuals viewing pages (or more correctly their online clickstreams) without revealing PII (personally identifiable information) as opposed to just targeting based on the context of content of whatever page they happen to be viewing at the time. We're getting very Minority Report.

adding a dimension of local to your app can up your CPMs you can charge to the tune of 10X (a search for "attorney" costs $1.59 while the term "attorney in denver" nets closer to $10.00

We also did the after-party circuit and checked out the FMP party at House of Shields, Snap.com party at TWO and finally the netvibes party at 111 Minna bar and gallery. After all that fun, it was a little more challenging than usual to get back to business as usual in the office last week!

evans data developer relations conference

2007-03-21T17:28:00.000-07:00

i spoke at the Evans Data Developer Relations conference last week, which is an event focused on companies and folks who run or are looking to start developer networks. I met all kinds of great people from other developer programs - Intel, Adobe, RIM, Citrix. I particularly enjoyed Chad's session on Yahoo! Hack Day, and how they pulled off such a kick-ass developer event. (thanks for including my quote, Chad!) I wasn't able to make it the second day, but I heard Jeffrey's Approver.com session was also very good and entertaining. He has posted his slides from his session, too, if you want to see them.

Since many folks came up and asked for a copy of my preso "Architect your platform for developer participation", here it is. Like I said in my session, my topic was architected for participation as well, so go ahead and share your comments if you were not among the folks who came up to see me after my talk. Developer community is a fun place!

blythe loves disco

2007-03-18T20:33:00.000-07:00

attention new san francisco parents: you probably remember not too terribly long ago the days when you could go clubbing until the wee hours in the morning. when you'd be taking a taxi home at 6AM, not waking up to change a nappy at 6AM -- plus, have all day to sleep in, nurse your hangover over a killer greasy brunch, then sleep some more.

if you recall when you used to have a serious post-11PM nightlife, you may want to check out Baby Loves Disco. This event organizer rents out a popular club in San Francisco in the afternoon - when clubbers are taking their disco naps - and opens it up to parents and their babies, toddlers from 2pm - 5pm in the afternoon.

On St. Patrick's Day this past Saturday, post-parade, we packed off with friends to Ruby Skye from 1:30pm - 3:30pm, shook our money maker on the dance floor to a live DJ, and drank a BEER with our friends while the little 'uns ran around dancing, too. Good times. If it's been a few years since you saw the inside of a nightclub, the novelty certainly worked on me. Favorite image: the ultra cool, back-lit Ruby Skye entry lobby with velvet ropes completely filled with 70+ strollers. Here's Blythe and her friend, Jackson, playing with their egg shakers to the base beat.

Geoffrey Moore on innovation

2007-03-03T20:55:00.000-08:00

Last week, Farhang in our Architecture group arranged for Geoffrey Moore, bestselling author of Crossing the Chasm, to come speak to our Platform & Innovation team.

His talk, Dealing with Darwin, focused on the nature of innovative ideas, and how today’s leading companies are able to leverage innovation to compete successfully for revenues and profits in a globalized, commoditized, and deregulated marketplace.

I found it interesting to walk through with him how companies can free up existing resources claimed by supporting core assets, or context, and then re-deploy them towards growth and innovation projects. Geoff termed this freeing up "coins in the couch", or claimed resources, by commoditizing the processes supporting context as much as possible. Resources for innovation in companies can often get "politically claimed", in other words trapped in the comfy couch.

Another key point is that there are different types of innovation - operational excellence, process, disruptive, line extension, platform - they key is to focus on how each of these areas help differentiate and separate growth opportunities from the gravitational pull of commoditization.

Geoffrey was an entertaining speaker, and I really enjoyed meeting him since I had read Crossing the Chasm a few years ago. Do pick up his new book, Dealing With Darwin, if you get a chance.

PC's revenge

2007-02-02T16:39:00.000-08:00

My groundhog sources tell me it will be an early spring this year. To celebrate, I wanted to share a giggle.

now, in the spirit of full disclosure, we are a mac household. And i do love my iPod. But it's nice to see a good-spirited spoof where Business Geek gets one up on Hip Geek.

i'm a PC, i'm a Mac: Money

i'm a PC, i'm a Mac: Open vs. Closed

moments of genius: ricky gervais

2007-01-03T11:42:00.000-08:00

did you know that david bowie (nee david jones) is funny? (thanks, carole!)

did you know banal and facile rhyme when spoken in the right accent?

would there be any good television without hbo?

meet the developer whisperer

2007-01-02T15:02:00.000-08:00

tooting the eBay developer community horn -

"eBay retooled its technology platform to scale for rapid growth. Now it
hopes a thriving community of outside developers can use that platform to keep
the company growing into its second decade."

plus, I love reading an article that makes it seem like working on our platform evangelism team is like working at the zoo or inside a really big circus tent:

" ... senior manager of platform evangelism at eBay (i.e., the guy responsible for the care and feeding of the developer program)."

Cesar Millan, meet Adam Trachtenberg.

blogging ... about blogging

2006-12-18T14:46:00.000-08:00

key takeaways from BBC.co.uk article on 10 technology predictions for 2007 by Gartner, including that the # of blogs will peak in 2007.

"A lot of people have been in and out of this thing. Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it."

I dreaded and posted about this concept in my inagural blog post for grep le miette. it's still better than real world miami (perhaps the secret of blogging success is just to aim low).

* Gartner analysts said that during the middle of 2007, the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.
* 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.
*Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web blog had already done so.
* He said those who loved blogging were committed to keeping it up, while others had become bored and moved on.
* Last month blog tracking firm Technorati reported that 100,000 new blogs were being created every day, and 1.3 million blog posts were written.
* Technorati is tracking more than 57 million blogs, of which it believes around 55% are "active" and updated at least every three months.

So according to Gartner, you only need to post once every 3 months to have an "active" blog.

How open is Web 2.0 for developer participation?

2006-12-17T16:40:00.000-08:00

Bill Gates recently hosted a private meeting with influential bloggers up in Redmond, where he shared some of his thoughts on the future of Web services and Web apps.

In response to a question from Liz at GigaOM about which MS applications will run inside the browser versus outside,

“the distinction would come to be silly from a technical standpoint, but the necessary movement toward web APIs does present challenges on the business side. One of the things that’s actually held the industry back on this is, if you have an advertising business model, then you don’t want to expose your capabilities as a web service, because somebody would use that web service without plastering your ad up next to the thing.”

Food for thought, considering the revenue model for many Web 2.0/social media companies is advertising, yet relatively few have opened up their platform substantially for commercial purposes.

Posts from other bloggers who were deemed "“leaders in various aspects of the web community”:

Jeremy Zawodny flickr photos

REST or SOA/Web services - you make the call

2006-11-29T17:16:00.000-08:00

Will the entertainment never stop? Duncan Cragg threw down the REST vs. SOA/Web services gauntlet to an imaginary eBay architect in a nine-part virtual dialogue - and Dan Pritchett, the real mccoy, was there to pick it up.

Let the battle of wits begin. Developer mano a mano on scalability, caching issues in huge transactional systems, Web 2.0 interoperability - it's all in there.

If you want to catch Dan in person, he's speaking tonight in San Jose about The eBay Architecture – Striking a balance between site stability, feature velocity, performance and cost.

developers conferences vs. codercons

2006-11-22T07:26:00.000-08:00

the balance betweeen traditional developer conferences, unconferences and codercons is shifting, and it will be interesting to see different types of developers attending different types of developer events.

here's an interesting article from CNET that does a nice job of comparing developer events and ecosystem approaches, professional developers and hackers, Microsoft and Yahoo! that I picked up from Adam T:

"In September 2005, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Yahoo would never compete against tools powerhouse Microsoft in the developer realm.

"Yahoo doesn't think of themselves as a platform company," Gates told CNET News.com at the company's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. "I don't think you will ever have the Yahoo PDC."

Chad Dickerson, the senior director of the Yahoo Developer Network, doesn't see it that way at all. Dickerson, who started at the Web company last year, has even used that Bill Gates quote in presentations to demonstrate how Yahoo is changing.

"We are already a platform company," Dickerson said. "There is (cultural change) going on in Yahoo and every company on the Internet."

codercon events: celebrating developer community talent

2006-11-15T12:51:00.000-08:00

Yahoo! Hack Day, Google CodeJam, AOL TopCoder Collegiate Challenge ... Om Malik spots an early trend in tech playas promoting and webcasting codercons, a.k.a. marathon coder events where hackers jock for hacking props.

ro will, ro will ... rock you

2006-11-13T12:50:00.000-08:00

floating hearts make the magic happen, people.

Yes, even tho this rock you slide show features one of the most horrendous pictures ever captured of me on film (thanks, alan), the others must be shared. good times at the burro.

we'll miss you, Ro and thanks for forgiving me that time I called you Roy. But Rock YOU for leaving us!

halloween for SF kids

2006-11-02T01:19:00.000-08:00

we have been on a grand tour of halloween fun for the toddler set in san francisco. mommy and daughter have been under the weather lately, so these have all been abbreviated stops = get in and get out quickly.

those of you locally probably know of our neighborhood's famous halloween in the castro celebration. but after we had blythe, we knew we had to strike out in search of different fare. all events will be evaluated on the scientific pumpkin rating scale, with 1 pumpkin being "i dressed up in a costume for this?!" to a 5 pumpkin rating being Half Moon Pumpkin Huge Fun.

A week ago Saturday was the noe valley harvest festival: craft booths lined 24th street with a kickin' funk band, and costume contests for kids and, of course in noe valley, dogs. 4 pumpkins.

Then, a week ago Sunday was the goblin jamboree at the childrens discovery museum in sausalito. $12 per person (that's $36 for a family of free) and the place was crazed. too busy, but cool train ride and pony rides. 2.5 pumpkins.

Finally, this past Saturday we headed up to the randall museum halloween fest. scary face painting, pumpkin carving, day of the dead skull making - big on the crafts and the games. we missed the costume parade, but we had a good time, just like at bug day. i give it 3.5 pumpkins.

Halloween update: trick or treating is a great way to meet your neighbors. don't pile your kids in the minivan and ship them to the "cool" neighborhood. oh, but go early so you don't get caught in crossfire. just kidding. sort of.

and here's blythe in her costume at the goblin jamboree, that traveled out from the UK from uncle gary and auntie michelle in david's suitcase. have you ever seen a sweeter fairy?

buy my stuff & filmloop 2.0 tool

2006-10-30T15:35:00.000-08:00

Take part in a friendly wager between work colleagues. Below, I am displaying the listings I have up for sale on eBay - buy my stuff!

To help move things along, I've enlisted the help of a photocasting tool from our developer community, FilmLoop. They've recently come out with their 2.0 download, which is way slick. And it even now comes with an eBay version, Loop Gallery eBay, that's safe to post on your listings and shows cools stuff like # of bids, time left in auction, etc.

You can use it to photocast pictures on your eBay listings page, MySpace, Facebook, your blog - you get the picture. (ahem.)

my red state namesake

2006-10-15T15:34:00.000-07:00

we all have an alter ego out there. mine happens to be male, has an astonishing amount of hair, and plays in a Joe Cocker tribute band in Ohio.

then again, maybe i'm The Bizarro Delyn. it's all in how you view the other side of the same delyn coin, my friends.

fostering innovation at Motorola

2006-10-15T13:17:00.000-07:00

"Risk-taking does not just mean placing big strategic bets with long-term pay-offs ... Success turns just as much on the willingness of people throughout a company to take all the little risks that add up to good execution ... That sort of atmosphere is hard to achieve unless the boss takes it seriously - and unless everyone in the company knows that the rules really have changed."

innovation is impossible without risk. this recent article from The Economist about Motorola's CEO, Ed Zander, highlights the leadership that is required when trying to encourage risk-taking at big, established companies, esp. one that has stumbled and experienced a dent in their confidence. it involves a simple message heard straight from the top: when you take risks, you're going to make mistakes. mistakes are OK. not taking risks is the biggest mistake you can make in today's global economy.

Zander took over in January 2004, with an established market leader (Nokia) that had surpassed it back in 1998. inspiring corporate confidence and a willingness to take smart risks means making sure your people don't learn the wrong lesson from a big bet that failed, in this case Motorola's Iridium satellite project - that also happened, perhaps not coincidentally, in 1998.

final pearl of wisdom (you need a subscription to view Economist articles online, hence so many quotes):

"(Zander's) new corporate culture has also filtered through to the company's hiring, where more emphasis is now placed on people skills, rather than just technical ability. After all, when innovation involves complex interactions between many internal teams and outside partners - as it does at Motorola - the ability to communicate is prized."

apex developer network @ Dreamforce

2006-10-12T16:02:00.000-07:00

I had a great time at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce event the past few days. Alan, Adam and I learned more about the relaunched Apex API, heard from Maynard and Don Albert from Skype in the keynotes and hung with the ADN folks in their Developer Lounge. (I missed the swingin' party at the DNA Lounge afterwards due to being under the weather, but Adam and Alan reported back: good times).

One of the highlights was getting to see eBay API developer Infopia take home the Appy award for "Breakthrough Application of the Year" in the Tuesday afternoon ceremony. Read more about their "business mashup" utilizing Salesforce.com and eBay APIs.

Ralf from Infopia shared a little bit about the "Appy experience", including their photo with Marc Benioff and their trophy below: "As a matter of fact, this award is so coveted that the trophy, a dancing hula doll mounted on a trophy base, was stolen out of our booth at the end of the show today. We have an APB out to find her. :-)"

Congratulations, Infopia! Hope your trophy manages to hula her way back to Utah.

- Delyn

at what point is it news?

2006-10-08T15:06:00.000-07:00

I, like many others, get much of my industry news by RSS feed these days, but here are a few interesting stories that stand out because I read them in print or heard them on the radio first = suddenly elevated rumors into credible news. Conventional wisdom has been that traditional media often looks to sources like the Drudge Report and TechCrunch to sniff out tomorrow's news headlines, but recently the line between the two (online/blogs and traditional media/news journalism) seems increasingly blurred.

Foley Story Wasn't Reported, Until It Was, National Public Radio. How ABC News broke the Foley Page Scandal story online, which caught the attention of former teenage pages who then proceeded to send in enough incriminating IM/email evidence to move the story over to prime time.
Terry Semel's long pause, The Economist. The impact of sloppy betas and what is considered too long to expect from idea to execution in an entrepreneurial culture. The tone of this piece is quite "bloggy" for this publication. Not sure if that's a good thing.
Google poised to net YouTube, The Sunday Times UK. Granted that the details are still sketchy, but it will be interesting to see who will end up being the moron.

developer community event: Yahoo! Hack Day

2006-10-05T21:55:00.000-07:00

I stopped by Yahoo! Hack Day last Friday (pre-Beck concert), and I wanted to congratulate Chad, Jeremy, Dan and the others involved from Y!DN on a fantastic developer event. Three things impressed me particularly:

1) You can consider your developer event a success with good tech press, blog, flickr & youtube coverage. But getting your local TV news anchor to exclaim how much she wants a Hack Day t-shirt is in the camp of impressive crossover coverage.

2) I particularly enjoyed reading this post by Ben (formerly of BBC/now of Citizen Agency) who we met briefly at Hack Day on the specific elements of what he thought worked better at this developer event than others he has attended. Phil took things a couple of steps further by contrasting the cultures and sensibilities of a more commercially-minded API developer crowd (even the term VAR is so 1996) with a hacker crowd. Bottom line: I think it's a good thing to recognize that not all application development is done by twenty and thirty-something, Silicon Valley-dwelling hipsters.

3) And speaking of recognizing and celebrating more parts of the developer spectrum, you gotta give props to a developer event where the best overall hack was a flickr hack from three women armed with the tagline "blog from your purse". That rules!

(valley)wag the dog: digg revision3 party

2006-10-04T16:15:00.000-07:00

eBay's Delyn Simons with Friend Hosted on Zooomr

Common, but easily cleared up misconceptions after last week's F-U-N fun Digg Revision3 party at Mighty in SF last week:

Q: Was that you in ValleyWag last week?

A: Yes.

Q: Are you a red-head?

A: No.

Q: Have you ever taken Red Bull & Vodka in a glass together?

A: Um, no. A smart Sapphire & tonic in high-ball will do nicely, preferably not in plastic, (open-bar exception notwithstanding).

Q: Why all the red references do you think?

A: Perhaps the red shirt? Plus, the club's red lighting had everyone looking a little surreal.

Q: Who is your "with Friend" there?

A: Andrea Wildt of Salesforce.com

Q: Anyone missing from the photo?

A: Alan and Rob were strangely absent from this photo.

Q: Digg v3 or Digg Revision3?

A: v3. People paid attention to the demo, and I liked seeing the stamen visualizations. Plus, I liked Kevin and Jay's hair better.

Q: Anything else you'd like to clear up?

A: Digg knows how to throw a launch party. Good times. How do I get on the media list next time? And can you make Diggnation t-shirts in women's sizes, please? Yes, the black ones. If not for me, do it for Lala to wear on Tikibar TV - "uh, you're on my shirt"

hard words to hear

2006-10-02T16:52:00.000-07:00

sometimes, working effectively with your developer community means listening to words that are hard to hear.

i'm not talking about flaming or mindless retribution - i'm talking about a well-written, insightful critique on something you put countless hours of energy, heart and soul into. sometimes, the input is a bit more raw, but they are voices of honesty and clarity and first-hand experience. words that make you sit back in your chair and think "yes, you're right. this should be easier."

speaking of words that are hard to hear, best of luck to Greg and Leah on their new adventures in LA.

UnWired Buyer powers eBay Phone Alerts

2006-09-20T15:10:00.000-07:00

Based in Austin, Texas, eBay Web Services developer UnWired Buyer is behind the launch of eBay Phone Alerts, which recently rolled out across all categories on eBay.com. Thousands of eBay shoppers have signed up since the services started rolling out in mid-July.

As announced at eBay Live! in June, Phone Alerts will call you with updates about all items on your watch list - or that you are currently bidding on - when the auctions for these items will be ending in the next three minutes. You can get the current price of the item. You can check the status of an existing bid. Best of all, you can actually bid from your phone if you need to, using the phone’s keypad.

After you register for the service, this screen is where you'll update your phone alerts. Phone Alerts are currently free for eBay shoppers. eBay sellers also benefit when bidding is more convenient.

I personally used this service recently on an auction where I ended up being the high bidder on a replacement high chair for my daughter. I got my alert in the car coming home from Sunday night dinner. If you've ever missed out on an eBay item you've been bidding on because you were away from your computer - you are going to LOVE Phone Alerts!

brummies are funniest

2006-08-23T15:27:00.000-07:00

My proud brummy hubby pointed out this one from BBC News: researchers, commissioned by Paramount Comedy Channel, asked 4,000 people to listen to the same joke in 11 UK regional accents to discover which they found most amusing. (yes dear. jasper carrott IS the best.)

But then it went on. Apparently, the funniest accents belong to people - Brummies (Birmingham), Scousers (Liverpool) and Geordies (Newcastle) - who were deemed the least intelligent. (chuckle)

And did you know that the BBC accent (the Queen's English) is refered to as the Recevied Pronounciation? It was considered the least funny of all UK accents in the study. (tee hee)

I suppose it's quite American of me to be taken aback at how seriously Brits take their humor. Or that the funnier you are, the less intelligent you are perceived to be (?) Take a look at the list - fancy a flutter on what this says about class and society hanging on in modern day Britain?

eBay: The OS for E-Commerce?

2006-08-21T14:23:00.000-07:00

"I want to bring our infrastructure stack to the entire developer community such that they are no longer limited by having to buy and run their own infrastructure."

Eric Billingley, Senior Director of eBay Research Labs, recently sat down with the Wade Roush of the MIT Technology Review to discuss R&D at eBay and a plug-in architecture for third party developers.

Read the Technology Review article.

"put the record on eBay"

2006-08-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

thanks to Ryan, i found out about this ten-second clip from Wu-Tang Clan's Ghostface Killah, talking about eBay.

Can't you see Turtle driving up with Vince, Drama, and E on Hollywood Boulevard playing this song?

self-governance and the social web

2006-08-13T21:41:00.000-07:00

"strive to control what you must, rather than what you can".

people are basically good. but, as Nick Carr points out, until all people are good, self-governing online communities will continue to require assistance with enforcement of consequences for harmful behavior. this is regardless of self-policing mechanisms you put in place (feedback, rankings, algorithms, report this as inappropriate, etc.)

the world is getting trending flatter, while the web remains decidedly unflat. But I disagree with those that say the social web is made up of companies working to perpetuate an illusion of self-governance. I consider it realpolitik for the Internet - interfering when you must, not when you can.

a "woman blogger"?

2006-08-11T17:23:00.000-07:00

"The compiler doesn't care if the person who forgot the curly brace is wearing a black lace bra."

i've never wanted to stand up and applaud after reading a blog post before.

it is now my mission to meet Kathy Sierra.

Lin

2006-08-02T21:58:00.000-07:00

lin and celeste

linda dyer passed away last week. lin and i worked together at two companies. she was the event chat queen. we were sharing an office when she learned she had breast cancer.

the last time I saw lin was in 2001, after she had finished her first round of chemo, before her second and then her third. i saw her waiting on the corner of 18th and Dolores for a light to change, and gave her a lift home. "cancer makes me cranky sometimes," she shared.

we lost touch. i would occasionally hear word about her through fundraisers, or about her poetry or her november birthday. jeffrey and carole stayed in contact, and lin would sometimes watch celeste. here she is, about 2 weeks before she died. cuddling with c in her hospice bed. (thanks for posting, j)

the importance of shipping in online commerce

2006-08-02T18:24:00.000-07:00

Shipping is a BIG DEAL to online buyers and sellers. After the supply & demand for an item has been made efficient (marketplace), and after payment friction has been removed (checkout), getting goods from sellers to buyers quickly and inexpensively increases in importance.

I thought this was a great New York Times piece highlighting the perspective of the US Postal Service, and how business models can adapt over time to turn a competitive threat into an advantage. Rather than going the way of the telegram, snail mail is booming.

My two favorite quotes:

1) “Six years ago, people were pointing at the Internet as the doom and gloom of the Postal Service, and in essence what we’ve found is the Internet has ended up being the channel that drives business for us,” said James Cochrane, manager of package services at the Postal Service.

Hot thought: Sure email, evites and online greeting cards have taken a bite out of USPS revenue, but the Internet has been a boon to USPS package delivery, thanks to online commerce.

2) Mr. Henderson (former postmaster general and current COO of Netflix) is “the only guy on the planet who looks at our volume of mail (1.4 million movies shipped every day) and thinks of it as quite small,” said Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, Calif. “It’s a trickle of mail to him, where to anyone else it’s a torrent.”

Hot thought: With shipping is so core to online commerce companies, who better than the postmaster general to give an operation needed perspective, efficiencies and innovative thinking. Now that's thinking outside of the shoebox...

Cool eBay photocasting tool - FilmLoop

2006-07-26T13:46:00.000-07:00

FilmLoop works with eBay Web Services to display gallery images of live listings selling on eBay in a running photocast, or "loop". These images also link back to the live listing on eBay, driving buyers to purchase items from eBay sellers. And eBay buyers can keep an eye on new listings of items they are interesting in purchasing by clicking "Watch this on your desktop".

For example, I've been shopping lately for the handbag for my mom to replace the one she lost on her vacation. I searched for a while, but I ran out of time and figured "I'll just know the right one when I see it." Enter FilmLoop. I entered a search for "coach bags", and voila - out came a ton of possibilities. Plus, this loop below is sitting right on my desktop, so when my eye catches the right bag for mom, all I have to do is click on the bag I want, and it will bring me right to the listing on eBay. (You can see now why eBay sellers love this tool, too!) :-)

You can also customize your loop to search across all of eBay or just in specific categories based on keyword.

And check out the loop that Alice from FilmLoop sent me when she was describing what a fantastic time she had meeting folks from the eBay Community at eBay Live! (eBaby belly art - wow) Sometimes, a thousand words don''t even come close.

beta release for eBay Web Services developer, TheFind

2006-07-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

Developer FatLens has been working with eBay Web Services on event tickets search over the past year. Now, Siva Kumar tells me now they are getting ready over the next couple of months to rollout the same search technology across all shopping categories in a new site called TheFind.com.

Sign-up for notification of their beta release for a search engine specializing in finding products shoppers want to buy online.

eBay Web Services developer hits a home run

2006-07-17T15:54:00.000-07:00

If you're from San Francisco, it is next to impossible to be neutral about Barry Bonds. eBay Web Services developer Mpire is getting into the action by powering the landing page featuring his historic 715th home run ball that will be sold on eBay.

Love him or hate him, there is quite a bit of controversy swirling around this ball and the breaking of Babe Ruth's record - should be a fun one to watch!

You can track how much it will sell for and watch the short video clip on the very funny and entertaining re-enactment of how Andrew Morbotzer caught the ball. If you like the video, digg it.

social media and developer community

2006-06-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

eBay has a long history of making Community feedback and input a differentiator for eBay's global marketplace, most recently with June 2006 launch of the Chatter blog, eBay Blogs and the eBay Wiki.

So, it's no surprise when the eBay developer community gets into the act. Nabit recently wrote me to tell me about their community hub page, which has links to their active blog and forum - they've even found their way onto the Developer area of the eBay Wiki.

As mentioned in the Web 2.0 community panel at DevCon, using social media (blogs, wikis, tags, comments, photo sharing, RSS) is a great way to drive awareness and traffic to your developer tool. These tools take communication that used to be done exclusively in email (the original killer app) to harness the attention of backlinks and pings and feeds for your business.

Upshot? Web 2.0 tools are just a different channel for communication that you are already doing with your customers. Try out some of the ways you can turn passive consumers of your tool into active participants with your tool.

Digg v3 Party

2006-06-23T10:50:00.000-07:00

Originally uploaded by Laughing Squid.

jay and kevin know how to throw a launch party. alan and i were among the crowd on Thursday night in the appropriately hip SF skid row bar that hosted the event, where we got a preview of the v. cool Digg v3, including impressive design elements from Stamen Design. Look out 'cause Digg is not just about tech news anymore.

Digg is launching Digg v3 on Monday - and they have a developer API coming out this summer...

btw. Kevin is #23 of who matters while apparently slashdot doesn't matter. guess the diggvdot game is already outdated in less than a year. reports of slashdot's demise may be slightly exaggerated, but these are words I would not have predicted a year ago.

Greg Matters

2006-06-21T11:52:00.000-07:00

"...our goal was to identify people whose ideas, products, and business insights are changing the world we live in today - those who are reshaping our future by inventing important new technologies, exploiting emerging opportunities, or throwing their weight around in ways that are sure to make everyone else take notice.

In assembling this list, we emphasized one key question: What have you done for us lately? We also considered its important corollary: What will you do for us tomorrow?"

- Business 2.0, on how they selected their 50 People who matter.

If you're looking for Greg, he's #31 on the list with other names, such as Bill, Rupert and Oprah. Or possibly on stage making it all look effortless...

Because he's a great person on top of being someone who matters, Greg's not the type to boast or brag. Go to his blog and congratulate him anyway in his comments - he deserves it.

Way to go, fearless leader! :)

"Come on, Eng-erland"

2006-06-18T15:41:00.000-07:00

Originally uploaded by unperfectwolf.

Where should you watch the World Cup in San Francisco? If you're an anglo-phile, a Brit ex-pat or just married to one, there's no better place to get into the game than Mad Dog's in the Lower Haight. World Cup quadrennial excitement turns palpable here. For example? Watched a v. fun match on Thursday, England v. Trinidad & Tobago. Fans watching the game were friendly and weren't shy about a 9AM pint. (afterall the sun is shining after 12noon somewhere in the commonwealth)

Most of the excitement was saved up for when Rooney #9 was subbed in late in the second half. (He had an injury that made him questionable for the game). After he came on (along with Lennon), the England offense came alive and went up 2-nil in short order. He may not look like Becks or wee Michael Owen (cute, cute, cute), but he sure knows how to get the crowd involved.

T&T are the smallest country (pop. 1.1 Mil) ever to qualify for the World Cup. They made the most of their shots on goal and were fun to watch. Except for Yorke and the water bottle down the pants action. What was up with that?

Lively Mad Dog crowd went back and forth between the "Come on, England" and "Rooooooney" chants. If they win their pool on Tuesday v. Sweden, they won't have to play Germany in the second round. Group B has been very kind so far.

happy anniversary to grep le miette

2006-06-14T22:05:00.000-07:00

grep le miette is one year old.

I began as a reluctant enthusiast in June 2005. It's not yet the middle of June 2006, and so far I've blogged:

as a guest author on the new eBay Chatter blog (launched earlier this month)
in my own eBay Blog (officially launched yesterday)
on the eBay DevCon event blog in Vegas
my usual eBay Developers Program beat
and then again in grep le miette

(did i just write a blog post about blogging?) holy meta. someone cut me off.

Power of Three in Vegas

2006-06-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

I spent the last 4 days straight blogging with Laurel and Curtis, so check out the Developers Program blog for in depth coverage of DevCon 2006 in Vegas, including with photos and streaming audio interviews of our Star Developer Award winners.

Social media played a big part in DevCon coverage this year, including

photos of on flickr
interviews of developers on Evoca (a Skype developer)
video clips hosted by YouTube
tagging with ebaydevcon

With apologies to Julie Andrews, here are just a few of my favorite DevCon things...

Friday night: arriving in 106 degree weather, fun cab with Laura to Mandalay Bay, orientation, meeting developers at House of Blues, learning the proper pronunciation of "Texas"

Saturday: impressive Cirque du Soleil-style keynote opening, lego lunch, Web 2.0 Community panel, RatPack crooners, recording interviews with Star Developers, AC in Press Room makes it 40 below, Lotus of Siam team dinner (the wait was worth it, Adam)

Sunday: blogging through more sub-zero temperatures in press room, Christoph's mceAuction demo, Scott Cook, Foundation Room patio, Red Square, shattering my 24/7 image of Vegas at 11:03 PM when all eateries with edible food apparently shut down

Monday: Unconference!, makeshift press room on the floor (where it's warm), Mandalay Bay pool, waiting in McLaren airport for 3 hours for my flight to show up, hugging David and Blythe when I get home.

Most of all, it's about getting to re-connect with developers we work with all year. Sure was fun - don't wait another year. And subscribe to the DevProgram blog already, wouldja?

bug day at the randall museum

2006-05-24T11:28:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday, we went and checked out Bug Day here in SF. If you have kids in San Francisco, you need to check out the Randall Musuem. It is an absolute treasure for city parents, with a petting area for animals, an exhibit on the 1906 earthquake for kids, and is entirely run volunteers and the San Francisco Parks and Recreation Department. I don't know what quirk of urban planning fate put a kids museum under the hospices of SF Parks & Rec, but it works.

Bug day was a lot of fun booths for kids, including pipe cleaner bug antennae hats, a bee keeper working with a live colony of honey bees, a composting exhibit (can't even type the "m" word, ewwwwww). We even marched in the bug parade, with a queen bee and an ant playing the sax to the tune of "the ants go marching".

blythe loved it.

Could ROR mean RIP for PHP?

2006-05-24T11:02:00.000-07:00

i rarely link to my husband's blog. mostly because I rarely understand what he's going on about in there most of the time.

this post, however, for once made me laugh harder than it confused me. I remember in March when he came back from the Server Side conference all gung ho about Ruby on Rails, and how it is going to be the death knell of PHP.

he's so cute when he's all fired up.

Web 2.0 as an enzyme: breaking down the hype

2006-05-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

I've made no secret of my passion for the The Economist. Its byline-less wisdom is a refreshing treat in an age of biased rantings that pass for news. While other periodicals are falling all over themselves publishing stories entitled "It Feels Like 1998 All Over Again", I can depend on a dry, archly written subtitle from the Big E: "If it's cool, it's probably Web 2.0."

The latest? A short and sweet piece on the hype and evolution of meaning behind Web 2.0, with the requisite snappy quote: "We think of ourselves as an enzyme,” says Mr O'Reilly. “When we see something coalescing, we give it a name.” An enzyme, matter that catalyzes, or speeds up, a chemical reaction. Snappy.

According to the article, Web 2.0 began with a specific and useful definition. In contrast to the static web pages of the 1990s, the second wave of websites would make web pages look like dynamic software applications that traditionally run only on personal computers.

Then, at some point, " 'Web 2.0' took on a life of its own, being applied to online social networks, collective intelligence, blogging and podcasting and “participation” in general. It started being used in sentences that also contained other buzzwords, such as the “long tail”, “folksonomies”, or the “semantic web”. It is in danger of meeting the fate of “core”, “synergy”, and “leverage”, but, for the time being, Mr O'Reilly is delighted."

Hype-ase anyone?

The DevCon Unconference - in Vegas, baby!

2006-05-03T19:05:00.000-07:00

I'm excited about this year's Developers Conference, June 10-12 in Las Vegas. My favorite part of every developer event is getting to reconnect with familiar faces and meeting new ones. Such a cool group.

This year, we're trying something new at DevCon - a half day Unconference, where conference intersects with community. Following two days of traditional keynotes, labs and breakout sessions at the eBay Developers Conference in Las Vegas, Monday morning will be about about dialogue over presentation, whiteboard over slide deck, couch over podium.

From now until the opening of the Developers Conference on Saturday, June 10th, developers can use the Conference wiki to propose and vote on Unconference Community Sessions. The Top 18 most popular topics by the end of lunchtime on Sunday, June 11, will be scheduled for Monday morning. The rest of the morning will be filled with sessions (discussions, 1:1 Meetings) led by eBay, PayPal, and Skype team members.

Check out the current structure of the Unconference agenda - to be filled in with sessions and voted on by you, in the wiki and then at the conference.

If you haven't signed up yet, take a look at the complete agenda for all three days and register today. See you in Vegas!

If you comment on my blog with a link back to your helpful contribution on the Conference wiki, I'll hook you up with a sweet discount on registration, so you can be a part of our first ever Unconference. :)

Cool eBay Info from your Phone: Mpire Researcher Mobile

2006-05-02T13:46:00.000-07:00

On Monday night, it hits me. I need to send off a gift to my newest nephew, Michael William. Cute as a button, born April 22nd, 7 lbs, 7 oz., 19 inches.

Suddenly, I'm on a mission, in the middle of a store, grinding through my checklist of weekly errands. Something practical, I think. Something colorful. Something he won't outgrow in a month. What was the useful stuff we got at our baby shower...? Yes! I know. A Bumbo Chair. Looks like it will cost me $39.99 if I buy it here, plus dealing with the line at the post office during lunch, or worse, at the weekend, plus purchasing proper packaging for shipping. Ick. I wonder how much are they selling for on eBay?

Nowhere near a desktop? No problem. Enter Mpire Researcher Mobile. In the middle of the store aisle, I quickly typed in Keyword "bumbo chair" in my mobile phone (loving the Treo 650 QWERTY keyboard right now), and waited about 40 seconds for the researcher service to download the results. I typed in an "ipod nano" search later that came back in under 5 seconds.

Once downloaded, the Quick Summary and Details results were very zippy. The Quick Summary screen came back with the info I was looking for: during the month of April 2006, bumbo chairs averaged a selling price of $38.35 and 96% of all bumbo chair listings sold. I guess more than one cute nephew was born in April! Cheaper, no post office line AND I can get out of this store immediately? Now you're talking.

The Mpire Researcher mobile service allows users to access data about items sold on eBay from anywhere by using their web-enabled mobile phone. The general idea is to enable eBay buyers and eBay sellers to use historical market data from millions of eBay listings to make better buying and selling decisions. eBay buyers can find out useful data, such as Average Selling Price and % sold. eBay sellers can use the service for recommendations on how to price their items and which listing upgrades have worked best in the past.

It's definitely easy to read and navigate on the screen of your mobile phone - here a screenshot of the Quick Summary screen:

So, how about when my daughter has outgrown her own Bumbo chair? I could loan it to another new mommy - or sell it on eBay. According to the recommendations on Mpire Researcher Mobile's Details menu, I should sell it as a 1-day Auction Listing ending between 6-7PM PT on Tuesday, place it under the Baby > Feeding > High Chairs & Booster Chairs category, and Yes, I should do the gallery image listing upgrade, but No, not to bother with bold or highlight listing upgrades for this item. Helpful.

My only delay in gratification with Mpire Researcher Mobile was with the initial set-up. After signing up online for the free trial, I immediately received a text message with the web address to access for the download. Ease of set-up from this point varied wildly depending on the particular mobile device type and carrier combination, from Very Easy on my co-worker's Nokia 6682 on Cingular, to Very Hard on the Treo 650 on Sprint (involving my husband, a JVM reinstall and a soft reboot), to Impossible on a Samsung on T-Mobile (not listed as a supported manufacturer/carrier combo).

I got to meet Dave Cotter of Mpire at an Innovation Day that eBay hosted in mid-March, where he was showing off his demo of the desktop Researcher product. Their mobile product is free through the initial launch period, and after the launch period, it will be $4.99 a month for unlimited searches via your cell phone. For when strokes of genius gift-giving hit you in the middle of the baby supplies aisle.

Good Storytelling

2006-04-24T14:54:00.000-07:00

I heard back from Dr. Jan Eglen, CEO and President of Digonex Technologies, Inc, the eBay developer behind the Nabit tool for eBay buyers, AND a fellow fan of CarTalk, about my post involving the Chevy blogosphere experiment.

Maybe Alfred is right and good storytelling, as well as good blogging, is about breaking out of your early recollections rut:

She asks:

Why do so many find it so compelling to listen to (on the radio) or to read (on a blog) unique voices and opinions of people you may have never otherwise heard from?

My response:

I think most people like to hear anyone that is arguably brighter on a topic with which we might be unfamiliar and who seem to have unusual insights and an ability to tell a story unlike one we have heard before. As a psychologist in my former life (well I still keep my license and even attended 35 hours of continuing ed in Forensic Psych last week) I find this to be a very interesting event.

One of the things you learn in your psychology training if you study certain theorists (Alfred Adler mostly) is that all of us have stories that we tell that are shaped by our early experiences. In fact if you listen to people enough you will find that most people have three to five themes that permeate most of the stories that they tell. This study is called Early Recollections if you want to Google it. Anyway if you listen to folks you will learn their 3 to 5 themes and then understand that most stories they tell will revolve around these same themes in hundreds if not thousands of variations.

Good storytellers can break out of these themes with things they learn later in life and so have many more themes. They are interesting to us to listen to because we aren't bored with themes we have heard over and over. Now what is fascinating to me is that if you record the Earliest Recollections that a person has - starting at about 5 or 6 (we seldom have memories earlier than that) you will find that the themes people have in their stories in later life are based upon incidents that occurred in the earliest recollections the individual has.

Car Talk: Debate on Chevy's experiment goes offline

2006-04-17T09:48:00.000-07:00

"Anyway, it sure got people talking about the Tahoe. Which was the whole idea, after all."

- Ed Peper, General Manager of Chevrolet

I know nothing about cars. But, like many of my auto-ignorant brethren, I am a big fan of the Tappet Brothers' (Tom and Ray Magliozzi) NPR show, Car Talk. The extent of what's under the hood of my 1995 Honda Civic hood is 1) where to pour oil, and 2) where to jump my battery when I leave my headlights on. I consider Click and Clack from "Boston, MAH" to be my trusted experts on all things car-related. I listen to them every week Saturday AM on the way back from morning errands.

So when I tuned in to the most recent episode this past Saturday (april 15th podcast available via audible.com) that the recent Chevy blogosphere experiment had crossed over and made a mention on that other most populist of media forms, call-in talk radio, I got to thinking. Why do so many find it so compelling to listen to (on the radio) or to read (on a blog) unique voices and opinions of people you may have never otherwise heard from?

Whether it be related to car maintenance on a beat-up '85 volvo wagon or the latest Web services mash-up, people naturally gather in online and offline places where people are relating their own individual experiences. Blogs are only the most recent way to tune into (via RSS) these voices.

As acknowledged by Ed Peper in his blog post, I may never buy a Chevy Tahoe. But I did learn something from a Detroit-based auto manufacturing behemoth last week about courage and transparency in corporate communication - and it was compelling.

MIX06: Vegas, baby!

2006-03-21T08:50:00.000-08:00

First, eBay Web Services got a few nice mentions from Bill Gates in yesterday's opening keynote at the Microsoft MIX06 conference, including how eBay Web Services API's are great example of how to take advantage of a platform:

""eBay is an extreme example where half the product listings are done in a programmable way."

Then, Christin Boyd, author of the eBay/Outlook 2007 integration via eBay Web Services, and eight-year Microsoft vet, gave her own demo in a break out session, resplendent in Vegas attire. Why, even Elvis showed up to bid on items at the demo featuring eBay API integration.

And then here's Adam in front of a full house at the Web 2.0 Show me the money panel, with Jeremy from Yahoo!, Tim O'Reilly, TechCrunch and others.

Is there such a thing as having too much fun at a tech conference?

ETech 2006: next gen web community is worth our attention

2006-03-13T10:25:00.000-08:00

Here is a sampling of the many interesting sessions on next Gen Web community last week at O’Reilly ETech 2006, themed around building the Attention Economy:

1) Derek Powazek's The New Community
http://powazek.com/etech06/

2) Amy Jo Kim's Putting the Fun in Functional: applying game mechanics to functional software
http://shufflebrain.com/etech06.htm

3) Clay Shirky's compelling Slashdot analysis, brilliantly simple Annoyingness v. Freedom community matrix, and “Shut up! No, *You* Shut Up”: A Pattern Language for Moderation Strategies
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/03/etech_clay_shirky.html
http://social.itp.nyu.edu/shirky/wiki/

Winners of the eBay Developer Challenge 2006

2006-03-08T15:10:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to our winners of the eBay Developer Challenge 2006!

We're down here in beautiful San Diego, CA with our Grand Prize and First Place winners, who won US $5,000 and US $1,000 respectively, at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

Grand Prize Winner: Unwired Buyer developed by Eric Smith (Developer gnumber2)
Calls you three minutes before an auction closes -- and lets you bid over your cell phone

First Place Winner: ctxbay by Aleksandar Stankovic (Developer astankovic79)
Analyizes Web page context and serves up contextual affiliate links to eBay.

Honorable Mentions:

1. Gumshoo by Craig Villamor (Developer auctionfigure1)
Remixes eBay data with the help of AJAX to provide a fresh interface to the marketplace
2. AuctionWatch GD by Ty Kroll (Developer tkrollwgg1)
Watch any eBay listing from your Google Desktop to always know the latest status
3. Auction Monitor by Christopher Wong (Developer freestuff60)
View your My eBay information using RSS, Yahoo! Widgets, and Apple Dashboard

ETech 2006: continuous partial attention

2006-03-07T12:25:00.000-08:00

i'm down here in San Diego, CA at ETech 2006 through Thursday.

our DevChallenge Grand Prize and First Prize winners, Eric Smith and Alex Stankovic, got a nice mention today in the morning keynote from the O'Reilly emcee, Rael, (with a round of applause from the ETech crowd and everything!)

linda stone's talk today was worth my attention (one of the buzzwords here this year). one of the downsides to our society's relentless 24X7 connectedness through technology is our adaptive behavior towards continuous partial attention. nothing anymore, it seems, is worth the risk of giving our full attention in case we miss something important. she gave a rough timeline as follows:

1) 1965-1985: creating opportunity. self-expression, creativity, actualization of individuals. flip-side? narcissism, loneliness --> crave connection to others

2) 1985-2005: scanning for opportunity. 24X7 availability, connected to the network, hyper-communication. flip-side? artificial and inflated sense of constant crisis, overwhelmed, everywhere *except* where you are physically present. (blackberrying at meetings, mobile phone calls at family dinner)

3) 2005-?: discerning opportunity. in the attention economy, we will be seeking protection from overstimulous (proliferation of iPod headphones), use attention wisely, apps will improve quality of life use of time. flipside? TBD

As she gave this slide-less, demo-less talk, I peeked up from my laptop to witness her giving this talk in a sea of clicking laptops and mobile devices, and enjoyed being completely in and of this particular moment, giving my full attention to a collection of live human nodes on a common network of continuous partial attention.

the hair of the blog that bit you

2006-03-05T10:34:00.000-08:00

Another gem from The Economist (the best publication in the world for international news & analysis) on companies such as P&G, Diebold and Netflix, who are managing corporate reputation/PR by acknowledging the power of blogging to gauge the seriousness of bad news.

Firms, such as BuzzMetrics (who has agreed to merge with Intelliseek) specialize in analysing blogs for business. These firms estimate there are about 27 million blogs online, which can be harnessed as another tool for companies to get a sense of customer satisfaction or common complaints about their products.

They even tracked down ex-CMPer Steve Rubel, of Micropersuasion fame, who recommends an intriguing "lockbox blog" concept for crisis corporate communication that is hidden behind an internet firewall, but can be made visible to the public at short notice.

In an age where disgruntled customers are more likely to blog about their experience than write a letter to the customer service department, companies can use the transparency of the Internet to uncover issues before they blow up into a crisis.

Consider it the "morning-after ramos fizz" approach to mitigating a PR hangover, rather than blogs just as a bitter pill to swallow.

what's new in the eBay Community Codebase?

2006-03-04T11:16:00.000-08:00

a few very cool open source eBay developer and buyer tools, that's what.

project gdebaywatcher: Google engineer larrygadea1 (Larry Gadea) worked with technical evangelist Alan Lewis to open source the eBay Watcher plugin for Google Desktop and contribute it to the codebase. Developers can play around with the code from our first open source tool available for widespread distribution to eBay buyers, via Rate Limiting by eBay User ID
project ebatns: German developer intradesysdev001 (Carsten Harnisch) worked with Alex Schwinn and Bjoern Behrendt from eBay.de Developers Program to release the updated, unified schema compliant version of the eBay Accelerator Toolkit for PHP, for PHP4 or PHP5 - a developer tool for PHP developers building applications using eBay Web Services
project apireferencedocs: check out version 2.0 of the suite of tools that produces one of our developer favorites - the Input/Output reference documentation. John Darrow of our API Docs team collected input from developers from the Developer Forums for this version

sea ranchers for a weekend

2006-02-21T23:57:00.000-08:00

we made our first trip to The Sea Ranch this holiday weekend. It was David's combination Valentine's Day gift/surviving our 2-week holiday in the UK with cranky baby, and it was lovely.

The Sea Ranch is ten miles of coastline on the Sonoma-Mendocino border, famous for its environmentally senstivive-architecture. Residents actually sign a covenant with nature, kind of like a home owner's agreement with the land. You'd think that would be the creepiest thing about Sea Ranch. But the creepiest thing was seeing "Private Property. No Tresspassing" signs everywhere, albeit "tastefully" embedded in rocks and wooden markers to blend in with the surroundings. These signs successfully mar an otherwise beautiful view with needless and constant marking of territory. And I thought our dogs were bad.

Actually, here they are being quite cute, after a nice long hike and play. blythe knows how to "pet gentle" now.

After you get over the initial creepiness, the Sea Ranch is a perfect weekend getaway to watch the surf, dip your toes in the tidepools, read by the fire, jump in the hot tub and grill on the deck. You can't do that too many other places in mid-February.

the wisdom of crowds: is digg the new slashdot?

2006-02-06T12:51:00.000-08:00

anyone involved with developers and community has had experience with slashdot at some point. and no matter what your experience, you have to respect the traffic they can heave your way. however, the slashdot effect is not just about traffic, as jason kottke correctly points out, but rather the influence developer communities can wield given longevity, trust and human editorial touch vs. pure traffic. snarkdot probably still has the influence edge on these grounds - so far.

or does it? kottke further speculates that digg comes across as more "bursty" (my favorite new community adjective) in his traffic analysis than slashdot because a higher percentage of its audience reads the site via RSS because they're younger, "grew up with newsreaders in their cribs", etc. social networking + RSS + developers = the new slashdot?

then, I happened upon this competition site, diggvsdot, where points are awarded +3 for first post, +1 for ties (within 50 min) and even negative points for ripping off the title & url of a news story. looks like digg is on a roll. turns out that speed of information combined with RSS alerts, can start winning you a lot of influence, esp among the younger set.

so the wisdom of crowds in the digg vs dot debate comes down to how you define the influence of a developer community over the long haul. bursty can be beautiful.

can you digg it?

developer challenge contest - what a blast

2006-02-01T21:15:00.000-08:00

Remember the eBay Developer Challenge we launched back in mid-November? Well the deadline for submissions was last night, and our developer community was submitting fast and furious right up until the midnight deadline. Judging will begin soon, and then we will announce the winners in early March 2006 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, CA.

We received a ton of fantastic entries from developers and got great program exposure from the blogosphere during the event. Lessons learned?

1) 50 Benjamins is a strong lead - don't dilute it

2) Don't think that your global developer community won't call you out for hosting a US-only contest on every blog, every discussion board imaginable

3) The concept of a secondary category where open source project teams collaborate in order to compete is either a) a fantastically brilliant idea ahead of its time, or b) irreconcilable

BTW, for all the international developers who emailed, posted and commented about their inability to submit entries for our developer competition, make sure to check out the eBay Integration category of the Skype Developer API Competition, which Lester posted about today.

How cool would it be to celebrate a developer from our community winning the eBay Integration category!

eBay open source developer hits Java.net

2006-01-25T16:24:00.000-08:00

Luan O'Carroll, lead developer and CEO of XeoTrope, published an article this week on Sun’s Java.net, about his company's open source sample eBay StoreManager application: Building an eBay Rich Client using the XUI Framework

Take a look at the article and the open source project on the eBay Community Codebase.

wiki policy: protecting the commons

2005-12-20T23:12:00.000-08:00

Wikipedia, the community-authored " free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," changed its rules earlier this month to require creators of new content to register. Some recent high profile errors have caused Wikipedia to re-evaluate its anonymous posting policy, such as running a biography of John Seigenthaler, former administrative assistant to Robert Kennedy, that falsely accused him of being a suspect in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.

Now, the Financial Times reports from San Francisco that Wikipedia will begin instituting a tape delay-like effect. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, said a new “stable” version of the reference would be added to the site and audited to ensure its accuracy.

BBC News also confirmed that the Wikimedia Foundation could not be sued for libel in the US because it is a hosting company and not a publisher, and US laws protect online publishers from legal action.

Wikipedia thrives because people are basically good. it will be interesting to see how these new policies impact the community dynamic of the site.