Craigslist v eBay : Deceptive Google Ads Used By eBay

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Craigslist v eBay: Craigslist Fights Back

Ebay sued Craigslist some time ago, suggesting that the site had engaged in anti-competitive practices. Craigslist has decided to fight back with a counter lawsuit.

Writing at the Craigslist blog, Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist, says:

We filed a complaint in California today, charging eBay with unlawful and unfair competition, misappropriation of proprietary information, deceptive passing-off, business interference, false advertising, phishing attacks, free-riding, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and breaches of fiduciary duty.

We respectfully ask the Superior Court in San Francisco to enjoin this conduct and order eBay to (1) make full restitution to craigslist, (2) disgorge their related profits (3) restore to craigslist all shares of the company acquired by means of, or for the purpose of unfair competition, and (4) pay punitive damages for their malicious behavior.

Ouch!

See: Deceptive Google ads used by eBay to channel traffic from Craigslist to eBay's Kijiji per court documents.

Ebay v. Craigslist: Details Are Now Public

Ebay has released details of its complaint against Craigslist, somewhat ironically a company in which Ebay has a substantial equity stake. That equity is critical to the lawsuit, which in a nutshell is about how Craigslist responded to Ebay's entry into the classified market with their listings website called Kijiji. That response was a reorganization that effectively took away Ebay's right to have a seat on the Craigslist board due to stock dilution.

New York Times Summary

Ebay Complaint

Craigslist Hits Back At eBay

Craigslist has responded to eBay's lawsuit filed against Craigslist and its board of directors.

We are surprised and disappointed by eBay’s unfounded allegations, which came to us out of the blue, without any attempt to engage in a dialogue with us.

Coming from a shareholder that views craigslist as a prime competitor, filing suit without so much as mentioning these assertions beforehand seems unethical, and hints at ulterior motives.

Ensuring the future well-being of craigslist and the craigslist community is admittedly very important to us. But Ebay has absolutely no reason to feel threatened here — unless of course they’re contemplating a hostile takeover of craigslist, or the sale of Ebay’s stake in craigslist to an unfriendly party. (In which case, they’re out of luck).

For our part, we have always treated eBay very fairly as a minority shareholder, and plan to continue doing so, despite this unfortunate development.

Addendum in response to commenter question - To be perfectly clear, eBay’s stake in craigslist has not been unfairly diluted as they have claimed.

Rumor: eBay to Sell Skype to Google?

Techcrunch reports on a rumor this morning that would have Google either buy Skype from eBay or Google partner with Skype. According to the site,

"Skype, acquired in late 2005 for $3.1 billion, has been a financial albatross around Ebay’s neck. eBay removed Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennstrom in October 2007, reportedly due to frustration at the financial performance of Skype. Ebay also negotiated down the huge earnout due to Skype stockholders and took a $936 million one-time loss around the transaction. It’s clear that eBay wants to either unload Skype, or significantly drive performance. Google, by contrast, is just beginning to think about how to dominate the voice space. They have a VOIP service through GTalk, a free 411 service and GrandCentral, a telephone management service they acquired last year for $50 million."

What it means: I think this potential acquisition/partnership makes complete sense. IMHO, call tracking and pay-per-call represents a large portion of future local search revenues and Google clearly sees that local search is where they will get tremendous growth in the next 5-10 years. By buying the Skype infrastructure (and user base) and combining it with the GrandCentral technology and expertise, they instantly get core assets to execute that strategy globally.

The Power Of "I Don't Know"

How often do you answer important questions with "I don't know"?

Over at Red Eye VC Josh Kopelman, Managing Director of First Round Capital and the founder of the Half.com book selling franchise (which he sold to Ebay for $350,000,000), suggests that startups and entrepreneurs should recognize that they won't have the answer to every question and they certainly should not try to pretend they do.

Although Kopelman's point is more about establishing credibility than about the practical value of saying "I don't know", I think this approach should extend to many aspects business life whether you are in startup or large corporate environments.

I think we tend to learn the most when we are intellectually vulnerable - when we really don't know much about a topic and admit that to an "expert" with a plea to enlighten us. This attitude can be a challenge, especially at conferences or meetings where you are surrounded by bright and competitive people who may even want to "eat your lunch". However on balance I think openness and transparency lead to the best idea exchanges, and establish the personal and professional credibility that leads to quality business relationships.

eBay Dumps ValueClick Takes Marketing In House

eBay (EBAY) unveiled the eBay Partner Network, a new global affiliate program for publishers driving traffic to eBay. The affiliate network will be in-house, designed to more fully align the programs across eBay’s global properties and give affiliates expanded access to revenue opportunities across its platforms. Previous eBay's affiliate program was run by ValueClick (VCLK), whose shares a taking a big today. ValueClick in a full service integrated online marketing company.

“Affiliate partners are central to eBay’s ongoing strategy of improving the user experience and increasing engagement,” said Matt Ackley, vice president of Internet marketing at eBay. “The new eBay Partner Network will allow us to have a direct relationship with our affiliates, innovate faster and deliver new products and tools in a more timely and efficient manner, providing new revenue opportunities for our affiliates and creating a more streamlined user experience for our buyers and sellers.”

eBay CEO Meg Whitman To Retire

eBay's CEO, Meg Whitman, is reportedly planning to retire. Meg has been at the head of the company for 10 years and is responsible for building and growing the company from the early days of the dot com boom through the rocky road of its highs and lows. She is widely considered a pioneer and icon of the consumer internet business and has helped to shape and define the industry as we've come to know it.

Meg joined eBay as president and CEO in March 1998 when the company was still a small auction website with 30 employees. eBay is, today, a global ecommerce force. The company has been experiencing some difficulty with some acquisitions, maintaining its revenues, and falling stock price. Before eBay, Meg was with toymaker Hasbro and was president and CEO of FTD. John Donahoe, eBay's auction business unit head, is expected to succeed her.

eBay Versus Tiffany

eBay, the online marketplace bringing circa 248M buyers and sellers together, is embroiled in a legal battle with Tiffany & Co. which is claiming that eBay is a distribution network for the trading of counterfeit Tiffany items.

This is a precedent setting case should Tiffany win which could open the floodgates for lawsuits against eBay from other retailers being squeezed by the online marketplace. But is it a reasonable expectation that eBay should be liable for the authenticity of each of the 102 million products sold at any point in time on their site. As eBay states, they "never take possession of any of the goods sold on the site" and they "go above and beyond what the law requires[...] to keep counterfeits off the site." Clearly, that's not working all that well. Some experts believe that if eBay really wanted to keep counterfeit off their site, they could.

Tiffany is arguing that eBay profits from these sales and as such is liable for copyright infringement. eBay's argument is that the burden of policing responsibility lies on the trademark owner, Tiffany, because Tiffany has the necessary expertise to identify counterfeits of its products. The judge has cited legal precedents that have found that if a manufacturer or distributor continues to supply a product knowing it is engaging in trademark infringement, that manufacturer or distributor is "contributorily responsible" for any harm done as a result of the deceit. The jury's out on this one for now.

Top Trends in Corporate 2.0 Sites

I've been scouring around quite a bit online to identify some of the top trends in corporate websites. These sites have traditionally been nothing more than brochure-ware displaying static content like mission statements, and product and contact info. In reality, not a whole lot has changed. While the Web has evolved at internet speed from the early days of Web 1.0 to 2.0, corporate sites have remained relatively the same and many are in danger of becoming relics of the past. We were going to have an event on "The New Corporate Website" which we decided to slate for another time in light of the OpenSocial phenom that came about.

So, what's the deal. Today's corporate website is still a sales and communication channel but not of the same manifestation as yesteryear's; the DNA of these sites have changed. There are a lot of Social Media and Web 2.0 components making their way to the corporate arena. Today's new corporate website is less static, stagnant, and one-dimensional.

Here are some of the trends I found:

• Widgetization of the web
  No suprise here. The corporate marketing-ites have jumped on this bandwagon and proven the Newsweek declaration that this is the "Year of the Widget" to be true. Although, I think this year was more about the hype and next year we will see more commercialization of widgets as more and more companies get caught up and the others push the marketing efforts on their initial adoption.


• Social networking cum customer networking
  It is built for customers, with customers. Live chatting has been around for a while for customer support but full-blown social networking sites have been created to serve customers better and to build and grow the network and community and utlimately, customer loyalty and goodwill. A good example is eBay's Neighborhoods.


• Blogs
  Blogs are being harnessed carefully and selectively. Not a lot of corporate blogs except for notable ones like Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog which provides insight into the company and its products. The rarity of these blogs is mostly for fear of legal and market backlash, but a lot of companies have externally facing blogs by employees. The problem is that unless its the CEO or some high-profile employee or a sexy company, or if the blogs are not fully endorsed by the company and marketed and supported, they will flail.


• Rich Media Content
  Live or on-demand rich streaming media content with a real person demo'ing or talking about a new product or service offering. This is much preferred and more effective than just straight textual content. But keep it real. Too many companies still can't let go of the canned, highly produced videos. Customers don't want to see that either but the context is important. Use by product managers and for customer testimonials are great but how-to's are more valuable to customers. Some companies even have video on their homepage. Audio-only podcasts are also common but offer a different dimension to video.


• RSS
  RSS feeds that people can subscribe to to get the latest information delivered to them as it is available versus going to a site to find it. This is very uselful for alerts, breaking news, etc. for customers, partners, and financial community.

I didn't see the use of a lot of other Web 2.0-esque elements like wikis (probably better suited for extranets and intranets) and mashups on corporate sites. The web is a powerful tool and many companies are realizing that if they don't utilize their websites effectively, they won't be able to effectively go the distance. Clearly, there is still a ways to go.

Next Generation Social Networking

Last Wednesday, the WebGuild held its monthly event on the "Next Generation of Social Networking" featuring Jonathan Abrams, Founder & CEO of Socializr & Freindster fame, Jia Shen, CTO of Rock You, and Sundeep Ahuja, Founder of Appfuels. It was a highly social event - well attended and high energy.

If you missed it, the video of this event will be available in about a week. View photos.

How to beat Google

Forbes has an interesting article on how companies can beat Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) when it comes to recruiting talent.

By Brian Caulfield

Let's just call the Googleplex what it really is: the ultimate recruiting tool. Employees are shuttled to Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters for free. Once they arrive, they're treated to massages and free gourmet meals. Plus, they're surrounded by thousands of young, type-A employees from the best schools.

Oh, and then there's the ultimate status symbol: Google's soaring stock price.

Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) has been grabbing talent at a ferocious pace. It's on track to double its head count to 20,000 from 10,000 at the end of last year. It employs swarms of contract recruiters to scour top engineering schools for fresh-faced newbies and raid competitors for hoary veterans. Read the glowing press clips and you'd think that Google has an insurmountable edge in the war for tech talent. The stakes can't be much higher: Even if it never capitalizes on the ideas all those brilliant new hires generate, Google locks them away from would-be competitors.

But if you talk to people who have worked inside Google's recruiting operation--or people who have competed against it--they'll tell you that the Silicon Valley's ultimate hiring machine can be beat. The trick: use Google's consensus-driven decision-making process--and exacting standards--against it. "Hiring over there is a protracted battle, to say the least," says one recruiter.

To understand how to beat Google, you first need to know its history. Early on, the company faced a dilemma. While the company's co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are Stanford-educated computer scientists--in other words, they are quite bright--as the smartest companies get bigger, they tend to get dumber. Call it reversion to the mean.

So, Google created a process designed to keep Google chock full of brainiacs. The result: an exacting, consensus-driven process. New hires are vetted extensively to ensure that they are not only smart enough, but that they'd fit in with Google's culture.

That makes speed Google's biggest vulnerability, recruiters say. While a Google hire might have to endure round after round of interviews, a savvy company can pluck off a candidate at the manager level and below by hitting him with an offer--and giving him or her just a few days to respond.

Tough standards are Google's other vulnerability. The company targets graduates of top schools who have top grades: that all but rules out, say, Microsoft Founder Bill Gates or Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs, neither of whom have a college degree.

Moreover, candidates on the cusp will get less lucrative offers from Google than candidates from elite schools with the top grades that Google targets. That makes a brilliant student from an out-of-the-way school a soft target.

Another weakness: A single objection will almost always sink a candidate's chances of ever getting hired at Google, those familiar with the company say. That gives a competitor a shot at grabbing a socially awkward but otherwise brilliant young engineer.

The most daunting problem for Google, however, is a math problem. While Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt asserts that Google's growth is accelerating as it grows larger, that pace may slow down: Google disappointed Wall Street after admitting it "overspent" on new hires during its latest quarter.

Moreover, recruiters are already pointing to Microsoft and Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ) when talking about the future of Google. The two mega-cap tech companies cranked out millionaires in their earlier days, but their share prices have been sedate for years now. Google may only hire geniuses, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Google is just too big to make its newest employees as rich as their peers.

Amazon Payments

Amazon plans to shortly launch an online payment service similar to PayPal and Google Checkout, reports TechCrunch.

The planned service will be an extension of the existing Amazon Payments, which allows third parties selling items on Amazon’s extended network to receive payments from buyers.

Expected to mirror Checkout, the competitive offering will bring buyers to an Amazon-hosted site when they use it to make payments.