eBay Demo Expo: Prototype eBay Toolbar

13:49 | Robert Scoble | Apr 30th, 2007 9:02am |

I was one of the few outsiders to visit eBay and witness an internal “Demo Expo.” The Demo Expo was a way for employees to come up with a new technology or feature and show it off to eBay’s employees and executives. I picked my favorite four teams, and this is one of them. Thanks to eBay’s Disruptive Innovations team, which is the one that put together the Demo Expo and invited me along. The only rule was that these projects had to use eBay’s standard publicly-available APIs.

Here, Harshal Deo, senior manager, Trust and Safety, eBay, shows me his idea: a new toolbar that — if it were built — would help eBay’s users buy and sell products. This is the first time that eBay has shown off prototypes at this early a stage so that internal and external developers can see the potential for building innovative tools and features on the eBay platform.