Rocketboom Founder Puts His Twitter Account On Sale
How much is a Twitter account with nearly 1,500 followers worth? Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron wants to find out, and launches a publicity stunt that will spark a debate about trust and privacy: He’s selling his Twitter account, including the followers. His explanation for the sale:
I really love my Twitter account but I feel like I haven’t been using it the way I want to. Quite honestly, I feel sorry for all of my followers because they wind up with my tweets in their timelines and I haven’t been able to utilize the medium the way I want to. I also participate in another Twitter account over on Rocketboom so I’m thinking I’ll post more over there and start up a new account to do what I want to do next.
It would be silly to just delete this account I have here, especially if there is someone out there that had like interests and had something to say or wanted to get involved in some relevant conversations. In terms of monetary value, I have no expectations or needs at all so I decided not to put a minimum bid on this. Whatever will be, will be.
At the time of writing the current bid for the account, complete with 1400 followers is $26. You can follow the auction here.
Twitter, of course, will almost certainly delete the account if a sale occurs (I’d suspend it immediately if I were them). But they may not have considered this possibility when drafting the terms of service or privacy policy - a sale or transfer of an account isn’t specifically prohibited.
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eBay Terminates 125, But Will Hire More Long Term
eBay has fired 125 workers as part of a restructure of its US and European Operations.
The 125 were located in the U.S, Belgium, Spain and Austria and “were part of an effort to centralize some customer support, finance and legal functions and were not aimed at cutting costs” reports CNN, quoting the company saying that it is actually looking to expand on its 15,000 strong workforce going forward.
The changes are designed “to make the company’s services easier to use” and is part of a push to “reinvigorate a company that remains the dominant online auction site.”
eBay has come under increasing pressure from competitors, including Amazon who surpassed eBay in traffic last Christmas. The company launched a fee restructure in January resulting in a seller boycott.
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Skype: 100 Billion Free Phone Calls And Counting
Since launching four and half years ago, Skype users have talked to each other for 100 billion minutes, and that is just counting free Skype-to-Skype phone calls. Of course, many of those calls would never have been made if Skype didn’t exists, so you cannot count the entire 100 billion minutes as a loss for the phone companies. But a significant chunk of that has got to be eating away at phone company profits.
Skype’s owner, eBay, is not necessarily the winner here either. While Skype has been a boon for consumers, it’s eBay that is footing the bill. Even at the reduced $3.1 billion acquisition price after the write-down, eBay still ended up paying roughly 3 cents a minute for all of those calls. I think I pay less with Verizon.
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Skype: 100 Billion Free Phone Minutes And Counting
Since launching four and half years ago, Skype users have talked to each other for 100 billion minutes, and that is just counting free Skype-to-Skype phone calls. Of course, many of those calls would never have been made if Skype didn’t exists, so you cannot count the entire 100 billion minutes as a loss for the phone companies. But a significant chunk of that has got to be eating away at phone company profits.
Skype’s owner, eBay, is not necessarily the winner here either. While Skype has been a boon for consumers, it’s eBay that is footing the bill. Even at the reduced $3.1 billion acquisition price after the write-down, eBay still ended up paying roughly 3 cents a minute for all of those calls. I think I pay less with Verizon.
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Ticket Scalpers Seatwave Take $25 Million Series C
European ticket resellers Seatwave have taken $25 million Series C in a round led by Fidelity Ventures that included Atlas Venture, Mangrove Capital Partners and Adinvest. Total funding for Seatwave to date is $36 million.
London based Seatwave, like StubHub (acquired by eBay for $310 million) and TicketsNow (acquired by Ticketmaster for $265 million) resells tickets to major events. The company was founded in 2006 by Joe Cohen, formerly with Ticketmaster and Match.com.
According to PEHub, the European market hasn’t had a strong online reselling presence, particularly compared to the United States.
Scalping tickets (reselling tickets) is not the easiest market to be in, with the practice frowned upon by many, and often illegal as well. The resale of football (soccer) tickets is illegal in the United Kingdom unless the resale is authorized by the organizer of the match, such as an under an agreement Seatwave competitor Viagogo has.
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Gizmo Gets MySpace IM Support, More IM Platform Than Skype These Days
When Michael profiled the Gizmo Project in July 2005, he noted that it had more features than Skype, but lacked instant messaging. The one time Skype competitor has become the Jaiku to Twitter, having pretty much dropped off the radar as Skype was acquired by eBay and went on to become the leading desktop VOIP/ IM solution.
The open source SIPphone owned Gizmo has continued to be developed, and this week added MySpace IM support on top of support for MSN, Yahoo, AIM and Jabber (including Google Talk). Today’s Gizmo is more IM platform than predominantly VOIP platform, and it makes for a fairly decent product.
Gizmo offers an attractive feature set. On top of the wide IM support that makes it a competitor to Adium and Trillian, the VOIP side offers competitively priced calls to external numbers, as well as free calls to those using the SIPphone platform. Services such as file transfer are supported, although video calling is only supported between Gizmo users, and not with users on other services. Cross platform voice chat is supported however.
Notably Gizmo 5 can be installed on a range of mobile phones and run locally, complete with VOIP calling, a decent value add if you’re on an unlimited data plan with your mobile phone. Unfortunately there isn’t a version (site or download) for the iPhone yet so I was unable to test it.
Gizmo has long since lost the battle against Skype to become the dominant VOIP service, however if you’re looking for a fully feature mobile IM client that also offers cheap calls it might be worth a look again.
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eBay Acquires Fraud Sciences For $169 Million
eBay through Paypal has acquired fraud detection provider Fraud Sciences Ltd for $169 million.
Israel and Palo Alto based Fraud Sciences offers automated anti-fraud systems including SpotLight VFX and SpotLight T2T, merchant solutions the provide transaction verification with fraud prevention. In an October 2007 profile, Israelplug said that Fraud Sciences products “help online retailers verify the identity of buyers and accept orders that they would have seen as suspicious in the past - thus enabling them to increase their sales.”
eBay said the acquisition will assist them in significantly improving trust and safety across its sites in 2008. Fraud Sciences’ risk tools will be integrated with PayPal’s fraud management system.
Personnel from Fraud Sciences, including Yossi Barak, Fraud Sciences’ COO, and founders Shvat Shaked and Saar Wilf, will join PayPal’s technology and fraud management teams.
This acquisition is expected to be completed within 30 days.
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Meg Whitman’s Exit Interview
I just got off the phone with Meg Whitman, eBay’s departing CEO, and John Donahoe, her successor. Whitman talks about her biggest successes (going global and buying Paypal) and her biggest mistake (losing Japan), gets a dig in at Skype’s founders, and ruminates about whether Facebook can become a platform for commerce. Donahoe talks about eBay’s renewed focus on fixed-price items, its commitment to distribute listings across the Web, and how he sees those listings as a huge advertising inventory. Here is the interview:
Q: If you had to pick one thing you did over the past decade, what was your best move?
Meg Whitman: I would say that the best move was that Pierre’s idea was a really good idea: using the Web to empower regular people and small businesses to do commerce. For me, the international expansion of eBay was the best idea. We are now in 35 countries, and have a huge global network. The second best one was the acquisition of PayPal—the wallet on eBay.
Q: What was your biggest mistake?
Whitman: I am not one for regrets, but I still regret we don’t have a presence in Japan.
Q: What about buying Skype?
Whitman: We liked Skype and still like Skype as a standalone business—a $400 million, four-year-old. Skype is doing more business as a four-year-old than eBay, Yahoo, or even Google did. We saw potential synergies between Skype and eBay. The next year or so will prove out if we were right. We’ve only had our management team in there for three months. Prior to that we had the founders, who are brave individuals, but were motivated by the earn-out.
Q: If you were starting out at eBay now in 2008 instead of 1998, what would you do differently?
Whitman: Guess what? The world changes. eBay has defined e-commerce. But John recognizes we are going to in many ways reinvent eBay.
John Donahoe: Buyers and sellers have more choices and higher expectations than in 1998, but the guiding principles are the same—the best values, the widest and most abundant selection, and a fun shopping experience. We will make it easier and safer to shop on eBay. The second thing we are going to do is build on this fabulous auctions business that is unique and is the best format for many items.
But we have used an auction approach for fixed price. We are not optimized to get those values in fixed price. Time-ending-soonest makes sense in auctions, but does not surface the best items in fixed price.
Q: eBay, along with Amazon and Yahoo, is now one of the elder statesmen of the Web. Do destination sites matter anymore?
Whitman: My view is that, just as in many businesses, brands really matter. There will always be a role for destination sites. Eighty million users come to our destination. I think that will be the vast majority of our future business.
That said, we must be in distributed commerce in the future, taking listings for auctions and Shoppng.com and distributingthem to other sites. If they ar not going to come to us, we are going to come to them. We are not at all averse to distributed commerce.
Donahoe: In many ways, our buyers will lead us there. We are making it much easier to bring eBay listings to your Facebook page, Myspace page, and shopping listings to various sites. eBay’s unique inventory offers better alternative [than other sources].
Whitman: Here is the interesting thing that I wonder about. You look at the tremendous success of Facebook. To my mind there is not a lot of commerce going on in these social networking sites. eBay is a community anchored in commerce. It is a commerce site that built a community around it. What has not been proven is if the reverse can happen and people will go to community sites to do commerce.
Donahoe: In payments, we are enabling faster checkout and easier payment on thousands of Websites off of eBay. In reputation, we think that reputaion is something we can increasingly outtake.
Whitman: We wonder if there is a way to embed reputation into Paypal. Is there a way to travel across the Web with your Paypal wallet and some other aspect of reputation?
Q: Do you want to get into the advertising game?
Donahoe: You could say we are already in the advertising game with millions of listings a day and expanding that with other advertising on eBay and off. We have our Yahoo and Google partnerships and we will continue to find ways to get our listings out there.
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Ebay’s Meg Whitman to Step Down After a Decade as CEO
It is not just Yahoo that is going through some rough times. After a decade at the helm, eBay CEO Meg Whitman is preparing to retire, reports the WSJ (subscr. req.). John Donahue, the president of eBay Marketplace, who was trotted out on a press tour about a month ago, is said to be the front-runner to be the next CEO.
During most of Whitman’s tenure, eBay seemed unstoppable. But the network effects that made it so powerful in the Web 1.0 era began to dissipate as destination sites began to lose some of their appeal. Now that people want to bring the Web to them—to their blog or MySpace or Facebook page—eBay needs to adapt to the new realities
It is not for lack of trying (see the bungled Skype acquisition). The old network effects still have a mighty pull, and generate a lot of money for eBay. Whitman maintained eBay’s dominant position in online auctions. But it just seems less and less relevant today.
Here is a ten-year stock chart. During the last two years, eBay has lost about half its value. Not a great note to leave on.
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New Year’s Tech Resolutions
Okay, I know, I’m late with these, but coming up with New Year’s resolutions is tough. And isn’t there a one-week grace period anyway? Rather than do predictions, I thought I’d offer up some resolutions—things I’d like to see happen this year. These aren’t my resolutions. These are resolutions that tech companies like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook should adopt, IMHO. (And, no, they are not capable of coming up with their own resolutions. Someone has to do this for them). If you have better resolutions to suggest for these or any other company, please add them to comments.
Apple—Learn to Let Go. Don’t repeat the mistakes of history. Open up a little bit. You are helping to bring the phone and other mobile devices into the digital age. Other people and companies want to be a part of that too. Make it easy for them to build apps on top of the iPhone and your other products. (You’ve indicated that you are working on this, but we are still waiting to see the results). Command and control got you this far, but in a world where every device is connected, a bunker mentality will limit your growth.
Facebook—Stop Being a Party Hog. Release my friends and leave Scobie alone. You want everyone to create applications for Facebook, but when it comes to letting people take data out of Facebook you are not so generous. Find a way to let members take their social graph (their list of friends and social connections) with them to other Websites. If you are serious about becoming the social operating system of the Web, you need to let people party the way they want to, and where they want to (even if that is not on Facebook). Embrace this change. You’ll still be popular. The alternative is to battle a growing user backlash (and startups looking for workarounds).
Google—Go Beyond PageRank. The main way you sort search results, PageRank, is more than a decade old. It is the basis of the entire search economy. But it is also starting to be gamed in ways that threaten to dilute the value of your search results. People are buying and selling links on Web pages with the express intent of manipulating search results. You can fight this, and you are, but maybe it is time to start shifting to other ways to rank search results. There are other sources of authority on the Web besides links, aren’t there? (Don’t ask me what they are—you are the one with all the genius employees).
Amazon—Open Up The Kindle. Your Kindle Reader is a big step forward in terms of gaining mainstream acceptance for electronic books. But what is great about the Kindle is the service, not the device. It is your 90,000-and-growing titles in e-book format, seamless wireless downloading, and back-end billing linked to existing Amazon accounts that makes the Kindle worth replicating. Put out a reference design and let other companies make sleeker electronic readers that tie into the Amazon store. The design of the device itself is clunky. Stick to what you know, and let other companies build the hardware.
Microsoft—Get Serious About Webtop Apps.  Productivity apps are moving to the Web, and while that threatens your Office franchise, you need to get in front of this trend now before it gains much traction. You are inching towards this with your recent Office Live Workspace beta, but you still need to get past your Barbarians at the Gate mindset. While Google, Adobe, and others try to figure out how to bring their Web-based word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software offline, you are already did that a long time ago with Office. Now you are integrating Office apps with Office Live, but you are trying to force people to use the offline apps as their default environment. Keep that as an option, but let people create documents and spreadsheets online as well without the need to ever launch Office on their desktop.
Yahoo— Use The Traffic, Luke. I don’t know what to tell you guys (and gals). You are losing more executives than Google, Jerry Yang’s first 100 days were uneventful, and still nobody knows what your strategy is supposed to be. Your biggest asset is that you still attract more traffic than any other site in the U.S. (although Google is gaining on you). For the most part, you like to slosh that traffic around Yahoo, but you’ve shown signs that you are willing to turn that hose towards other worthy Websites, even if they have no pre-existing deals with you. Find more ways to spread that traffic and to get other Websites to return the love. Then use that natural traffic network to lure other Websites into your advertising network. Focus on dominating the growing behavioral ad-targeting market instead of trying to beat Google head-to-head on contextual and search ads.
eBay—Sell Skype. Come on, you know you want to. It was a bad fit from the start.
(Photo via Crystl).
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