Former eBay scientist complains of “Dilbertian compromises”

By tim, on December 17th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Former eBay scientist Raghav Gupta – who composed a farewell poem – has given an interview in which he talks about the difficulty of getting innovations deployed at eBay:

There is actually a lot of good innovation happening nowadays in terms of demos and prototypes and contests, but hardly anything worthwhile ever makes it

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December 17th, 2008 | Category: ebay, internet | 2 comments

Why you can’t trust a Google ad

By tim, on July 4th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

An interesting facet of the recent problems with UK non-supplier Zavvi Direct is that all the purchasers I spoke to found the fake web site via a Google ad. Put another way, without the ease of advertising through Google and eBay, it is likely that far fewer people would have found the site and

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July 4th, 2008 | Category: ebay, google, internet, search, security | One comment

eBay insisting on PayPal only in the UK

By tim, on July 3rd, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

I’ve just listed an MP3 player for sale on eBay in the UK. I was surprised to see that I was required to accept PayPal and only PayPal for the transaction, making the “Decide how you’d like to be paid” section of the form redundant:

It is not even possible to state

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July 3rd, 2008 | Category: amazon, ebay, internet | One comment

Have you found an AIR app you actually use yet?

By tim, on July 3rd, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

Today I downloaded the BBC’s new Adobe AIR application, BBC Live.

This installs as a system tray app on Windows. It’s a beta. Nice little app; but it’s competing against my existing RSS reader which is subscribed to the BBC news feed. The AIR app is much prettier, has images, and lets

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July 3rd, 2008 | Category: adobe, ebay, software, software development | 6 comments

Amazon, eBay, FaceBook: the risk of building your business on a third-party platform

By tim, on April 7th, 2008 Follow tim on Twitter

We are seeing web giants flex their muscles. Here’s three instances.

FaceBook’s frequent platform changes make it tough for small developers to keep up – I blogged about this recently.

Amazon declares that Print on Demand sales on its site must use its own printing system, causing consternation for rivals like Lightning Source.

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April 7th, 2008 | Category: amazon, apple, ebay, facebook | One comment