Word: ebay
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...eBay spending $2.6 billion to buy a $60 million Internet phone company called Skype that has yet to turn a profit? During a presentation to investors this week, eBay CEO Meg Whitman used 75 PowerPoint slides to justify her intense, and expensive, interest in Skype, but analysts were skeptical. Whitman enthusiastically pitched the idea that Skype, a free service that lets users talk to each other via computer, would increase eBay's transaction volume by making it easier for buyers and sellers to talk to each other. She theorized that eBay could start collecting new fees from its users...
That could turn out to be wishful thinking. The same Alexa.com data that put Taobao in front also show a distinct narrowing of the gap. The reach-per-million-users data, for example, have Taobao's users down 6% over the past three months, while eBay's are up 32%?arguably a sign that what Taobao's Erisman sarcastically calls the "shock and awe" marketing campaign is having an effect. Meanwhile, eBay has rolled out its standard support system for big-time sellers in China. Education sessions are available once or twice a month at "eBay University," and what seller...
Whitman knows Taobao doesn't charge sellers to list items on its site, but that won't be the case next year, as Ma acknowledges. eBay believes that will be a game changer, even if the alliance with Yahoo! makes Taobao's pockets that much deeper. But a link with Yahoo! gives Ma the capital and technology he needs to battle eBay on its terms. "Meg made a big mistake coming here," he says with a smile. "I respect her for doing so, but the chief commander shouldn't be at the front line with the troops. It just causes...
Nice try, Jack. Whitman is in China because she knows the cost of failure could be astronomical. In 1999, technical problems delayed eBay's roll-out in Japan. That allowed Yahoo! to get a jump on the online shopping business in what has become the second largest e-commerce market in the world?a lead it has never relinquished. eBay pulled out of the market entirely in 2002, a move Whitman has rued ever since. She is not about to let the Japan debacle be repeated anywhere else, especially China; nor is it probable that she wants to spend another...
...Working from eyewitness accounts and drawings, Stevenson constructed a full-scale replica from new castings of original torpedo-shaped fuel tanks, and a World War II parachute purchased on eBay. Tied together with hemp rope and bamboo, The Gift, as the sculpture is called, forms the oddly beautiful center of an exhibition around which the artist has placed other "relics" from the voyage, including maps meticulously hand-painted by Stevenson. Starting off in Sydney last May, "Argonauts of the Timor Sea" traveled to the U.K. in November, where the artist recruited a band of local Sea Scouts to (unsuccessfully) sail...