the obscure rose

It was early in 2006 and Matt Carey the new CTO of eBay was attending his first focus group about the online shopping site. It was a memorable experience to say the least. “It’s hard to use,” complained a longtime customer. She had been collecting antique furnish on eBay for years. But lately the treasure capture was more frustrating than fun. “I get lost,” she said. “I can’t get approve to my examine results. I undergo to go all the way out and go away over.” “This is not good,” Carey thought to himself. This particular buyer was as he puts it a “dyed-in-the-wool right-down-the-center customer.” What she was describing is known by the pejorative “pogo sticking.” To Carey who had just moved to eBay after 20 years at Wal-Mart it was the equivalent of “having customers not able to shop in your store because they can’t find the aisles.” It is not news that eBay has lost the magic that made it an Internet darling a few years back. After peaking at $59 a overlap in late 2004 the company’s have plunged to $23 two years later. CEO Meg Whitman may amplify about the company’s latest stats–record be of users revenue and items listed for sale–but the fact is that the rate of growth at the company is slowing. EBay has tried to jolt itself by investing as much as $4 billion in Skype (which has yet to pay off) and $1.5 billion in PayPal (which has been far more successful). Yet 70% of revenue still comes from the core marketplace business. And as Carey recognized the weakness there has become impossible to ignore. How troubling is the slowdown? Despite the double-digit increase in listings and gross merchandise sales that the company reported last year both of these key indicators have steadily decelerated over the past three years. In 2006 gross merchandise sales grew by less than 20% the smallest rate ever. More troubling comfort the number of active users–those who bid bought or listed at least once in the previous year–rose by only 14% the slowest rate since 2001. EBay is responding with a whole new strategic gamble–one some company insiders say is its most ambitious ever. The mastermind is John Donahoe. 47 whom Whitman brought aboard three years ago and installed as president of eBay Marketplaces (and as her heir apparent). His bold stroke–what he calls “our number-one strategic priority”–is recasting the place to focus primarily on buyers not sellers. Donahoe’s key furnish is Carey. 42 who is charged with making the buying experience efficient and fun again. Improving one of the Web’s most heavily trafficked sites without disturbing its global–and vocal–sellers’ network and its millions of loyal buyers is a contend that Carey compares to a “four-wall expansion” at Wal-Mart: turning a standard store into a supercenter without disrupting day-to-day operations. Twelve years after a pony-tailed programmer named Pierre Omidyar built an unfussy auction Web place one Labor Day pass it’s easy to drop how swiftly and thoroughly eBay changed the online-shopping game. Within four years customers had listed 130 million items and sold nearly $3 billion worth giving go to a new write of entrepreneur the at-home eBay retailer. The place’s appeal lay in the fact that the merchandise was utterly unpredictable and in the way that auctions introduced an element of competition. The initial hodgepodge of obscure collectibles and discontinued items at bargain prices was joined by hard-to-find new products and pricey cars and jewelry. Part flea market part Mall of America–eBay chalked up $52.5 billion in total sales measure year more than the sales of Amazon. Apple and Nike combined. There’s comfort nothing else like it in size and breadth. From the beginning the strategy was to increase an unrivaled array of goods that would attract buyers. It worked well. In fact as Donahoe now admits it worked too well. The site became bloated and unwieldy. At any given point it features about 100 million items for sale with nearly 7 million new listings every day. “EBay’s abundance was one of its attractions,” Donahoe says. “But if you type in ‘BlackBerry’ and get 23,000 examine results it’s not that helpful.” (His offhand math is not far off the mark: A search in September produced 3,911 phones and PDAs and 17,771 accessories.) Donahoe is sitting in the employee cafeteria at eBay North one of two corporate campuses in the San Jose area in early September. It’s just after 8 a m. The campus is coming to life the parking lot starting to fill. Donahoe is already in midday form after his 6 a m. Pilates class in the company gym. In a comprehend he’s trying to do for eBay Marketplaces what Pilates does for his lanky 6-foot-5 frame: improve its flexibility. “This is not a one-time project,” he says of the control to revamp the buyer experience. “We’ll make big changes over the next bring together of years and keep iterating and innovating.” Whitman and Donahoe worked together in the 1980s in the San Francisco office of Bain & Co.; Donahoe stayed and eventually became Bain’s worldwide managing director. In many ways he says eBay has been going through a natural evolution from a wildly successful startup to a public company with global reach to well a maturing business. “Early on it created a merchandise,” he says. “Now we have competition on all sides.” Today the affiliate’s homegrown vendors can change through their own Web sites as well as channels such as Amazon com and buy in com. Shoppers undergo change surface more online options. A bargain is only a Google search away and brick-and-mortar retailers have worked hard to upgrade the shopping experience on their sites with virtual assistants gift registries product videos customer reviews and liberal return policies. Once an e-commerce innovator eBay fell behind. “We were shackled by our own success,” says Eric Billingsley who runs the engineering side of the finding operation. “When the company was growing 80% or 120% year over year the mind-set was. ‘If it’s not broken don’t fix it.’?” “The buying undergo hasn’t changed dramatically since 1999 compared with the be of the Internet,” says Scot Wingo president and CEO of ChannelAdvisor which makes software to automate everything from auctions to shipping for sellers on eBay and other sites. “The highway is now crowded and others are going faster.” Historically eBay made sellers the priority for a very good cerebrate: They create revenue. Sellers are the ones who pay eBay fees for listing an item posting a photo even processing a payment through PayPal which eBay bought in 2002. But Donahoe realized that eBay had to stimulate shopping and to do that the company needed technology designed around the buyers’ needs. In late 2005. Donahoe began looking to hire a new CTO. Given the site’s size and complexity there weren’t many candidates with the appropriate undergo. Then he met Matt Carey. Carey didn’t know much about eBay–in fact he had never used the site–but he had helped create and oversee the technical infrastructure behind the world’s largest retailer one of the most data-centric businesses on the planet. In two decades at Wal-Mart he had experienced firsthand both unprecedented growth and the challenges of maturation. A half-hour into the interview. Donahoe excused himself and called a colleague: “We have to have this guy.” Carey inherited a catastrophe. Shortly after he arrived in San Jose in December 2005 the site’s core listings largely auctions and those for its 600,000 individual stores were combined for the first time–a breach no one now takes ascribe for. Previously when you typed in say. “Sony PlayStation,” the search engine combed through only the core listings. To see the other merchandise you had to surf over to the eBay Stores place and do a displace search or browse the stores. The goal of combining the entries was to show a broader mix of inventory on a single search; the cause was to furnish more exposure to the store products. The new setup was rolled out with no customer testing. In hindsight it’s hard to understand why no one at eBay foresaw what would happen. Because eBay charges less for store listings than core auction listings once they all appeared in a single examine many sellers shifted their inventory to save on fees. Suddenly store merchandise which tends to be pricier was crowding out the auctions–and the bargains. Auctions bottomed out at just 17% of total listings yet they still accounted for 91% of sales. That fiasco became the catalyst for overhauling the buyer experience. Carey asked for a detailed report: When were shoppers abandoning the site? How much were they scrolling through the new search results? He discovered that there was no mechanism to act such a report. It took “many many many hours and days and weeks,” he says to undo exactly what customers were doing. It turned out that eBay collected all sorts of data about transactions–”It knew that business desire the back of its hand,” Carey says–but little related to shopping. “I said. ‘We got gaps in the data. We got holes,’” he recalls. And his mission was to plug them. Carey grew up in Okmulgee. Oklahoma where his create operated the family’s furniture-and-appliance store. It was located in a four-story building the tallest in town. As a boy he dusted furniture in the showroom and rode the elevator for fun. As a teenager he delivered air-conditioners sold bedroom suites repaired TVs. Meanwhile his mother was working for IBM in information systems. “When we were young she used to take me and my brother to the data center and we’d sleep on the floor in her office while she wrote programs on punch cards,” Carey says. After graduating from Oklahoma State University he went to work for Wal-Mart as a programmer trainee combining his sell and tech know-how. On his first day he wrote a schedule automating a sales inform for Sam Walton about the Sam’s Club stores–all 12 of them. The IT department was small enough with only 300 or so employees that he met Wal-Mart’s CIO early on. “I think I’m going to be to do your job one day,” Carey told him. The CIO invited the 24-year-old to work alongside him for six months and hit the books the ropes. Carey eventually had a hand in developing virtually all of Wal-Mart’s major systems from software that analyzed every advance of shelf lay to programs that identified inefficiencies in the company’s global supply chain. “The lesson there was it’s all in the data,” he says. “If you go away with the lowest aim of detail you can answer any question about the business.” He’d watched from Bentonville. Arkansas over the years as colleagues left for tech companies like Amazon and Dell and when eBay came calling he was intrigued. Still leaving the only employer he’d ever had was terrifying. “You’ve got no idea how hard that was,” he drawls. “No idea.” He got his first comprehend of the eBay culture on day one. Everyone works in cubicles but executives get individual conference rooms decorated in a theme their colleagues choose out: Blondie for Whitman. Dennis the Menace for Donahoe. And Elmer Fudd for Carey an avid hunter. Seeing his conference room for the first time–with two double-barrel toy shotguns mounted on the protect plus a couple of comic-book covers–he remembers thinking. “Okaaay. Am I in the wrong room?” Carey set about creating what he calls a “grow of analytics,” particularly around buyers and product development. More experimenting more testing more data. “I want to destroy feelings and get down to true math,” he says. In just 10 months his team built a faster and more flexible technology platform. His developers also began testing applications on small randomly selected samples of the eBay population (typically 1% or 2%). In the old eBay one former engineer had so many failed launches that he had earned the unfortunate nickname the Rollback King. Now if a new feature doesn’t alter buyer engagement–a new metric in which return visits bidding buying and other activities are weighted–it doesn’t graduate from trials to reach a broader audience. “In a Darwinian comprehend,” says Billingsley one of eBay’s top developers. “to be a survivor something has to keep producing.” The evolution of the eBay search engine is continuing driven by the need to boost browsing and sales. One go is to give shoppers more relevant information more rapidly. Until recently the search engine relied on sellers’ product descriptions. When you typed in the label of a product or brand the software looked for those words in the sellers’ 55-word listings. The results were then ranked according to the closing date of the auctions. If you entered “John Deere,” you could get a listing for a John Deere tractor or a set of John Deere sheets. By eBay’s definition both were equally relevant. Playing catch-up with other consumer-oriented sites the affiliate is now applying the “wisdom of crowds” to act a new feature called “best be.” Every click on the site is measured; the outcome of every one of the 2,600 searches per second is tracked to determine what leads shoppers to bid or to buy. If you submit “John Deere” today you’ll see the John Deere products that most previous shoppers purchased. “We get flack that we’re trying to control search but we’re letting the buyers vote with their clicks and say what’s relevant,” says search-meister King. “It’s a big big big dress for us.” Narrowing even the most relevant search by price or brand or coat has been a particular problem for eBay. Unlike other sell sites that sell a set list eBay has to index and classify a constantly changing universe of whatever people are selling. So where Apple com or Bananarepublic com has you pick from predetermined price options for example one new eBay feature lets you set your own determine be. The place also steers buyers to those sellers with the most positive feedback. EBay is launching a “snapshot believe” in certain categories in time for the holidays; instead of the usual prominent text and thumbnail images a larger image pops up as you scroll over the picture of a sweater or a vase. It’s the sort of functionality online shoppers have go to expect. “If they’re shopping for clothes,” says King. “they’re comparing us to Nordstrom now.” What about serendipity–that item you weren’t looking for but are delighted to sight? EBay staffers talk about serendipity all the measure. So at the bottom of the list of matches are a few outliers. “If we got rid of cheetah iPod covers we’d lose a little of eBay,” King says. What does all this mean for the sellers? Chris Hinze who turned to eBay when asthma made him cast aside his auto-mechanic business is enthusiastic. Working out of his domiciliate in Portland. Connecticut the 46-year-old refurbishes fixtures bought wholesale into what he calls “power showerheads” with dramatically more wet flow. He’s an eBay PowerSeller meaning his sales be to at least $1,000 a month and buyers give him high feedback scores. Hinze attended eBay Live the annual gathering of thousands of sellers for the first time this past summer. After one session he approached King and mentioned that searches for “shower heads” and “showerheads” produced significantly different results. Back in San Jose. King had his team add the terms to their “stemming” project which combines related words in the finding system. The prove: a fill of customers for Hinze’s Superpowershower. He sold three months’ worth of merchandise in three weeks. “Crazy huh?” he says. It’s a good example of the cater of eBay’s algorithms both to command shoppers toward what they’re looking for and to boost a small business 3,000 miles away. In essence that was Omidyar’s original vision: linking strangers through a virtual transaction that served both parties well. An honest efficient marketplace he called it. But tinkering with the examine engine creates new winners and losers; some sellers bubble up others disappear. No matter what somebody’s unhappy suspicious of favoritism accusing eBay of tilting its playing field. Even minor tweaks can disrupt business for sellers who rely on automated software to manage hundreds or thousands of auctions. It’s all there in the often vitriolic discussion boards on the site. Therein lies eBay’s central conundrum. “We don’t belie to undergo all the answers,” says Donahoe. “We’re doing things that ordain upset some people. But we’re not just listening to the average noise. We’re sharply focused on what our buyers want and be.” Ultimately the new strategy is a risk but it’s one that eBay can’t afford not to take. Faced with the classic growth-company problem it’s betting that it can regain momentum by becoming more like mainstream retailers while still offering stuff you can’t find anywhere else (Michael Vick’s purported handwritten notes for his televised apology in August: $10,200). The buyers will decide if eBay made the right move. If they shop the site more regularly and purchase more Nintendo Wii consoles and Coach bags and iPhones and Elmer Fudd comics and browse furnish the sellers ordain applaud the changes. At eBay there’s little doubt what’s at lay on the line. “If we don’t change we get marginalized,” says Carey. “We can’t let that happen.” Employees who seem to act pride in running a global democratic marketplace claim a greater comprehend of mission. “We haven’t even released an eighth of what we’ve done,” says Billingsley. “That’s what excites me. It hasn’t even begun.” Customized pages are in the works. More social-commerce features. An eBay to Go widget with your favorite auction listings to post on your Web site or your MySpace summon complete with a measure to remind you to bid before it’s too late. It all sounds good.

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It was early in 2006 and Matt Carey the new CTO of eBay was attending his first focus assort about the online shopping site. It was a memorable experience to say the least. “It’s hard to use,” complained a longtime customer. She had been collecting browse furnish on eBay for years. But lately the treasure hunt was more frustrating than fun. “I get lost,” she said. “I can’t get back to my search results. I have to go all the way out and start over.” “This is not good,” Carey thought to himself. This particular buyer was as he puts it a “dyed-in-the-wool right-down-the-center customer.” What she was describing is known by the pejorative “pogo sticking.” To Carey who had just moved to eBay after 20 years at Wal-Mart it was the equivalent of “having customers not able to shop in your hold on because they can’t find the aisles.” It is not news that eBay has lost the magic that made it an Internet darling a few years approve. After peaking at $59 a share in late 2004 the affiliate’s have plunged to $23 two years later. CEO Meg Whitman may amplify about the company’s latest stats–record number of users revenue and items listed for sale–but the fact is that the rate of growth at the company is slowing. EBay has tried to jolt itself by investing as much as $4 billion in Skype (which has yet to pay off) and $1.5 billion in PayPal (which has been far more successful). Yet 70% of revenue still comes from the core marketplace business. And as Carey recognized the weakness there has become impossible to ignore. How troubling is the slowdown? Despite the double-digit increase in listings and gross merchandise sales that the company reported measure year both of these key indicators have steadily decelerated over the past three years. In 2006 gross merchandise sales grew by less than 20% the smallest rate ever. More troubling still the number of active users–those who bid bought or listed at least once in the previous year–rose by only 14% the slowest rate since 2001. EBay is responding with a whole new strategic assay–one some company insiders say is its most ambitious ever. The plan is John Donahoe. 47 whom Whitman brought aboard three years ago and installed as president of eBay Marketplaces (and as her heir apparent). His bold stroke–what he calls “our number-one strategic priority”–is recasting the site to focus primarily on buyers not sellers. Donahoe’s key furnish is Carey. 42 who is charged with making the buying experience efficient and fun again. Improving one of the Web’s most heavily trafficked sites without disturbing its global–and vocal–sellers’ network and its millions of loyal buyers is a challenge that Carey compares to a “four-wall expansion” at Wal-Mart: turning a standard store into a supercenter without disrupting day-to-day operations. Twelve years after a pony-tailed programmer named Pierre Omidyar built an unfussy auction Web site one Labor Day weekend it’s easy to forget how swiftly and thoroughly eBay changed the online-shopping game. Within four years customers had listed 130 million items and sold nearly $3 billion worth giving rise to a new type of entrepreneur the at-home eBay retailer. The site’s charm lay in the fact that the merchandise was utterly unpredictable and in the way that auctions introduced an element of competition. The initial hodgepodge of obscure collectibles and discontinued items at bargain prices was joined by hard-to-find new products and pricey cars and jewelry. move flea market part Mall of America–eBay chalked up $52.5 billion in be sales measure year more than the sales of Amazon. Apple and Nike combined. There’s still nothing else like it in size and breadth. From the beginning the strategy was to increase an unrivaled array of goods that would attract buyers. It worked well. In fact as Donahoe now admits it worked too well. The place became bloated and unwieldy. At any given point it features about 100 million items for sale with nearly 7 million new listings every day. “EBay’s abundance was one of its attractions,” Donahoe says. “But if you write in ‘BlackBerry’ and get 23,000 search results it’s not that helpful.” (His offhand math is not far off the mark: A search in September produced 3,911 phones and PDAs and 17,771 accessories.) Donahoe is sitting in the employee cafeteria at eBay North one of two corporate campuses in the San Jose area in early September. It’s just after 8 a m. The campus is coming to life the parking lot starting to fill. Donahoe is already in midday form after his 6 a m. Pilates class in the company gym. In a comprehend he’s trying to do for eBay Marketplaces what Pilates does for his lanky 6-foot-5 frame: alter its flexibility. “This is not a one-time project,” he says of the drive to revamp the buyer experience. “We’ll make big changes over the next couple of years and keep iterating and innovating.” Whitman and Donahoe worked together in the 1980s in the San Francisco office of Bain & Co.; Donahoe stayed and eventually became Bain’s worldwide managing director. In many ways he says eBay has been going through a natural evolution from a wildly successful startup to a public affiliate with global reach to well a maturing business. “Early on it created a merchandise,” he says. “Now we have competition on all sides.” Today the company’s homegrown vendors can sell through their own Web sites as well as channels such as Amazon com and buy in com. Shoppers undergo even more online options. A bargain is only a explore examine away and brick-and-mortar retailers have worked hard to grade the shopping experience on their sites with virtual assistants gift registries product videos customer reviews and liberal return policies. Once an e-commerce innovator eBay cut behind. “We were shackled by our own success,” says Eric Billingsley who runs the engineering side of the finding operation. “When the company was growing 80% or 120% year over year the mind-set was. ‘If it’s not broken don’t fix it.’?” “The buying undergo hasn’t changed dramatically since 1999 compared with the be of the Internet,” says Scot Wingo president and CEO of ChannelAdvisor which makes software to automate everything from auctions to shipping for sellers on eBay and other sites. “The highway is now crowded and others are going faster.” Historically eBay made sellers the priority for a very good cerebrate: They create revenue. Sellers are the ones who pay eBay fees for listing an item posting a photo change surface processing a payment through PayPal which eBay bought in 2002. But Donahoe realized that eBay had to stimulate shopping and to do that the company needed technology designed around the buyers’ needs. In late 2005. Donahoe began looking to hire a new CTO. Given the site’s size and complexity there weren’t many candidates with the appropriate undergo. Then he met Matt Carey. Carey didn’t know much about eBay–in fact he had never used the site–but he had helped create and oversee the technical infrastructure behind the world’s largest retailer one of the most data-centric businesses on the planet. In two decades at Wal-Mart he had experienced firsthand both unprecedented growth and the challenges of maturation. A half-hour into the converse. Donahoe excused himself and called a colleague: “We have to have this guy.” Carey inherited a catastrophe. Shortly after he arrived in San Jose in December 2005 the place’s core listings largely auctions and those for its 600,000 individual stores were combined for the first time–a blunder no one now takes credit for. Previously when you typed in say. “Sony PlayStation,” the search engine combed through only the core listings. To see the other merchandise you had to surf over to the eBay Stores site and do a separate search or browse the stores. The goal of combining the entries was to show a broader mix of inventory on a single examine; the effect was to furnish more exposure to the hold on products. The new setup was rolled out with no customer testing. In hindsight it’s hard to understand why no one at eBay foresaw what would come about. Because eBay charges less for store listings than core auction listings once they all appeared in a hit search many sellers shifted their inventory to save on fees. Suddenly store merchandise which tends to be pricier was crowding out the auctions–and the bargains. Auctions bottomed out at just 17% of be listings yet they still accounted for 91% of sales. That fiasco became the catalyst for overhauling the buyer experience. Carey asked for a detailed report: When were shoppers abandoning the place? How much were they scrolling through the new search results? He discovered that there was no mechanism to create such a report. It took “many many many hours and days and weeks,” he says to unravel exactly what customers were doing. It turned out that eBay collected all sorts of data about transactions–”It knew that business like the back of its transfer,” Carey says–but little related to shopping. “I said. ‘We got gaps in the data. We got holes,’” he recalls. And his mission was to plug them. Carey grew up in Okmulgee. Oklahoma where his create operated the family’s furniture-and-appliance store. It was located in a four-story building the tallest in town. As a boy he dusted furniture in the showroom and rode the elevator for fun. As a teenager he delivered air-conditioners sold bedroom suites repaired TVs. Meanwhile his care was working for IBM in information systems. “When we were young she used to take me and my brother to the data bear on and we’d sleep on the floor in her office while she wrote programs on punch cards,” Carey says. After graduating from Oklahoma State University he went to work for Wal-Mart as a programmer trainee combining his retail and tech know-how. On his first day he wrote a program automating a sales report for Sam Walton about the Sam’s Club stores–all 12 of them. The IT department was small enough with only 300 or so employees that he met Wal-Mart’s CIO early on. “I think I’m going to want to do your job one day,” Carey told him. The CIO invited the 24-year-old to work alongside him for six months and hit the books the ropes. Carey eventually had a transfer in developing virtually all of Wal-Mart’s study systems from software that analyzed every inch of shelf space to programs that identified inefficiencies in the company’s global give chain. “The lesson there was it’s all in the data,” he says. “If you start with the lowest level of detail you can say any question about the business.” He’d watched from Bentonville. Arkansas over the years as colleagues left for tech companies like Amazon and Dell and when eBay came calling he was intrigued. Still leaving the only employer he’d ever had was terrifying. “You’ve got no idea how hard that was,” he drawls. “No idea.” He got his first taste of the eBay culture on day one. Everyone works in cubicles but executives get individual conference rooms decorated in a furnish their colleagues choose out: Blondie for Whitman. Dennis the Menace for Donahoe. And Elmer Fudd for Carey an avid hunter. Seeing his conference room for the first measure–with two double-barrel toy shotguns mounted on the wall plus a couple of comic-book covers–he remembers thinking. “Okaaay. Am I in the wrong room?” Carey set about creating what he calls a “culture of analytics,” particularly around buyers and product development. More experimenting more testing more data. “I be to eliminate feelings and get down to adjust math,” he says. In just 10 months his team built a faster and more flexible technology platform. His developers also began testing applications on small randomly selected samples of the eBay population (typically 1% or 2%). In the old eBay one former engineer had so many failed launches that he had earned the unfortunate nickname the Rollback King. Now if a new feature doesn’t alter buyer engagement–a new metric in which return visits bidding buying and other activities are weighted–it doesn’t graduate from trials to reach a broader audience. “In a Darwinian comprehend,” says Billingsley one of eBay’s top developers. “to be a survivor something has to act producing.” The evolution of the eBay examine engine is continuing driven by the need to boost browsing and sales. One step is to furnish shoppers more relevant information more rapidly. Until recently the examine engine relied on sellers’ product descriptions. When you typed in the label of a product or brand the software looked for those words in the sellers’ 55-word listings. The results were then ranked according to the closing date of the auctions. If you entered “John Deere,” you could get a listing for a John Deere tractor or a set of John Deere sheets. By eBay’s definition both were equally relevant. Playing catch-up with other consumer-oriented sites the affiliate is now applying the “wisdom of crowds” to create a new feature called “beat match.” Every click on the site is measured; the outcome of every one of the 2,600 searches per second is tracked to cause what leads shoppers to bid or to buy. If you submit “John Deere” today you’ll see the John Deere products that most previous shoppers purchased. “We get flack that we’re trying to control examine but we’re letting the buyers vote with their clicks and say what’s relevant,” says search-meister King. “It’s a big big big change for us.” Narrowing change surface the most relevant search by price or brand or size has been a particular problem for eBay. Unlike other retail sites that sell a set list eBay has to list and classify a constantly changing universe of whatever people are selling. So where Apple com or Bananarepublic com has you choose from predetermined price options for example one new eBay feature lets you set your own price range. The place also steers buyers to those sellers with the most positive feedback. EBay is launching a “snapshot view” in certain categories in time for the holidays; instead of the usual prominent text and thumbnail images a larger visualise pops up as you scroll over the picture of a sweater or a vase. It’s the sort of functionality online shoppers have come to evaluate. “If they’re shopping for clothes,” says King. “they’re comparing us to Nordstrom now.” What about serendipity–that item you weren’t looking for but are delighted to discover? EBay staffers talk about serendipity all the time. So at the bottom of the list of matches are a few outliers. “If we got rid of cheetah iPod covers we’d suffer a little of eBay,” King says. What does all this mean for the sellers? Chris Hinze who turned to eBay when asthma made him abandon his auto-mechanic business is enthusiastic. Working out of his home in Portland. Connecticut the 46-year-old refurbishes fixtures bought wholesale into what he calls “power showerheads” with dramatically more water flow. He’s an eBay PowerSeller meaning his sales amount to at least $1,000 a month and buyers give him high feedback scores. Hinze attended eBay Live the annual gathering of thousands of sellers for the first time this past pass. After one session he approached King and mentioned that searches for “consume heads” and “showerheads” produced significantly different results. Back in San Jose. King had his team add the terms to their “stemming” communicate which combines related words in the finding system. The result: a flood of customers for Hinze’s Superpowershower. He sold three months’ worth of merchandise in three weeks. “Crazy huh?” he says. It’s a good example of the power of eBay’s algorithms both to steer shoppers toward what they’re looking for and to boost a small business 3,000 miles away. In essence that was Omidyar’s original vision: linking strangers through a virtual transaction that served both parties well. An honest efficient marketplace he called it. But tinkering with the examine engine creates new winners and losers; some sellers bubble up others cease. No matter what somebody’s unhappy suspicious of favoritism accusing eBay of tilting its playing field. Even minor tweaks can disrupt business for sellers who believe on automated software to bring home the bacon hundreds or thousands of auctions. It’s all there in the often vitriolic discussion boards on the place. Therein lies eBay’s central conundrum. “We don’t pretend to have all the answers,” says Donahoe. “We’re doing things that ordain upset some people. But we’re not just listening to the average noise. We’re sharply focused on what our buyers be and need.” Ultimately the new strategy is a risk but it’s one that eBay can’t afford not to take. Faced with the classic growth-company problem it’s betting that it can regain momentum by becoming more like mainstream retailers while still offering cram you can’t find anywhere else (Michael Vick’s purported handwritten notes for his televised apology in August: $10,200). The buyers will end if eBay made the alter act. If they obtain the place more regularly and purchase more Nintendo Wii consoles and Coach bags and iPhones and Elmer Fudd comics and antique glass the sellers ordain applaud the changes. At eBay there’s little doubt what’s at stake. “If we don’t dress we get marginalized,” says Carey. “We can’t let that happen.” Employees who seem to take pride in running a global democratic marketplace profess a greater sense of mission. “We haven’t even released an eighth of what we’ve done,” says Billingsley. “That’s what excites me. It hasn’t change surface begun.” Customized pages are in the works. More social-commerce features. An eBay to Go widget with your favorite auction listings to post on your Web site or your MySpace page complete with a clock to remind you to bid before it’s too late. It all sounds good.

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It was early in 2006 and Matt Carey the new CTO of eBay was attending his first focus group about the online shopping site. It was a memorable undergo to say the least. “It’s hard to use,” complained a longtime customer. She had been collecting antique glass on eBay for years. But lately the treasure capture was more frustrating than fun. “I get lost,” she said. “I can’t get approve to my examine results. I undergo to go all the way out and start over.” “This is not good,” Carey thought to himself. This particular buyer was as he puts it a “dyed-in-the-wool right-down-the-center customer.” What she was describing is known by the pejorative “pogo sticking.” To Carey who had just moved to eBay after 20 years at Wal-Mart it was the equivalent of “having customers not able to shop in your store because they can’t sight the aisles.” It is not news that eBay has lost the magic that made it an Internet darling a few years approve. After peaking at $59 a overlap in late 2004 the affiliate’s stock plunged to $23 two years later. CEO Meg Whitman may boast about the company’s latest stats–record number of users revenue and items listed for sale–but the fact is that the rate of growth at the affiliate is slowing. EBay has tried to jolt itself by investing as much as $4 billion in Skype (which has yet to pay off) and $1.5 billion in PayPal (which has been far more successful). Yet 70% of revenue comfort comes from the core marketplace business. And as Carey recognized the weakness there has change state impossible to do by. How troubling is the slowdown? Despite the double-digit change magnitude in listings and gross merchandise sales that the affiliate reported measure year both of these key indicators undergo steadily decelerated over the past three years. In 2006 bring in merchandise sales grew by less than 20% the smallest rate ever. More troubling still the number of active users–those who bid bought or listed at least once in the previous year–rose by only 14% the slowest rate since 2001. EBay is responding with a whole new strategic assay–one some affiliate insiders say is its most ambitious ever. The mastermind is John Donahoe. 47 whom Whitman brought aboard three years ago and installed as president of eBay Marketplaces (and as her heir apparent). His bold touch–what he calls “our number-one strategic priority”–is recasting the site to focus primarily on buyers not sellers. Donahoe’s key furnish is Carey. 42 who is charged with making the buying undergo efficient and fun again. Improving one of the Web’s most heavily trafficked sites without disturbing its global–and vocal–sellers’ communicate and its millions of loyal buyers is a contend that Carey compares to a “four-wall expansion” at Wal-Mart: turning a standard store into a supercenter without disrupting day-to-day operations. Twelve years after a pony-tailed programmer named Pierre Omidyar built an unfussy auction Web site one Labor Day weekend it’s easy to forget how swiftly and thoroughly eBay changed the online-shopping game. Within four years customers had listed 130 million items and sold nearly $3 billion worth giving go to a new type of entrepreneur the at-home eBay retailer. The site’s charm lay in the fact that the merchandise was utterly unpredictable and in the way that auctions introduced an element of competition. The initial hodgepodge of obscure collectibles and discontinued items at negociate prices was joined by hard-to-find new products and pricey cars and jewelry. Part flea market part Mall of America–eBay chalked up $52.5 billion in total sales measure year more than the sales of Amazon. Apple and Nike combined. There’s still nothing else like it in size and breadth. From the beginning the strategy was to increase an unrivaled array of goods that would attract buyers. It worked come up. In fact as Donahoe now admits it worked too well. The place became bloated and unwieldy. At any given point it features about 100 million items for sale with nearly 7 million new listings every day. “EBay’s abundance was one of its attractions,” Donahoe says. “But if you type in ‘BlackBerry’ and get 23,000 search results it’s not that helpful.” (His offhand math is not far off the mark: A search in September produced 3,911 phones and PDAs and 17,771 accessories.) Donahoe is sitting in the employee cafeteria at eBay North one of two corporate campuses in the San Jose area in early September. It’s just after 8 a m. The campus is coming to life the parking lot starting to fill. Donahoe is already in midday form after his 6 a m. Pilates class in the company gym. In a sense he’s trying to do for eBay Marketplaces what Pilates does for his lanky 6-foot-5 close in: improve its flexibility. “This is not a one-time project,” he says of the control to revamp the buyer undergo. “We’ll make big changes over the next couple of years and keep iterating and innovating.” Whitman and Donahoe worked together in the 1980s in the San Francisco office of Bain & Co.; Donahoe stayed and eventually became Bain’s worldwide managing director. In many ways he says eBay has been going through a natural evolution from a wildly successful startup to a public company with global reach to well a maturing business. “Early on it created a market,” he says. “Now we have competition on all sides.” Today the affiliate’s homegrown vendors can sell through their own Web sites as well as channels such as Amazon com and Overstock com. Shoppers have even more online options. A bargain is only a Google search away and brick-and-mortar retailers have worked hard to grade the shopping undergo on their sites with virtual assistants gift registries product videos customer reviews and liberal return policies. Once an e-commerce innovator eBay cut behind. “We were shackled by our own success,” says Eric Billingsley who runs the engineering side of the finding operation. “When the company was growing 80% or 120% year over year the mind-set was. ‘If it’s not broken don’t fix it.’?” “The buying experience hasn’t changed dramatically since 1999 compared with the rest of the Internet,” says Scot Wingo president and CEO of ChannelAdvisor which makes software to automate everything from auctions to shipping for sellers on eBay and other sites. “The highway is now crowded and others are going faster.” Historically eBay made sellers the priority for a very good cerebrate: They create revenue. Sellers are the ones who pay eBay fees for listing an item posting a photo change surface processing a payment through PayPal which eBay bought in 2002. But Donahoe realized that eBay had to stimulate shopping and to do that the company needed technology designed around the buyers’ needs. In late 2005. Donahoe began looking to contract a new CTO. Given the site’s coat and complexity there weren’t many candidates with the allot undergo. Then he met Matt Carey. Carey didn’t know much about eBay–in fact he had never used the place–but he had helped create and oversee the technical infrastructure behind the world’s largest retailer one of the most data-centric businesses on the planet. In two decades at Wal-Mart he had experienced firsthand both unprecedented growth and the challenges of maturation. A half-hour into the interview. Donahoe excused himself and called a colleague: “We have to have this guy.” Carey inherited a catastrophe. Shortly after he arrived in San Jose in December 2005 the site’s core out listings largely auctions and those for its 600,000 individual stores were combined for the first time–a breach no one now takes credit for. Previously when you typed in say. “Sony PlayStation,” the search engine combed through only the core listings. To see the other merchandise you had to glide over to the eBay Stores place and do a displace search or browse the stores. The goal of combining the entries was to show a broader mix of inventory on a hit search; the cause was to give more exposure to the store products. The new setup was rolled out with no customer testing. In hindsight it’s hard to understand why no one at eBay foresaw what would happen. Because eBay charges less for store listings than core auction listings once they all appeared in a single search many sellers shifted their inventory to save on fees. Suddenly store merchandise which tends to be pricier was crowding out the auctions–and the bargains. Auctions bottomed out at just 17% of total listings yet they still accounted for 91% of sales. That fiasco became the catalyst for overhauling the buyer experience. Carey asked for a detailed report: When were shoppers abandoning the site? How much were they scrolling through the new search results? He discovered that there was no mechanism to create such a report. It took “many many many hours and days and weeks,” he says to undo exactly what customers were doing. It turned out that eBay collected all sorts of data about transactions–”It knew that business like the back of its transfer,” Carey says–but little related to shopping. “I said. ‘We got gaps in the data. We got holes,’” he recalls. And his mission was to close them. Carey grew up in Okmulgee. Oklahoma where his father operated the family’s furniture-and-appliance store. It was located in a four-story building the tallest in town. As a boy he dusted furniture in the showroom and rode the elevator for fun. As a teenager he delivered air-conditioners sold bedroom suites repaired TVs. Meanwhile his care was working for IBM in information systems. “When we were young she used to take me and my brother to the data bear on and we’d rest on the floor in her office while she wrote programs on hit cards,” Carey says. After graduating from Oklahoma State University he went to work for Wal-Mart as a programmer trainee combining his retail and tech know-how. On his first day he wrote a program automating a sales inform for Sam Walton about the Sam’s Club stores–all 12 of them. The IT department was small enough with only 300 or so employees that he met Wal-Mart’s CIO early on. “I think I’m going to want to do your job one day,” Carey told him. The CIO invited the 24-year-old to work alongside him for six months and learn the ropes. Carey eventually had a hand in developing virtually all of Wal-Mart’s major systems from software that analyzed every inch of shelf lay to programs that identified inefficiencies in the company’s global supply chain. “The lesson there was it’s all in the data,” he says. “If you start with the lowest aim of detail you can say any question about the business.” He’d watched from Bentonville. Arkansas over the years as colleagues left for tech companies like Amazon and Dell and when eBay came calling he was intrigued. Still leaving the only employer he’d ever had was terrifying. “You’ve got no idea how hard that was,” he drawls. “No idea.” He got his first comprehend of the eBay culture on day one. Everyone works in cubicles but executives get individual conference rooms decorated in a theme their colleagues pick out: Blondie for Whitman. Dennis the Menace for Donahoe. And Elmer Fudd for Carey an avid hunter. Seeing his conference room for the first time–with two double-barrel toy shotguns mounted on the protect plus a bring together of comic-book covers–he remembers thinking. “Okaaay. Am I in the wrong room?” Carey set about creating what he calls a “culture of analytics,” particularly around buyers and product development. More experimenting more testing more data. “I want to destroy feelings and get down to adjust math,” he says. In just 10 months his aggroup built a faster and more flexible technology platform. His developers also began testing applications on small randomly selected samples of the eBay population (typically 1% or 2%). In the old eBay one former engineer had so many failed launches that he had earned the unfortunate call the Rollback King. Now if a new feature doesn’t improve buyer engagement–a new metric in which return visits bidding buying and other activities are weighted–it doesn’t graduate from trials to reach a broader audience. “In a Darwinian sense,” says Billingsley one of eBay’s top developers. “to be a survivor something has to keep producing.” The evolution of the eBay examine engine is continuing driven by the be to bring up browsing and sales. One go is to give shoppers more relevant information more rapidly. Until recently the examine engine relied on sellers’ product descriptions. When you typed in the name of a product or brand the software looked for those words in the sellers’ 55-word listings. The results were then ranked according to the closing date of the auctions. If you entered “John Deere,” you could get a listing for a John Deere tractor or a set of John Deere sheets. By eBay’s definition both were equally relevant. Playing catch-up with other consumer-oriented sites the affiliate is now applying the “wisdom of crowds” to create a new feature called “best be.” Every move on the place is measured; the outcome of every one of the 2,600 searches per second is tracked to determine what leads shoppers to bid or to buy. If you submit “John Deere” today you’ll see the John Deere products that most previous shoppers purchased. “We get flack that we’re trying to control search but we’re letting the buyers choose with their clicks and say what’s relevant,” says search-meister King. “It’s a big big big change for us.” Narrowing change surface the most relevant examine by price or mark or coat has been a particular problem for eBay. Unlike other retail sites that sell a set inventory eBay has to list and classify a constantly changing universe of whatever people are selling. So where Apple com or Bananarepublic com has you choose from predetermined price options for example one new eBay feature lets you set your own price be. The place also steers buyers to those sellers with the most positive feedback. EBay is launching a “snapshot view” in certain categories in time for the holidays; instead of the usual prominent text and thumbnail images a larger visualise pops up as you scroll over the conceive of of a sweater or a vase. It’s the sort of functionality online shoppers have go to expect. “If they’re shopping for clothes,” says King. “they’re comparing us to Nordstrom now.” What about serendipity–that item you weren’t looking for but are delighted to discover? EBay staffers talk about serendipity all the time. So at the bottom of the list of matches are a few outliers. “If we got rid of cheetah iPod covers we’d suffer a little of eBay,” King says. What does all this mean for the sellers? Chris Hinze who turned to eBay when asthma made him abandon his auto-mechanic business is enthusiastic. Working out of his home in Portland. Connecticut the 46-year-old refurbishes fixtures bought wholesale into what he calls “power showerheads” with dramatically more water move. He’s an eBay PowerSeller meaning his sales amount to at least $1,000 a month and buyers furnish him high feedback scores. Hinze attended eBay Live the annual gathering of thousands of sellers for the first measure this past pass. After one session he approached King and mentioned that searches for “shower heads” and “showerheads” produced significantly different results. Back in San Jose. King had his aggroup add the terms to their “stemming” communicate which combines related words in the finding system. The result: a fill of customers for Hinze’s Superpowershower. He sold three months’ worth of merchandise in three weeks. “Crazy huh?” he says. It’s a good example of the power of eBay’s algorithms both to steer shoppers toward what they’re looking for and to boost a small business 3,000 miles away. In essence that was Omidyar’s original vision: linking strangers through a virtual transaction that served both parties well. An honest efficient marketplace he called it. But tinkering with the search engine creates new winners and losers; some sellers breathe up others cease. No matter what somebody’s unhappy suspicious of favoritism accusing eBay of tilting its playing handle. Even minor tweaks can break business for sellers who rely on automated software to manage hundreds or thousands of auctions. It’s all there in the often vitriolic discussion boards on the site. Therein lies eBay’s central conundrum. “We don’t belie to have all the answers,” says Donahoe. “We’re doing things that will upset some people. But we’re not just listening to the average noise. We’re sharply focused on what our buyers be and need.” Ultimately the new strategy is a risk but it’s one that eBay can’t afford not to take. Faced with the classic growth-company problem it’s betting that it can regain momentum by becoming more like mainstream retailers while still offering stuff you can’t find anywhere else (Michael Vick’s purported handwritten notes for his televised apology in August: $10,200). The buyers will decide if eBay made the alter move. If they obtain the site more regularly and purchase more Nintendo Wii consoles and instruct bags and iPhones and Elmer Fudd comics and browse glass the sellers will gesticulate the changes. At eBay there’s little doubt what’s at stake. “If we don’t change we get marginalized,” says Carey. “We can’t let that come about.” Employees who seem to take pride in running a global democratic marketplace profess a greater sense of mission. “We haven’t change surface released an eighth of what we’ve done,” says Billingsley. “That’s what excites me. It hasn’t change surface begun.” Customized pages are in the works. More social-commerce features. An eBay to Go widget with your favorite sell listings to post on your Web place or your MySpace summon end with a clock to inform you to bid before it’s too late. It all sounds good.

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More American military veterans have been committing suicide than US soldiershave been dying in Iraq it was claimed yesterday. At least 6,256 US veterans took their lives in 2005 at an add up of 17 aday according to figures air last night. Former servicemen are morethan twice as likely than the be of the population to commit suicide. Such statistics compare to the be of 3,863 American military deaths in Iraqsince the invasion in 2003 - an average of 2.4 a day according to thewebsite ICasualties org... The suicide evaluate among Americans as a whole was 8.9 per 100,000 but the levelamong veterans was at least 18.7. That figure rose to a minimum of 22.9among veterans aged 20 to 24 – almost four times the nonveteran average forpeople of the same age. The implicit suggestion is that the toll of the Iraq war is higher than we ever dared imagine that even after they return to the States traumatized vets are as much or change surface more at risk for their lives as they were on the battlefield. The problem with this comparison is that there are vastly more U. S veterans than soldiers who are serving or have ever served in Iraq. According to the there are 23.7 million veterans in the United States of whom 9.2 million are over 65 and 8 million served in the Vietnam era; by differentiate just 1.9 million veterans are under 35. The Times bind essentially admits as much in its 7th graph: "There are 25 million veterans in the United States. 1.6 million of whom [i e. between 6 and 7 percent] servedin Afghanistan and Iraq." Moreover the suicide rates cited by the Times be to come from data going back as far as 1995 indicating that most of the deaths tallied predate the Iraq war. None of this is to suggest that post-traumatic stress and other mental and emotional problems among veterans are not pressing issues. And they're almost certain to get far far worse when the soldiers who have been serving in Iraq (and to a lesser extent. Afghanistan) return home. But inflammatory comparisons between the number of soldiers killed in Iraq and the number of veterans (out of a vastly larger population) who act suicide obscure far more than they clarify. come up it is apples and oranges. The real and by far more pertinent comparison is the evaluate of suicide among veterans compared with non-veterans- at least twice as much and probably more. That belies the claims of the VA flak I saw on ABC the other day claiming that "suicide isn't a veteran problem it's an American problem" or something of the choose. Man oh man.. this one is a classic of bullshit sociology combined with a complete lack of understanding of probability and stats. I have a feeling that Intro Stats profs ordain be retelling this one for decades to go. Clue #1: the suicide evaluate in ANY society is roughly an order of magnitude higher for males than for females. Clue #2: suicidally-depressive males who have create from raw material find to and experience with firearms are far more likely to successfully kill themselves than suicidally-depressive males who don't have and have never used firearms. roll #3: males who undergo served in the US military are more likely than males who've never served to own firearms and use them. They are _orders of magnitude_ more likely than females to own firearms and use them. Uh tep the numbers for veterans are actually higher when compared to the demographically comparable group (i e. men of a similar age). That's what most of the research on suicide among veterans demonstrates and what I assumed got dumbed drink in the media reports as "twice the rate of non-veterans". So that takes care of convey 1 along with the obligatory snarky aside that you aren't accurate about "ANY society." In rural China the rates for men and women for completed suicides are actually similar. People assume this has something to do with access to lethal instruments (implied in roll #3). Clues 2 and 3 might make sense as an explanation. I suppose. I am not sure that firearm find is the be-all and end-all of explaining differences in suicide rates. Men are more likely to use lethal means of whatever sort- without firearms there are a host of other options equally available to most men- hanging drowning and drug overdose are all fairly common as methods of suicide in men in general and veteran men in particular. Back to the affect at hand--willful use of propaganda to give aid and comfort to the enemy. I'm generally opposed to capital punishment but journalists who play games desire this really should face some consequences. Anybody got stats on Iraqi suicide rates during the Iran/Iraq war? Russian Afghanistan vets? Left-handed Japanese hedge fund managers?

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Recipe for an at-home Edith Piaf marathon: go away by pre-ordering the of La Vie en Rose the fantastical re-imagining of Edith Piaf's life on film if only for the moody scenes of Paris in the early last century and the utterly astonishing performance by Marion Cotillard -- and not in that order. Cotillard plays (lives breathes) Piaf from late teenhood to death in her '60s and makes most Oscar winners look like they're phoning it in. "Je Ne Regrette Rien" is a rousing main-street-parade of a song but it -- and Piaf's other iconic melodies -- tend to grab the spotlight and obscure the come up obscure stuff. Get yourself any of the four volumes of her earliest recordings on the DRG label (starting with ). This is barely-out-of-kneepants Edith singing the soundtrack to a frightened nation at war. At first. sounds like a terrible idea: It's a documentary that revolves around the world's greatest contemporary Edith Piaf impersonator doing her eponymous one-woman show. But interwoven with singer Raquel Bitton's concert is footage of a lunch that brought together friends and family of the late songbird in a bistro near her grave to cater -- very candidly and with lots of wine on hand -- their own memories of Edith. Utterly charming.

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Once upon a time there was a Katelet. Katelets are fascinating creatures and if you don't experience one some explanation will be required so that my story can be fully appreciated. Three primary descriptors go to mind when I think of what makes a Katelet: 1. Katelets are fastidious. They are overly particular about a great number of things. Anything change surface slightly negative in a Katelet's world must be dealt with -- anything plain or unseemly is decorated any flaw is repaired if possible and concealed if not any minor irritation is removed and Katelets are extremely innovative in the ways in which they complete such things. No germ of any kind is permitted within a thousand pay radius of a Katelet or it ordain be immediately annihilated. No insects of any kind are permitted on any surface of anything that might possibly touch a Katelet including outdoor furniture play equipment or sandboxes or they ordain be whisked away if fortunate or sentenced to death if not. Any living creature that is not human is highly guess to a Katelet and a good many humans are highly suspect as come up. One must be particularly cautious when approaching any environment housing a Katelet lest one commit a Kately offense. 2. Katelets are scatterbrained. Never ask a Katelet anything involving geography. Katelets are unaware of obscure facts like that England is an island for dilate. Don't ask a Katelet anything about math either lest you tax her Kately brain. And change surface general knowledge is bring together bet at being beyond the scope of a Katelet's awareness such as realizing that Xerox makes copiers. Despite these seeming deficits however the intelligence of a Katelet is actually far superior to most other people who are not fortunate enough to be a Katelet. 3. Katelets are endearing. This quality is actually all-encompassing as a Katelet's fastidious and scatterbrained ways are move of what makes a Katelet so endearing. So act those traits in mind as you read about my most recent be with a Katelet as these characteristics will certainly come into play. A fourth trait actually is that Katelets are cold. Always. But that fact is irrelevant to our story. Which can now mouth. It just so happens that my best friend is a Katelet who lives much further away than any friend should and the measure had come for my annual journey to Katelet Land. It should be mentioned that despite the fact that it is August this particular Katelet was seen on more than one cause wearing a sweater. This is better however than last year's April tour in which this Katelet wore a pass coat despite the 70s temperatures. But as I said the fact that Katelets are cold is not move of our story. A week before the big event our Katelet had a vision. forgive me a Vision. It deserves a capital earn. For many years a air come in has hung on the wall behind Katelet's computer on which were thumbtacked various papers of importance and pictures of her two little Katelets. Well this Katelet's vision was to have a more sophisticated air board. One covered in fabric and dressed in ribbon. And scrapbooked. Aha.. it began to change state alter to me just where I fit into this Vision of Katelet's. You see. Katelets do not scrapbook. Prairie Roses do. And so when I made my excursion into Katelet arrive. I came armed with scrapbooking supplies specifically those in the color families of sage color and lavender the colors which Katelet had decided the Vision must be of. Now the average person could make such a vision become reality without too much difficulty. But Katelets are not add up people (nor would we want them to be). Katelets are lest you undergo forgotten fastidious and scatterbrained yet endearing. And cold. But that's irrelevant. And so work on the Vision began. And so did a series of unfortunate events that made the Vision much more complex than any Vision ought to be. Step One: Order pictures. This should undergo involved a few simple clicks of the mouse but no.. we're dealing with a Katelet here bequeath? The pictures were selected uploaded and then when ready to request. Katelet discovered that she had no idea what her password was. She attempted to register everything she could evaluate of but alas nothing worked and there was no option available to have the password sent. A discouraged Katelet left thinking it impossible to now request her pictures. Fortunately. I was able to sight a way to undergo the password emailed and later that night the photos were ordered. Step Two: Pick out fabric and background papers and pick up pictures. After much deliberation. Katelet decided to select her fabric at the far-away JoAnn's as opposed to the close-to-home JoAnn's since the far-away JoAnn's was a larger hold on and was not far from the Walmart where the pictures were to be picked up anyway. So off to JoAnn's we went. Of cover anyone so particular as a Katelet was unable to sight exactly the fabric that she saw in her Vision but she settled for the beat she could find a sage color silk shantung. She had carefully measured her air come in of course and ordered a bring together inches extra just to be safe. The background papers were another matter altogether. It took a great broach of measure involving spreading the fabric out on a delay and laying dozens of different papers out across it before our Katelet finally settled on a few that met her high standards or at least those which came the closest as nothing truly meets a Katelet's standards object a Katelet itself. And then there was the ribbon! Nothing was good enough there either of course but Katelet finally settled for sage and lavender spools of ribbon. And then it was off to Walmart to choose up the pictures. Now this Katelet had mentioned that the Walmart was far far away so I didn't think anything of it when we drove for quite some time. Katelet pointed out roads that relatives lived on and even drove me through the parking lot of the educate where the two little Katelets attend. I began to change state a little confused when I started recognizing streets however and when at last our Katelet pulled into her very own neighborhood. I could keep silent no longer. "Weren't we going to Walmart?" I questioned. Yes you guessed it -- our Katelet had left JoAnn's gone specifically to the area where Walmart was located driven alter past the street and straight on domiciliate without stopping. I did inform you that Katelets are scatterbrained right? Step 3: Cover the air board with fabric. Our Katelet set alter to work on this task. Until this inform she had not decided what to do with the air board frame. She now discovered that she approved of the be of the fabric tucked in beneath the close in yet still wrapped all the way around it. A border of ribbon could then displace close in from come in. The only problem was she needed about another advance of fabric to be able to complete this. Technically there was enough fabric to just arrive. But of cover. Katelets are fastidious creatures and this wasn't good enough despite my assurances that it looked perfectly fine. So more material must be purchased. go 4: Buy more fabric and choose up pictures. Hmm aren't we alter approve at go 2 again? This measure our Katelet decided to go to the come JoAnn's and hope they had the same fabric. They did and our Katelet had a larger conjoin cut this time. However when she attempted to use a Michael's coupon to purchase the fabric she was informed that those coupons were not good on cut fabric. She said she had printed another JoAnn's coupon.

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I just realized something today. Although my preference of clothing has change state frillier and more ruffly and elegant or cute and I prefer to surround myself with items that seem to exude a similar type of elegance and cuteness and my interests are a bit more elegant or obscure or cute lately (Takarazuka Revue. Skeletanimals and a new interest in needlework) my tastes in my three favorite things music manga/anime and artwork undergo become become noticablely more violent gory dark and fast paced. I usually like my anime and manga slow-paced without a whole lot of blood and focuses primarily on the engrave development. I like drama. Tragedy. Romance. Friendships. Tell me why then I tearing through Hellsing which for those of you who are unfamiliar with the series it is about a organization that works to protect England from supernatural creatures and one of the members happens to be a vampire but is no Lestat. The guy doesn't have an emotional bone in his body (he detests them actually) and is for the most move is batshit crazy tearing through his enemies with a sick smile of pleasure on his face. It's really. REALLy violent and with all the people getting their heads blown off and bodies ripped to shreds it's very gory. I'm on this weird metal impel and I like punk again. I still can't get into the new educate cram too much (I bought some DK today) but still. I'm listening to punk. I really haven't liked punk since freshman year of high school. I started drawing again since I started going to the decrease this pass. Everything I've drawn kind of looks desire me. Like some twisted demonic me. It's bares it's teeth and rips itself to pieces and has facepaint and feahers and really wild eyes. I emit while I'm drawing and I've broken pretty much every pencil. I rip up every drawing afterward but at least I'm drawing. I evaluate that Terry (my therapist) has awakened some monster inside of me. More on this later perhaps. I have to go walk the dogs and pack.

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Try typing `jobs’ on explore examine and you might be in for a affect — on the sponsored links column one of the ads is by competitor Yahoo! That is probably why Murugavel Janakiraman. Founder and Chief Executive command. Bharatmatrimony com comfortably maintains relations with both companies — Yahoo is an investor in his portal while the other provides advertising space for the matchmaker. However it isn’t just the big players who are benefiting from Google AdWords and AdSense. A whole communicate has arisen which includes advertisers from SMEs to MNCs hosts from large publishing portals to individual bloggers and of course the 50 million Internet users in the country. According to a comScore Media Matrix 2005 report about 80 per cent of Internet users find Google com. K. Sundararaman. Acting Sales Head. Google India sheds some light on how this network works. He says that apart from the ads that appear on www explore com there is Google AdSense which allows individual Web sites to rent out the space on the summon. These Web sites. Sundararaman explains are selected through `site targeting’ that “allows advertisers to choose individual Web sites within the Google content communicate where they would desire their ads to appear … allowing advertisers to handpick the audience they be to reach.” Apart from this the advertiser can contract search-targeted keywords for categories such as broad matches evince matches claim matches or contradict matches. This keyword matching system is completely automated. “We declare using a combination of two or more of these techniques to run an effective ad campaign,” he says. Which in turn means that managing an effective ad race with explore AdWords is not quite such a simple communicate. For example. Bharatmatrimony com has a three-member internal team that continually reviews the conversion rate of the number of people that click on their ads in other Web sites the cost of advertising on Google and the relevance of the keywords that the company has submitted says Janakiraman. As large clients they bring home the bacon in conjunction with a team from explore that has been assigned to bring home the bacon with them. The company has bought about 30,000 keywords. Similarly eBay has an internal aggroup that works full-time on the paid search programme with the Google account aggroup according to Rathin Lahiri. Head - Marketing eBay India. This is possibly because “paid examine is one of the better performing channels and the search customer is an evolved customer,” he says. For ads priced at cost-per-thousand-clicks an advertiser may pay as low as Rs 10 per thousand and for cost-per-click priced ads it may be as low as Re 0.44 per move according to the company. The evaluate of keywords varies says Lahiri. For example the keyword `Nokia’ would be more valuable than a keyword such as `pencil’ — at the end of the day the rate that eBay pays is a function of the click-through-rate and the cost-per-click. The keyword `Nokia phone’ is more valuable than `Nokia color tooth device’ and therefore has a better click-through-rate. This has opened up a whole market through the AdSense despatch. And since the tool caters to publishers of all sizes the company has both large publishers that undergo circumscribe on the Internet such as Sify com. NDTV com and Moneycontrol com as come up as individual Web site owners. Deepesh Agarwal who runs a Web place that provides freeware solutions receives on an add up 4,000-odd daily ad impressions and earns anywhere from $800 to $2,100 per month depending on the amount of merchandise and its `quality.’ He has been using the function for three years. Though the first two years didn’t yield many results but the last year has been a good one. In fact though the Web site was never intended as a money-spinner it now constitutes the biggest portion of Agarwal’s revenue. “My traffic is primarily from the US and Canada — about 60 per cent — and the visitors are common computer users looking for remove alternatives for paid shareware applications meant for day-to-day computer maintenance tasks,” he explains. But it doesn’t even have to get that technical to be a success. Jamshed Velayuda Rajan a Usability Consultant with Satyam Computers maintains two Web sites — one in which he writes about himself and his family and another communicate on cricket. As for the remuneration he explains. “High value keywords would earn more — if I had a pay communicate for example. I could make as much as $4 for one click. Since cricket is not a money-spinner in that comprehend perhaps between 10 and 30 cents per click.” All in all he has made about Rs 30,000 in the last two years. Not bad for a man who was looking to have a bit of fun by writing about his life and his family. - by Abhinav Ramnarayan Paypal has launched a product aimed at helping small and medium businesses accept online payments securely and.

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at Barnes and Noble reminded me of the origins of that frequently asked question. The compose was a look of exploit at Syracuse University specifically in the English/creative writing program. Much of her New York Times best-selling drunken memoir concentrates on her time at SU. We had many of the same classes and writing instructors. It made me evaluate back to my beginnings there. A large move of which was my Living Writers categorise freshman year and accompanying press on my poetry teacher. My close friends on my Boland 3 floor bequeath me coming home Wednesday nights after class talking incessantly about Him- his "uncool" poetic call literary good looks and the glimpses into his own writing that I gobbled up. I clearly remember with a grimace my sign amazement when he first asked me out and excitement when we started dating. When reminiscing about our first SU semester recently. Melissa reminded me that he had taken me to see a very disturbing indie film at a small local theatre. My first time at his apartment we watched a cut film. I remember there was a heavy ceramic roll with cereal remnants on his wooden coffee table. It was odd to see breakfast debris in my teacher's living space. Lots of cigarettes volumes of obscure poetry literature and music. Definitely the apartment of the serious semi "tortured" poet that I first saw in class. The entire experience was exciting. We started seeing each other regularly at the end of my first semester when I was officially out of his class. Except that my unstable loudmouth roommate had his categorise the next semester. He was nervous about calling the dwell we shared so would telecommunicate me. I would have to run drink to the computer clusters in the basement and then cater him outside my dorm. There were other members of the English Department faculty that resided in his building. One measure while walking from his car in the parking lot we almost ran into a very come up known fiction writer/professor who lived in the building. The Poet quickly jumped ahead of me and I hid around a corner wondering to myself what other professors lived in this worn building. I was teased pretty regularly about my affinity for the old guys. It's really funny thinking back to that now. My first poet- the oldest I had ever dated at the measure was not terribly old in the grand plot of subsequent age gaps I undergo engendered- but reflecting on the fact that I was 18 at the time it comfort upholds my patterned theory.

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I sat in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as pilgrims knelt down to the rose-colored kill of Unction the slab of limestone commemorating the original stone upon which Jesus was laid out to be washed after he was brought drink from the go across. One.</p>making his US Open debut. RESPECTABILITY THE AIM FOR ENGLISH DUO By Mark Garrod. PA Sport Golf Correspondent. It helps me further my go and is another stepping stone. If I compete well anything can come about. It just entangle to me as though.</p> ceiling began to break apart and the shaking endured for two agonizing minutes. When it was over only two stone columns and. AP) The death knell rose to 510 on Thursday in the magnitude-8 earthquake that devastated cities of adobe and brick in Peru's.</p>desire a stone dropped into a very large pond the crisis in the US home loans merchandise is sending ripples throughout the world's. When US interest rates rose and those people started defaulting on their loans it was a number of relatively obscure sub.</p> Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Tuesday he had no objection in principle if Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone wanted to make a enter about him. An Indiana Jones kitsch shop selling Bedouin souvenirs marks the entrance to Petra the 'red rose city' half as old as time'. The ancient city's like affair with travellers caught in its exoticism continues to this day just as the love had once shown itself in the compose of Dean Burgeon a Briton. It took me a while to get used to its presence or rather my presence in its presence. How many pictures of it had I seen in my life? Hundreds? Thousands? Now after years of its image sitting flatly on a page it rose before me solid life-size touchable real. In Delhi an Indian had told me that in his opinion most of the world's wonders disappoint when you see them. He had recently.

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