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Keynote: Let's Shape Our Future Together

Posted by Curtis Gavin in Developers Conference
Thursday, Jun.18.2009, 3:59 PM PT

The keynote address always sets the tone for the Developers Conference. The tone for this, the 8th annual eBay Developers Conference, appears to be "let us help you." This year's keynote was delivered by eBay CEO John Donahoe, eBay CTO Mark Carges, and Max Mancini, eBay Sr. Director of Platform and Mobile, and John Hagel, author and special guest.

Max's message was clear. eBay values the developer community and wants to help developers make better applications and ... more money. He offered up a straightforward equation for this:

Transparency + Simplicity + Opportunity = $

eBay is working to make it easier and cheaper to run your business on eBay and providing more opportunity to make money. He provided some great examples to illustrate his point, including:

Multi-SKU (item variations), an eBay project released early to Sandbox to help developers learn and plan for code changes
Paperless payments, a project with significant impact to developer community, was communicated early and enforcement was delayed to allow time for developers to adopt.

Max ended his presentation with a challenge to the community:

Learn about Selling Manager Applications
Tell us how we can further open up the site
Focus on customer experience

John Donahoe spoke briefly and reinforced the message that eBay is committed to platform and community. eBay's developer community is 90,000 strong and an important part of eBay's future. John said eBay is prepared to invest whatever it takes to enable the eBay platform to accelerate and adapt to market and industry changes.

John feels eCommerce is still in it's early days, with technology and competition evolving rapidly. He said, "We need to evolve to meet customer needs tomorrow." The increasing role of technology in the company will help us shape our future. He handed the podium over to Mark Carges, eBay's CTO to complete that story.

Mark Carges, as eBay's CTO, told us about eBay's platform, from the operations infrastructure layer to the eBay application we see on the web. He described how impressed he was with the scale and effectiveness of the eBay platform. He shared a few eBay statistics that were, indeed, impressive:

50 billioin SQL queries and transactions daily
25 million sellers on eBay
13,000 live third-party applications using eBay Web Services
Hundreds of millions of API calls daily
30% of all eBay listings come through the API
400,000 sellers use third-party tools to list items and manage their business on eBay

Mark outlined eBay's top technology priorities:

Search—improved relevance, search as platform (support for custom shopping experiences), better sorting (more and better predictive models), and more data to help sellers optimize tools and listings.
Catalog—bringing structure to unstructured data. Catalogs a big investment and a huge priority.
User Experience—separating the application from the platform enables better opportunities to delight sellers and buyers with improved core experience, custom verticals, and increased channels.
Platform—a platform that is reliable and flexible is key to enabling everything else.

Mark summarized by saying there will be more opportunities for developers to innovate and build their business. eBay's and its developer community's priorities are clear—continue to build and improve the eBay platform and Developers Program so we can better delight our buyers and sellers. Mark says he's committed to dialog and partnership, so if you're here at the conference, try to find him.

John Hagel, author and and co-chairman at Deloitte LLP Center for the Edge, spoke about Shaping Strategies. He started by noting the conventional wisdom that, in uncertain times, the ability to respond more quickly and adapt better than anyone else is the key to success. Beyond this, he noted, there is a key opportunity. In unstable times, there are, he says, "opportunities to shape markets and industries in a profound way." Shapers, he argued, can magnify the perception of reward and reduce perception of risk. Shapers provide positive incentives, which can reshape markets and industries to the shaper's advantage.

The keys to the success of shapers are:

Shaping view that provides a long-term future, with short-term choices for investment and participation
Shaping platform to provide economic leverage, ease of entry, and accelerated rewards
Acts and assets that increase credibility

Shaping is a positive sum game and there are plenty of rewards to go around. Hagel finished with, "You have to understand the rules of the game. Play by the rules of the game in order to succeed."

Max came back to wrap up the keynote with some more information about Selling Manager Applications. eBay is working to drive seller adoption of these applications in the following ways: