eBay UK has launched a new advertisement campaign. This is a campaign that eBay want their users to bid, sell and buy the items from the eBay store online. According to the campaign, if you managed to buy and sell at least an item on eBay from 9th to 18th November, you will be entitled to enter the lucky draw. The winner will be rewarded not by cash incentive, but win a chance in becoming the star feature in a television advertising campaign next year. eBay will create the winner as a 3D animated logo person or avatar that will feature alongside the existing red, blue and yellow animated figures used in eBay’s advertising, as shown in the advertisement above.

Though it’s unusual for a giant company like eBay to launch this type of ad campaign, however the campaign is only open to the UK residents. In a time that avatar is such popular among all the Internet surfers, the idea of putting one of their users as avatar and to be used as a representative in eBay UK community will thus make their users crazy about this campaign. If you interested to know more about lucky draw, there is more information on the Terms and Conditions page.

A three-day Skype outage in August this year and the acquisition of Skype by eBay is now an acknowledged failure, however this doesn’t stop the growth of its users. Maybe the Skype users are not really bother about those stuff other than using it. Today marks another milestone for Skype, they had grown to more than 10 million users that running this software online. And this number is expected to increase everyday. Interestingly, the growth of Skype’s users does not commensurate with its financial performance, albeit that Skype, owned by eBay trying to improve it materially for the past two years.

The other day I came across a new visual search engine that called oSkope. As stated on their landing page, oSkope is a visual browser that fetch and organize the items from Web services such as Amazon, eBay, Flickr and YouTube. Users are allowed to select one of these four services and play around with it, the search results display can be viewed in a variety of ways such as in the mode of grid, stack, pile, list or graph. Click on one of the thumbnail images that can be enlarged when mousing over, and in the right-hand side of the image will display a dialog box that list the item’s product and price information. For an instance, a book image fetched from Amazon will list the book’s particular details. For every book, you will find that there is a link that provided in order for a user to go to the Amazon’s original book page and buy the book.

Visually, oSkope meet the users’ needs when they want to get a better browsing experience. The establishment of these visual search engines tend to complement the existing search engines such as Google or Yahoo! However, if I’m looking for a specific book or photo, I prefer go to the Amazon or Flickr and enter the specific search query. Nevertheless, there is still room left for a visual search engine to further grow on the Web and oSkope might well situated to make money through the referral programs of Amazon or eBay.

eBay has officially launched its new service “eBay Neighborhoods” to the platform that they built for years. It has been a primary focus of eBay when comes to aggregate all its micro-communities that will shape the future of eBay’s E-Commerce businesses. There are currently some 600 online communities that featured discussions, blogs, product-related guides, product reviews, message boards, social mapping, and etc. All seems to be integrated well among each other by eBay. These 600 online communities covered product interests ranging from espresso machines, Apple iPhone, vacuum cleaner, just to name a few. Furthermore, the “Related Neighborhoods” has also been built in order to maximize the efficiency of a single product, as you can see on the left-hand sidebar, one can surf through the product lining and explore the related products. This is one of eBay’s product strategies to address the product needs of a large segments of its shoppers.

Clearly, eBay Neighborhoods is an essential place for their users to socialize themselves, in addition to play and trade. With all the functions that built-in on the site, it will make eBay to further transform the shopping experience in a social and collaborative direction. But how efficiency this platform in engineering the users in the buying process still remained a big question now?

eBay is doing extremely well in the UK at this moment, and they are reported to launch an SMS alert service to its users. The SMS service will be provided by mBlox with the technology collaboration of dynetic, an application service provider based in Germany. This service, which will be similar as launched in Spain last September, will allow eBay UK users to monitor or re-submit their bids with the SMS. Moreover, it also help the users to receive alerts when they have been outbid on an auction, and thus provide an option for them to re-enter a higher bid if they want to do so.

However, this service will be provided as a premium SMS service, where users will be charged at 12 UK pence plus VAT per message.

Skype is back in business after its service outage last Thursday, for a period up to 36 hours, and this caused million of users can’t logged in to the service last week. Though this morning I read eBay’s explanation (English) and (Mandarin), I believed many users still wondering what was the main reason that caused this worst outage in Skype’s five year history. Unlike any other service disruption, Skype said the disruption was due to a large number of Skype users restarting their computers after installing the routine Windows update on the second Tuesday of every month. In Skype’s post, they didn’t mentioned precisely what in particular about the August’s update has led to the Skype crash and indeed this kind of vague explanation on this issue outlines the necessity of another round of explanation.

“Windows Updates” was the key feature of Microsoft’s OS strategy. It cost Microsoft a certain amount of money to set up their team in developing the security patches in a “periodic” time frame in spite of us, as the users sometimes didn’t realized whether these updates really meet our own computing demand. However, for Skype service outage, and their explanation for this was due to the Windows periodic updates nonetheless remained controversial. Will it served as an unexpected boon to some of the Skype peer-to-peer competitors? Well, time will tell.

For the Facebook users, they just have their own choices to bypass the online auction and sales sites in order to sell goods directly from their profile pages due to the launched of Garage Sale platform by Buy.com. Garage Sale is a new online shopping site that allowed friends in a same Facebook’s contact group to trade their goods for the money. For this service, Buy.com will charge a flat 5% commission on any completed sales. This contrast to eBay where they charge sellers a listing and final transaction fee. However, all Facebook users must use credit cards to pay for the items, and the sellers can only get their money via eBay’s PayPal accounts or through checks from Buy.com.

“As the first company to market with this embedded e-commerce capability, we see tremendous growth opportunities in providing the millions of users on business and social networks with an alternative to eBay and the ability to transform their personal profile pages beyond information-sharing.” According to a Buy.com’s press release. This is fairly easy for Garage Sale to convince people that they’re offering a better facility to trade by combining the power of Facebook platform, with the aim also to compete with the likes such as eBay.

Still, this Garage Sale is based on the technology, i.e. RightCart from Shoperion that Buy.com acquired earlier this year.

EachNet is a new platform that jointly founded by eBay and Tom.com in China, and now it has opened to the public. As announced on EachNet’s community forum (in Mandarin), the existing eBay China users are required to re-activate their membership on this new platform. The existing and previous eBay platform in China, i.e. ebay.com.cn will be shut down permanently after this coming 10th July, as stated in their Memo. A bit sad to read this type of news after I examined the history, the growth, the launched of eBay’s platform in China in September 2004, and the fall of this great Internet company in China.

The shift from the wholly-owned to a joint-venture EachNet platform reminded us many things, overseas market, not to mention China alone, most companies will face the cultural shock that they ever imagined. I’m not agreed to a statement that joint-venture is the only business model that one Internet firm can work on in China, this type of statements can be misled, I rather believe the management theory of “distance still matter,” how easily things can go terribly awry in overseas markets.

See also my June 2007 post on eBay China, entitled, “New eBay China Platform Launches.“