EBay develops ‘miles per gallon’ metric for data centers
There's a maxim in the data center business that you can't manage what you can't measure, and eBay has come up with the mother of all measurement systems for calculating data center efficiency.
The online auction giant has devised a methodology that looks at the cost of its IT operations in dollars, kilowatt hours and carbon emissions, and ties those costs back to a single performance metric -- in eBay's case, the number of buy and sell transactions its customers make at eBay.com.
The result is a set of data that provides the equivalent of a "miles per gallon" metric for data centers, which organizations can use as a baseline to improve on over time, said Dean Nelson, head of eBay's Global Foundation Services, which manages its data centers worldwide. Read more...
EBay buys BillSafe for ‘purchase-on-invoice’ technology
EBay has purchased German vendor BillSafe to complement its PayPal online payment system, the company announced Thursday. Terms were not disclosed.
BillSafe offers "purchase-on-invoice" capabilities, which allows shoppers to choose items, receive them, and then get a bill for payment later. EBay had taken a minority stake in the company in October 2010.
Purchase-on-invoice is extremely popular in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands, and in Germany alone, eBay has 15 million accounts, the company said. Read more...
eBay launches Web query language
In the hopes of reducing the complexity of making data calls over the Web, eBay has launched a programming language, called ql.io, which bundles separate API requests into a single call.
"ql.io can reduce the number of lines of code required to call multiple HTTP APIs while simultaneously bringing down network latency and bandwidth usage in certain use cases," wrote Subbu Allamaraju, an eBay developer who led the effort to build ql.io, in a blog posting announcing the new language.
With its release, ql.io has joined the growing rank of software developed by large Web service providers that have been released for others to use and refine, including Twitter's Storm data stream analysis tool, LiveJournal's memecached data caching software, Facebook's Scribe log aggregation tool, and Google's SPDY HTTP replacement. Read more...
eBay buys Magento to boost its e-commerce developer tools
In a move that could help eBay improve its tools for online store developers, it has acquired Magento, the maker of an open source e-commerce platform.
The online auctioneer last year acquired a minority stake in Magento, which is based in Los Angeles and has about 290 employees and tens of thousands of merchant customers.
The deal is expected to close in this year's third quarter. The plan is for Magento to remain in Los Angeles and continue supporting its partners and customers, as well as keep developing its product roadmap, while leveraging eBay's additional resources and helping eBay develop X.Commerce, according to an FAQ about the deal (PDF) Magento posted on its site. Read more...
Update: PayPal, eBay sue Google over mobile payments secrets
PayPal and parent eBay have filed a suit against Google and two former executives alleging that they have misappropriated their trade secrets in the area of mobile payments and point-of-sale strategies.
The suit filed Thursday before the Superior Court of the State of California in the County of Santa Clara also charges two former employees, Osama Bedier and Stephanie Tilenius, who now work with Google, of breaching their obligations to PayPal and eBay.
Google unveiled on Thursday its Google Wallet, that will let people with special phones pay for goods in retail shops by tapping the phones against a payment terminal. Read more...