Typically I don't blog about my work place eBay. But this article from our VP of Systems and Architecture- James Barrese - gives a good insight into what I typically do at work, so I wanted to share it.

eBay hasn't been historically known to be a technology company in the industry. But in the last couple of years that has changed significantly. A lot of the things we do, as James alludes to, are very innovative and technologically complex. The challenge we typically face is that given eBay's scale, the issues we face are quite unique and haven't been solved in public domain. Of course internet giants like Google, Yahoo, Amazon etc. might have dealt with these same issues internally, but never in public domain, and so that technology is a key enabler to the company's success. So all the companies are reinventing similar technologies to support the massive scale and keep ahead of the curve.

So yes, eBay is a technology company now.

You are in good company! :-)
Bessemer Venture has created a webpage listing the ventures it didn't invest in when they were approached by these companies. They call this the 'Anti-portfolio'.

And the list is stellar - Apple, eBay, Intel, Google, Paypal, Stratacom, Intuit  .... !!!

And of course Bessemer's David Cowan is a top 10 VC in the Forbes Midas List. His portfolio includes Verisign, Hotjobs, Keynote, Postini, Ciena, etc.

So don't be disappointed that these VCs rejected your idea. It still has merit! ;-)

"We live in an exponential world"! So true.... Here's a thought provoking video I found, of the rate of progress we are doing today. (Not sure of all the facts in the video .. but an intriguing one for sure)


Enjoy!
  

There have been so many online TV and Video sites coming up these days, that its hard to keep track of. Few of the more well known names are and ,  and    and of course and and the multitude of the P2P networks.


The one big challenge facing these companies is the adoption of the technology by the consumers. And a huge challenge they are facing there is the carriers. The carriers are either lowering the Quality of Service (QOS) for the video traffic or in some cases blocking the traffic completely. Networking companies like Cisco are getting huge contracts to build such technology and routers/filters for the carriers. And carriers are very reluctant in giving this bandwidth away for free. Thus the net neutrality debate.

The following article is an interesting read on the topic. http://www.last100.com/2007/05/28/will-isps-spoil-the-online-video-party

One interesting twist in the tale is that these video companies are backed and lead by bigwigs.

Joost is sponsored by Kazaa/Skype founders  Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. Interestingly Cisco's SVP Mike Volpi who recently left Cisco is now heading Joost as their CEO. He knows the challenges Cisco offers to this mix.
Youtube is Google's
Skype is eBay's
AOL video backed by AOL
Veoh got a lot of funding and is backed by Time Warner.

So there is a real battle ensuing, and hotshots are in the game.

Will be interesting to see how this unfolds. I feel that carriers will eventually relent and let these companies use the bandwidth but in return will surely get a piece of the action, which is what they want.

The debate will go on whether this is more invasion of privacy from Google after the satellite images, etc. or whether this will give a better GPS style mapping and directions view. I am not going in that debate here (although as an opinion, I think this will be better and I am ok with giving up the privacy bit for this feature). This is more on the technology that enabled Google to do this.

Google recently launched Street View. A very interesting feature which gives street level photographs of the area. They are interlaced with google maps. When you click on the street view, you grab the man in yellow and drop it to a street with a blue line indicating street view is enabled.

Interesting to read how Google has enabled this. They have licensed the technology from Immersive Media which has patented an 11 lens camera which takes videos and snapshots continuously. After this it is a brute force method. This camera is mounted on a top of a fleet of Volkswagen Beetles which drive around neighborhoods taking videos and photos. A software stiches these views together and gives a great street level view. You can also see a 360 degree view of the area as all the photos are stitched together.

The article detailing this came out on Business Week. Given the manual labor involved in getting these street level views, I doubt this will be done more than once for any street. Its just not scalable to do it more than once. So whatever images you see in this view will be pretty much be there for the near future. Unless Google makes it a social application, and users contribute the photos. Of course the camera will have to be made available to the consumers which is quite expensive today.  Social Immersive Media. :)

Following is a view of the street I live on
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=Milpitas,+CA+95035&layer=c&ie=UTF8&ll=37.44161,-121.908932&spn=0.050088,0.080338&z=14&om=1&cbll=37.43029,-121.90894&cbp=1,355.103369548834,0.53263345270177,2

Saw this video on Read Write web .
It promotes a concept of a Prosumer (Producer + Consumer). This is an amalgamation of the producer and consumer into a single entity. A merger of the professional and the amateurs ... e.g. bloggers who are a combination of professional editors and amateur news readers, flickr photo uploaders who are a combination of professional and amateur photographers but whose content is consumed by the the rest of the world. Its not just the professionals who are read anymore. Its these prosumers' content which is moving across the web making the web more viral. This is described in the 'Long Tail' as Democratization of the web. This is also one more way of defining the web 2.0 phenomenon of User Generated content.


This particular video goes into the future 2050 based on the prosumer concept and predicts who will be taking over the world. It features Google buying microsoft, amazon buying yahoo and SecondLife. I think given the disruptive nature of today's innovations, companies like Google and Amazon will be eclipsed by newer entities by 2050, just like Google eclipsed Yahoo. Interesting new world.

For all the pani puri lovers out there ... here is a vindication of your love!

Pani puri is metamorphically Mother Earth! :-)
Check out the 'all pros .. no cons Pani Puri'!

eBay released the Togo widgets. There are 3 different types of widgets that you can put up. These are neat and cool looking widgets. Will be good to have these widgets tied to the affiliate program to get more participation.

Ram Charan is a highly paid management consultant, who makes about $20,000 a day! 67 years old, Ram Charan doesn't have a residence of his own. He has lived in hotels all his life and doesn't have any personal belongings.

Strange man:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/04/30/8405482/index.htm

Baazee cofounder and Matrix ventures cofounder Avnish Bajaj says India is not yet ready for Web 2.0. According to him, there are a lot of "low hanging" innovations that can be done in the Indian market before India reaches the stage of requiring to go with Web 2.0 innovations.

Interesting read.

There are most definitely a lot of inefficiencies in the Indian market which not a lot of folks are yet addressing and there are opportunities there, if you get the hang of the Indian market that is.

Just saw this video on Google about Sreesanth mocking fast bowler Nel of South Africa after hitting a six. Funny stuff! The song fits very well as well :-)

Then read this article on rediff about the background of this incident Sreesanth to curb aggression. Apparantly Nel had mouthed these words to Sreesanth :

Nel said, 'I can smell blood, I can smell blood,' " the Kerala bowler, whose match haul of 8 for 99 scripted India's first Test victory in South Africa, was quoted as saying in Outlook magazine.

"Then after beating me, he said 'You don't have the fire, man. You should have a big heart to play. You are like a bunny to me.' He turned back and said it again, 'You are a bunny man and I will get you next ball,'" Sreesanth recalled.

Sreesanth responded in the above fashion! Neat! Btw Congratulations India on the very well deserved first victory on SA soil!

Came across this insider memo, presumably from a Sr. VP - Brad Garlinghouse - at Yahoo!, enumerating the organizational challenges Yahoo! is facing in his view. http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2006/11/18/yahoos_peanut_b.html

Tehcrunch's take on this : http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/18/yahoos-brad-garlinghouse-makes-his-power-move/

Most important point I took out of this is the challenges yahoo! is facing integrating all the acquisitions it has made during the past years into its current organization heirarchy. There are a lot of competing products given the acquisitions resulting into an overall reduced accountability. The VP also points out to the reduced accountability of the Matrix Organization structure, which I found very interesting and true. You lose overall accountaibility as everybody is reporting to their own bosses with the Matrix model.

Will be interesting to see how Yahoo! reacts and responds to this.

On a side note, Valleywag equates this memo to Jerry Maguire's memo in movie Jerry Maguire : http://www.valleywag.com/tech/yahoo/brad-garlinghouse-is-jerry-maguire-215842.php

Following is Jerry's memo extract:

It's 1 AM and this might be the bad pizza I had earlier talking, but I believe I have something to say. Or rather, I have something to say that I believe in. My father once said, "Get the bad news over with first. You be the one to say the tough stuff." Well, here goes. There is a cruel wind blowing through our business. We all feel it, and if we don't, perhaps we've forgotten how to feel. But here is the truth. We are less ourselves than we were when we started this organization.
Sports Management International began as a small company. I was hired by Jack Scully in 1981, I was fresh out of college, I didn't even watch much sports. But a young man came to me, and his name was Bill Apodaca. He asked me to look at a contract he'd acquired to play football for the Atlanta Falcons. Before long I was overseeing the business of another member of the Falcons, and two baseball players. The nuances and the small miracles of professional sports would soon hook me - there was something simple and perfect about the way a stadium felt. The way you felt when a player you'd helped and represented made his stand in front of 54,000 people. And I remember the conversation Mr. Scully and I had by an elevator, standing next to one of those sand-filled ashtray posts, right before he hired me as one of the first agents in this company. "You and I are blessed, he said, "we do something that we love."
Tonight, I find those words guiding me back to an important place, and an important truth. I care very much about the fact that I have learned to care less. Now our company is one of the top three in this business, and we represent over a thousand athletes. Over sixty agents work at our huge new office, and I still haven't met all of you. The business of sports has never been bigger, or tougher, or more written about. And we are at the forefront. But I wonder tonight, as we leave our 13th annual conference ... we've talked a lot and partied a lot over the last three days, but I dare say that not one of us, our diet Pepsis and sheaf of papers in hand, have said what we really think.
It is beyond the easy arguments waged against sports, and our business on the editorial pages of the New York Times. It is beyond the huge salaries, the endorsements all our clients now want because "I'm a better actor than Michael Jordan." Beyond the globalization and merchandization of the games. It's more subtle than the baseball strike, more about loyalty than the Colts moving to Indiana, the Rams going to St. Louis, or the Cleveland Browns moving to ... someplace. I'm talking about something they don't write about. I'm talking about something we don't talk about.
We are losing our battle with all that is personal and real about our business. Every day I can look at a list of phone calls only partially returned. Driving home, I think of what was not accomplished, instead of what was accomplished. The gnawing feeling continues. That families are sitting waiting for a call from us, waiting to hear the word on a contract, or a General Manager's thoughts on an upcoming season. We are pushing numbers around, doing our best, but is there any real satisfaction in success without pride? Is there any real satisfaction in a success that exists only when we push the messiness of real human contact from our lives and minds? When we learn not to care enough about the very guy we promised the world to, just to get him to sign. Or to let it bother us that a hockey player's son is worried about his dad getting that fifth concussion.
There is a good bet that I will erase all of this from my laptop, and you will never read it. But if you are reading it, and you're reading it right now, it is only because I was unable to stop. I was unable to forget the quiet questions in the hallways, when some of you, usually the younger agents, or interns, asked me on the side: "How do you keep all these lives, all these clients, separated in your mind?"
Chances are, I didn't say much. I might have told you "it's easy," or, "you're not working hard enough." Chances are, I said something that you expected, maybe even wanted to hear. But it wasn't the truth, and it wasn't what I felt. And if you ever wondered about the drawbacks of being quiet about important things, talk to yourself in the mirror some time, say the truth. Yell the truth to yourself, when no one is listening. See how good it feels?
My father worked for the United Way for 38 years. We lived in San Diego for many years, before I left to move up the coast to Los Angeles. One of the things my father said was: "Every time you allow a problem in your life, you are actually at a point of transformation. Crisis is a powerful point of transformation." (Never mind that he sat at the same chair for 38 years, and when he retired said only that he'd wished he'd asked for a more comfortable place to sit.)
We are now at a point of transformation with this company. But this is not something to fear, it is something to celebrate. Because I come to you tonight, looking out at the dark Miami skyline, not only with a challenge. I come to you with answers too.
But first let us define our position.
Right now we are a breaking point with our client list. We are not so huge that we must hire more agents, and not so small that we have not experienced huge success. We are at a point of neutrality. We are all, right now, neutral. Neutral, as in not black or white. Not bad or good. Even. neutral.
Even in my own life, after 35 years, I feel that I have never done that one thing, that noble thing that defines a life. Even writing this Mission Statement is odd for me. I am used to flying below the radar, enjoying my life and friends. But I have not been truly tested. I have not gone to India to explore my life, as my brother has. I have not been in a major car accident, or fathered a child. I have not created a life, nor have I killed anyone. I am neutral. I haven't started a war and I haven't stopped a war. I have broken even with my life. I have a nice home, a nice car, a fiancee who makes my heart race. But I have not taken that step, or risk, that makes the air I have breathed for 35 years worthwhile. I once had a yellow couch. I got rid of it because it was neutral. My life is now like that yellow couch.
And yet, as I sit here in the wonderful Miami Hilton, I have never been so happy to be alive. I have said "later" to most anything that required true sacrifice. Later I will spend a weekend reading real books, not just magazines. Later I will visit my grandmother who is 100 and unable to really know the difference. Later I will visit the clients whose careers are over, but of course I promised to stay in touch. Later later later later. It is too easy to say "later" because we all believe our work to be too important to stop, minute to minute, for something that might interfere with the restless and relentless pursuit of forward motion. Of greater success. Make no mistake, I am a huge fan of success. But tonight, I propose a better kind of success. I could be wrong, but if you keep reading and I keep writing, we might get there together.

 

All this ties very well in the Organization Theory class I am taking this quarter. Interesting stuff.

An Indian search engine Guruji was launched today. It kinda falls under the "vertical search" category for the Indian market. This is a better and a rebranded version of the cofounders' earlier venture Terrawiz.

Till recently search engines in India were pretty much yellow pages. khoj.com, 123india.com come to mind as the web 1.0 version of Indian search engines.. directory based. Khoj actually had a good chance to enter this search engine market given its branding as well. It probably got lost in all the advertising focus it had!

Recently though some action has been happening in the Indian search engine market. Junglee co founders have started an Indian search engine - Hot Samosa. Guruji has been launched now. Seems like this market seems will grow in India given the fantastic success of Baidu in China.

Although there are some unique challenges in India though given the differences in India China. So not easy to become as successful as Baidu:

1. Guruji will have to have a very strong support for local languages search. This will be a much bigger initiative than Baidu in China as there are just so many more languages in India!

2. Although even with the language support, given that most net savvy Indians are very much comfortable with English, they wouldnt have as much affinity to local language search engines comparable to Baidu.

3. Good rating, ranking and relevancy algorithms needs to be implemented which will automatically crawl new Indian websites, rather than users submitting their sites. A problem which gets much more complex given again the local languages support.

4. Guruji will need a lot of marketing, PR and advertising as it has to displace Google and Yahoo from the Indian users browsers/desktop. This I believe is not as easy as Baidu had it in China as even today Indian users tend to prefer the 'western' products more. Will be interesting to see how Guruji overcomes the biggest challenge it faces in the face of Yahoo and Google in India. Both have offices and strong teams in India already.

Given the strong $7M venture backing Guruji has from Sequoia India and Baazee cofounder, they will be in a strong position to tackle these challenges.

(Disclosure: The CEO and cofounder Anurag is a friend and an ex-colleague. Good luck Anurag!)

You have been hearing news that Indian stock market is red hot. But heres a comparison with the Dow, S&P500 and even the high volatility Nasdaq to understand really how much it has performed better over the last 2 years.

Dow went up from 10000 to 11800 : 18% increase
Nasdaq went up from 1900 to 2300 : 21% increase
S&P500 went up from 1120 to 1350 : 20.5% increase

And the BSE Sensex from 5700 to 12300 : 115% increase

A picture is worth a thousand words .. so here goes :

Ross Mayfield has a nice graphic on how the information dissemination cycle works in today's world.

(Click the image to see the larger original)

 

It shows how the playing field of information access has been levelling with the recent Web 2.0/blog/online communities advent.

What other time in the past would I have heard of so many startups before they even get any funding, from any corner of the world.

If you are able to catch a startup in the mobilization phase, you are in a very good shape. Of course this is based on the BIG assumption that diffusion and commoditization happen for the product! Most of the companies would fail while trying to move from the mobilization to the diffusion phase.

Good Luck in catching yours! :)