The New York Times-20080128-Bits
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Full Text (1016 words)The Plan to Save eBay: Better Search
How will eBay fend off the growing challenge from Google?
On its rival's own turf: search.
EBay has struggled to offer even the most basic search engine that will let users find the products they want.
Today our buyers tell us that we know you have unmatched selection, but we can't always find what we want and find values as fast as we want, said John Donahoe in an interview last week shortly after being named the successor to Meg Whitman as chief executive of eBay.
Now the company is working on something far more ambitious: a system that will evaluate customer feedback, data from its PayPal payment system, shipping costs and other factors to present the very best deals to shoppers.
With eBay and PayPal, we have more closed transaction data than anyone else on the Internet, Mr. Donahoe said. On eBay we have data about what people actually purchased and bought. As we begin to capture and use that data, we believe we can provide the most relevant search experience that takes that inventory we have and delivers it to a buyer so they have good choice.
For example, he said, sellers that provide reasonable and fast shipping, even free shipping, will rise to the top.
Mr. Donahoe also proposes a way of combining fixed-price listings, which are appropriate for new products, and auctions, which are the best way to find prices for unique, older and used merchandise.
Right now, fixed-price goods can be bought on the main eBay site, on its eBay Express site that is devoted to them, and on its Shopping.com site, which combines offers from larger online stores. Mr. Donahoe suggests that in the future all these options will be presented on a single page of search results from eBay's main site.
Let's say you wanted to buy a BlackBerry, he said. Last time I checked we had 25,000 BlackBerry listings. That is a fairly confusing experience. A year from now you will be able to say, 'I want a BlackBerry. Boom. Show me the latest models and the cheapest price.'
The same screen, he added, will show used and older models as well.
We also want to surface the six-month-old version, still brand new, that may be in an auction format because its value is less certain, he said. SAUL HANSELL
Tracking
Global Appetite
For Innovation
In its quest for what it calls new metrics for the knowledge economy, a nonprofit research group has come up with an index of global innovation confidence.
The poll of 25,000 people in a dozen nations, published on Tuesday, found the United States squarely in the middle of the pack. America trailed the nations that most enthusiastic about new technology, gadgets and services, a group that included the United Arab Emirates, India, Brazil, Ireland and China. Still, the United States came out ahead of the Europeans; the least thrilled by technology were the Netherlands, Finland, Slovenia and Turkey.
Jonathan Levie, author of the study and a senior lecturer at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, noted that the nations most confident about innovation tended to be fast-growing economies with young populations. Innovation confidence, he said, doesn't closely track consumer confidence, as one might expect. So it is a separate sentiment.
But innovation confidence, Mr. Levie said, does show a strong correlation with age worldwide. We find that innovation confidence starts dropping after people reach 40, he said.
A sign of wisdom or technological exhaustion? Further research, it seems, is required.
That is precisely what the Institute for Innovation and Information Productivity, the group that sponsored the index, has in mind. The group plans to conduct the innovation confidence studies annually as part of its broader research agenda as it seeks to measure what works and what doesn't in the knowledge economy -- as opposed to the industrial economy. STEVE LOHR
At Sundance,
A Second Life Sweatshop Is Art
One of the more exotic premieres at this year's Sundance Film Festival is Invisible Threads. It's not a movie, but a virtual sweatshop that exists only on Second Life, the online virtual world, to produce real-life, custom-ordered, personalized blue jeans.
Stephanie Rothenberg, a new media performance artist, and her collaborator, Jeff Crouse, a digital artist and programmer, started Invisible Threads a year ago while at Eyebeam, an art and technology center in New York. Invisible Threads is intended as art, but they see it as a window into so-called telemetric manufacturing methods of the future.
The jeans are being shown and sold for the first time at Sundance in a beta version. Customers tell the Invisible Threads staff the size and style of jeans they would like; the instructions are sent to the virtual factory inside Second Life, where workers push buttons that generate an image. From that image, a pattern is created and sent to an industrial printer, made by Hewlett-Packard, which spits out the custom-printed canvas cotton patterns. The patterns are then cut and assembled at the Sundance Festival with a glue gun and a little stitching for reinforcement. The jeans cost around $35.
The margins are enviable. The Invisible Threads factory has 16 workers, who are paid 200 Lindens an hour -- about 90 cents, which is pretty good pay by Second Life standards. Factory workers are also granted 500 square meters of Second Life land on which to build a house.
What I think is fascinating about her work is that it is a step toward what our future is going to be, said Jeffrey Winter, a panel programmer for the Sundance Festival who focuses on media, art and technology. It's called art now, but in the future it's going to be how you get your jeans. It will be daily life. So often what you call art is just people who see the future before the rest of us do. KATIE HAFNER
[Illustration]PHOTOS: John Donahoe, left, is succeeding Meg Whitman as eBay chief. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RICK WILKING/REUTERS); Computer chips are produced in a plant in Suzhou, China. (PHOTOGRAPH BY KEVIN LEE/BLOOMBERG NEWS)