GetItNext Blog

eBay Devcon 2008 Agenda - Chicago Developers Conference

For everyone planning on attending this years eBay Developer conference June 16-18th here is the agenda.  I'm really looking forward to this years event in Chicago, especially Monday NIGHT.  Hope to see you all there.  For more details on signing up goto eBay devcon for the details.

Agenda:

Monday, June 16, 2008
Time	Event
7:30am-7:00pm	Registration Open
8:00am-9:30am	Breakfast
9:30am-11:00am	Keynote
11:00am-11:30am	Break
11:30am-12:20pm	Education Session 1
12:30pm-1:30pm	Lunch
1:30pm-2:20pm	Education Session 2
2:20pm-2:30pm	Break
2:30pm-3:20pm	Education Session 3
3:20pm-3:30pm	Break
3:30pm-4:20pm	Education Session 4
4:30pm-6:30pm	Beer Bash & Exhibits Open
7:00pm	PayPal Party

Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Time	Event
8:00am-6:00pm	Registration Open
8:00am-9:00am	Breakfast
8:00am-9:00am	1:1 Technical Sessions/Guru Lounge
9:00am-9:50am	Education Session 1
9:50am-10:00am	Break
10:00am-10:50am	Education Session 2
10:50am-11:00am	Break
11:00am-11:50am	Education Session 3
12:00pm-1:15pm	Lunch & Platform Pub Quiz
1:30pm-2:20pm	Education Session 4
2:20pm- 2:30pm	Break
2:30pm-4:00pm	Keynote
4:00pm-6:00pm	1:1s/Exhibits/Guru Lounge

Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Time	Event
8:00am-12:00pm	Registration Open
8:00am-9:30am	Networking Breakfast
8:00am-11:30am	1:1 Technical Sessions/Guru Lounge
8:00am- 12:00pm	Exhibits Open
8:00am-2:00pm	PayPal Certification
9:30am-10:20am	Education Session 1
10:20am-10:30am	Break
10:30am-11:20am	Education Session 2
11:20am-11:30am	Break
11:30am-12:20pm	Education Session 3

Congratulations to Jeremy Schoemaker "Shoemoney" for Most Innovative Application—Buyer at eBay Developer Conference

Congratulations to Jeremy Schoemaker "Shoemoney" for winning the "Most Innovative Application—Buyer" at eBay Developer Conference for his new AuctionAds service.

Jeremy and the AuctionAds team won the award for promoting efficiency using innovative caching techniques, allowing this affiliate developer to serve up 30 million impressions a month with only 200,000 API calls – an impressive volume of traffic per API call.

That's impressive!

Ron
President
www.getitnext.com

Pierre Omidyar & Bob Kagle Coffee Talk

 

Pierre Omidyar and Bob Kagle gave an extremely interesting talk that described the early days of eBay and how they created a culture of "empowering people".  They described their A-HA moment about viewing user testimonials and hearing a woman talk about how she was able to purchase items at Flea Markets for 25 cents and resell them on eBay for 25 dollars to lift herself out social assistance.  This event caused Pierre and Bob to realize the power and potential of the marketplace that they were creating.

Tying into yesterday's presentation by Eric Billingsly on the Future of eCommerce, Bob Kagle spoke about his initial opposition about utilizing 3rd party developers to help eBay drive innovation.  However, once Paypal came onto the scene Bob slowly began to change his mind.  eBay at the time was of the opinion that they could create a large enough ecosystem to innovate internally.  However, as they soon discovered eBay's own payment system BidPay was no match for Paypal.  As Bob mentioned "at 300 million Paypal was too expensive, at 700 million Paypal was too expensive, at 1.5 billion Paypal was a deal!".  Paypal allowed eBay to realize the fantastic innovation can take place outside of eBay. 

Fast forwarding to present Bob and Pierre are very strong advocates of leveraging outside developers to help eBay grow and drive innovation.  In fact, they are looking to the community to drive as much innovation growth. 

Ron
President

eBay devcon Monday wrap up

Alright everyone, I'm going to consolidate things and wrap up the rest of the highlights from Monday.  One of the biggest surprises of the day was a presentation by Rolf Skyberg who is an eBay Disruptive Innovator.  Rolf blew the audience away with a Web 2.0 presentation that took the audience from 600 AD to the present.  He touched upon such things as Salton Sea Pelicans (omigod, Birds) to compare the evolution of the Web, and basic human needs to the explosion of Web 2.0.  It was a 450 page slide show that kept everyone in the crowd laughing and engaged.  The only thing funnier was seeing Rolf get painted blue and thrown into a wall at the Blue Man group show.

After the sessions finished, eBay hosted a beer bash.  Of course the GIN team represented.  After that Paypal invited everyone to board buses and drove us over to the Charles Theatre.  Once there we were treated to a private showing of the Blue Man Group.  After the show Paypal hosted another outing at Jillian's.  Believe it or not, we actually declined and cabbed back to the hotel and worked all night.

More later -

Matt
Marketing
getitnext.com

Nice Hair!

Hi everyone I'm still trying to catch up from yesterday, I'll fill you in later on why I am so far behind.

Monday morning my first session at ebaydevcon was Marketing your software to the community, hosted by Debbie Levitt.  Debbie is the President of  as was, check out her their site as was .  Debbie has made a big name for herself by helping eBay sellers create, manage and grow their eBay businesses.  If you're a new eBay seller or want to pump up revenue give Debbie a call.  Debbie spoke about a variety of topics of interest to the getitnext team, most of it was marketing 101 tips tweaked for eBay sellers.  She also reinforced some of the decisions we made which is always nice to hear.  All in all the session was very informative and Debbie is a dynamic and enthusiastic speaker.  Drop by her booth at eBay live and say hi and tell her NICE HAIR!

-Matt

Marketing

www.getitnext.com

Jenga

The eBay conference isn't all speeches and seminars.  We also had a very competitve game of Jenga.  The object of the game was to build the H I G H E S T tower.  The team decided to think way outside the box and build a tower to support our tower (hey no one said that wasn't allowed). 

However, it ended up that we didn't come close to winner.  They informed us right before the contest ended that they were ONLY measuring the height of the Jenga blocks.... I tell  you we got robbed!  :-)

Ron

President
www.getitnext.com

Jeremy "ShoeMoney" Schoemaker reveals his SEO secrets at eBay DevCon

Jeremy is widely known as one of the most successful self-made entrepreneurs in the Internet Marketing space.  A.K.A. "ShoeMoney", Jeremy says he's not so much of an SEO professional as he is someone who has earned a good living through good SEO and SEM practices.

The nice thing about Jeremy is that despite his fantastic success, he doesn't have the inflated ego that might go along with it.

Jeremy covered the "intro" level SEO topics such as useful tools (the Omniture Keyword tool, Google Trends etc.), on and off-page optimization and common pitfalls and mistakes.
Most people acknowledge that the older a domain is, the better its rank.  One interesting example he brought up was that the age of links can be just as important as the age of a domain. 

Inbound links are essential since they're both the foundation for Google PageRank and for traffic in general, but how do you acquire them without spamming people?  Common ideas were given such as reviews from sites with good PR, link sharing etc. 

Interestingly, Jeremy recommended avoiding SiteMaps, saying that it's more important to make sure that any important pages are always within three clicks from the homepage.  Huge sitemaps can actually cancel out the natural ranking of your internal link structure.  It always comes back to the basics... build what people would use, and the search engines will treat you well.

And never forget to try the Paris Hilton approach... make headlines!

   

Boston eBay Devcon

 

Well it was quite a day.  I have a lot to post but I'll post a couple of updates to break down the day.  The morning started off on the right note when we arrived and there was ZERO traffic on Boston roads.  See Ron's update for our introduction during the keynote, pretty cool.  I had to eat a lot of crow since I had half jokingly mentioned to the getitnext team that maybe we should skip devcon and use that money for marketing.  Yeh they ripped me for a good part of the morning, I gladly ate my helping as John's intro more than paid for our entire trip.   

PS - Alex, thanks for the introduction to John.  We definitely owe you a beer!                  

Matt

Marketing

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New eBay Announcements are Good News for getitnext.com

eBay announced today a number of features that will directly benefit users of getitnext.com.  These new features will enable us to improve the searching and shopping experience by speeding up response times and delivering more information to buyers in a timely manner.

One of the recent trends in the Web has been redesigning web sites to offer information in a more interactive manner.  At getitnext, we try not to offer "interactive" features that look sexy but don't add value.  Features such as "Add/Remove Keywords" and our interactive category menu allow users to quickly specify what they are looking for in order to get better search results.  They offer real value, and reduce the number of pages and clicks that a user has to wade through. 

With eBay's investment in infrastructure and new features, we will be able to offer more of such features in the near future without slowing down your experience.  In fact, getitnext.com in general should get even faster!

We'd love to hear from you regarding features you would like to see, so please be sure to send us feedback!

Colin Angel
Technology

Keynote at eBay Devcon

Greetings from eBay Devcon 2007. 

The getitnext team had breakfast with John Donahoe (President of eBay Marketplaces) this morning. We had a great conversation about the launch of getitnext.  John was kind enough to mention getitnext during his keynote address and include us in his powerpoint presentation.  Thanks for mentioning us John!

We also had breakfast with Alex Schultz (Marketing Specialist, eBay International).  We talked about getitnext and were able to give him some feedback about the Affiliate program.  MORE TO COME....

Ron Stewart
President