Returning from DevCon 2010

0

Last week, I attended eBay’s top meeting for its third-party developers, the eBay Developers Conference, or DevCon, as we call it. DevCon is comprised of two days of information-packed keynote speeches and technical breakout sessions.

Speakers covered an array of topics, including developing rich mobile Web sites, what’s coming for Best Match, eBay’s product roadmap, and item condition and parts compatibility. I attended the aforementioned sessions, but there were many, many more.

DevCon got underway with a welcome by the big kahuna himself, eBay CEO John Donahoe, and then a short talk by Lorrie Norrington, president of eBay Marketplaces. Mark Carges, eBay’s chief technical officer and senior vice president of Global Platform, presented later. And Gartner Group Vice President Gene Alvarez rounded out the keynotes. He took us all up to 60,000 feet for a broad overview of the outlook for e-commerce.

Both the keynotes and the technical sessions were interesting and worthwhile. Application programming interfaces, or APIs, are the programming facilities we and other third-party developers use to get our Web site to “talk” to eBay. eBay is constantly refining and improving many of these. There was a plethora of helpful information for us to pick up as we continue our work—work that is never really complete—to make sure Auctiva maintains itself as the eBay listing tool of choice.

Going behind the scenes

One takeaway I had was that eBay is now moving full speed ahead into the mobile device arena: There were multiple presentations on how mobile devices like Blackberries and iPhones, iPads and similar devices can augment the e-commerce experience. Since Auctiva announced we now are in beta testing for a new iPhone-based lister application just last week, I had the opportunity to bask in the feeling of Auctiva being on the cutting edge.

On a personal level, my favorite part of DevCon was the opportunity to put faces with names that I’ve seen in e-mail and voices I hear on numerous conference calls. It takes a tremendous amount of communication and coordination between eBay and Auctiva to allow us to deliver features like multi-variations and parts compatibility listings. For the most part, logistics and budget dictate that we do most of our coordination with each other via conference calls and e-mail. But I’m old fashioned enough that deep down I really feel most comfortable dealing with complex topics in good old face-to-face meetings.

For example, one of the technical sessions covered eBay’s new parts compatibility listings—for which we introduced support on our site on Monday. I attended that session and was delighted to finally meet, in person, the eBay staffers working on this initiative. I’ve had numerous conference calls and exchanged many, many e-mails with these folks, and it was great to put the faces with the names.

I also had the opportunity to meet and greet the Bay staff members in charge of the item condition overhaul, as well as meeting the Best Match and Checkout team members. By the end of the conference, my head felt like it was about to explode with all the information gleaned from the presentations I attended. But I came home with some cool little items like the ultra-light ChicoBag that eBay handed out to conference attendees, and a handful of business cards, which are pure gold to a product manager.

While we’re continuously in contact with several eBay staff members, we can never have too many eBay contacts. These ensure advanced notice of eBay’s planned changes, which translates into better and more timely new features for you, our users.