Innovations from past Demo Expos have inspired several core features on the site, as well as many patents and patent filings. The eBay Pulse update was a result of this year’s Spring Demo Expo event, as was the VUVOX acquisition.

For the Fall event, teams were asked to create projects around any one or more of the following themes, using eBay services and APIs:
• Trust
• Finding
• Selection

John Donahoe kicked off the event and there were 35 demos on display on Tuesday. I managed to attend 13 of them. Some of which are already in limited public release; others still at the conceptual stage before going into Beta. I plan on writing about individual projects as they get closer to reality and testing, but for now, here is one of the cooler demos I was able to attend:

ClickiT & Buy it on iPhone
One of the demos from the Spring Expo was eBay Mobile; something that I talked about here on Ink and that became available in Europe earlier last month. This Fall’s Demo Expo saw tools and solutions that built upon that technology and one nifty solution was the eBay ClickiT and Buy It on iPhone.

Essentially, it is a native iPhone application which would allow users to take a picture of a barcode of an item in a store, upload it and see the prices and deals for that same product on eBay. Basically, you could be in a shopping mall looking at a digital camera you’re interested in buying, take a picture of the barcode of that camera, and do a quick check to see if the camera is available cheaper on eBay all from your iPhone. I should add the caveat that I don’t actually own an iPhone but I thought that this would be a pretty cool feature to have on it. Definitely better than some of the fun but pretty much inconsequential apps I’ve seen on friend’s iPhones (the “Light Sabre” app and “Crazy Pumpkin” app to name but two).

Like I said, I plan on reviewing more products and tools that came out of this Fall’s Expo event over the coming weeks. Some of which I saw definite benefit and immediate appeal for both buyers and sellers alike. I’m looking forward to sharing that with everyone soon.

Cheers,
RBH

According to Chris, he and his Kernel Framework team “sought to provide a technology platform that would enable eBay to have a richer and more effective personalized experience. The vision was to provide each of the several thousand application servers running the eBay site the ability to access and leverage an instantly updateable, globally shared, personalization data system on every URL request.” As a result, eBay collaborated with MySQL starting back in the Summer of 2007.
In my discussions with Chris and James it was agreed that eBay had been traditionally close-to-the-chest with its technology and application implementation, so getting an award for leveraging the power of open source software was impressive indeed. Chris went on to say, “although not advertised very much, eBay is a technology company at its core, providing internally developed technology solutions for one of the largest scale sites in the world. This particular cache system is built to handle over 4 billion requests per day!”

The transparent initial rollout occurred over the past holiday season.

Chris is presenting an overview of how eBay incorporated MySQL into its personalization platform in a presentation tomorrow at the conference. I will provide a link to the presentation once I receive from Chris.

Congrats to the whole Kernel Framework team on this accomplishment!

The full list of award winners:

2008 MySQL Application of the Year
• FaceBook – Social Network
• Virgin Mobile France – Mobile Operator
• eBay – ECommerce Site

2008 MySQL Partner of the Year
• Zmanda
• Microsoft
• Computacenter

2008 MySQL Community Member of the Year
• Baron Schwartz – Code Contributor
• Diego Medina – Quality Contributor
• Sheeri Kritzer Cabral – Community Advocate

Cheers,
RBH