Web Services and Broadband

Web Services and Broadband

eBay generates $681 per second. It is now the now 31st largest commerce provider, bigger than GAP, ToysRUs.

They're seing 6.5 million web service API calls per day! Sending 21 million emails a day, conducting 80 million searches a day. 30% of inbound products are coming in through virtual supply chain --- e.g. web services.

Broadband would help their ability to have an immediate, notification driven relationship with buyers and sellers. From a bandwidth perspective, they can really improve the richness of the product views and details with broadband focused content. And broadband empowers more individuals to create eBay-based businesses.

They'd want to to become an alternative distribution channel for any manufacturer or retailer, and using multiple pricing models, including fixed price increasing dramatically.

Broadband Killer Apps ?

Broadband will surprise us. The apps that take off were never predicted. Examples --- eBay and commerce; SMS and Mobile; ring-tones and mobile. Nobody knows what the killer apps will be. Must be able to launch services quickly and inventively, and fast experimentation.

Today TV is more like browsing and you get data on the fly. Increasingly, machines in the home wil pull content over the network and assemble programming for you on the fly, when you want it....from being a browser app to a data service, and more and more of its apps communicating with the the server for data.

Effecitvely, what the user sees are specific apps/services that are local on their machines, with communication and data happening in the background using XML web services. So this is the real change and trend, this new distributed computing infrastructure.