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eBay DevCon '08 Opening Keynote Recap
Posted by
Alan Lewis
in Developers Conference
Monday, Jun.16.2008, 1:10 PM PT
This is the fourth eBay Developers Conference that I have attended, and the keynote address this year was a departure from the keynotes of years past. The entire hour and a half focused on the theme of "openness." 
eBay Marketplaces President Rajiv Dutta set the stage by emphasizing the importance of developers in eBay's future. Of all the numbers thrown out during the keynote, one that stuck with me was Rajiv noting that there are only a few thousand developers employed by eBay, but that there are now 70,000 members of eBay's Developers Program. He also laid out 3 priorities at eBay, all of which include clear opportunities for developers to participate:
- Make eBay safer.
- Make eBay easier to use, both for buyers and sellers.
- Find more ways for PayPal to unleash the power of the platform.
Max Mancini, director of Disruptive Innovation and Platform, was up next. He also stressed the importance of developers within the eBay ecosystem. Among another flurry of numbers thrown out, one new one that was impressive to me was that developers were responsible for 500,000,000 listings in the last year.
Max moved on to discuss Project Echo, an initiative to open up the eBay web site to applications created by outside developers. Project Echo will launch in limited beta form by the end of the year Rolf Skyberg from the 
Innovation team showed a demo of 3rd party applications embedded within Selling Manager Pro, an extension to My eBay that is used by 700,000 eBay sellers. The part of the demonstration that I found most interesting was the application directory. Max mentioned about half a dozen times that Project Echo is in a very early form, and that it was being presented at the conference so that eBay can get feedback from developers on what features and functionality they would like to see in the production version of Echo. In addition to integration within the eBay web site, another aspect of Project Echo is the creation of new APIs. Two mentioned in the keynote were Inventory APIs and Buyer Segmentation APIs (which would, for example, tell you if a particular buyer is a high-value "Top Buyer" who might warrant a higher tier of support.) But Max stressed that eBay is looking to developers at the conference to help define what additional APIs eBay should create as part of Project Echo.
Adam Gross from Salesforce wrapped up the keynote. Salesforce has been a pioneer at offering software as a service, otherwise known as "cloud computing," where instead of software code running within a closed network, services are deployed on the Internet and developers create systems by connecting together those services to create a finished application. Adam raised the point that the industry is at a cross-roads, where developers today must choose if they are going to follow the traditional software path, or if they will embrace cloud computing. Adam showed an application built using Salesforce technology, a selling tool created by Infopia, running within eBay using Project Echo, thus making the point that by using the open, cloud-based services provides by Salesforce and eBay, Infopia is able to create an application that would have been much more difficult, if not impossible, using a traditional software model where the developer implements every piece of the application stack.
I talked to some of the attendees after the keynote to get their reactions. Thomas Hallock runs TheSellery, a consignment tool for eBay sellers. He was excited about Project Echo, and was interested in particular in learning more about the inventory management APIs.
Ron Stewart from GetItNext said, "it is great to see eBay endorsing openness much more than in the past, in the same way as the iPhone has opened up and Facebook has opened up. That I liked."
Alan Lewis
Product Manager, eBay Desktop
