eBay DevCon 08 - Tue17 14:30 Keynotes

Another keynote session started now with Rajiv Dutta (President of eBay).

Mike Shaver (Director of Ecosystem Development, Mozilla) is an Evangelist from Mozilla and came to present about The Web. "The web loves people" ... "We love the web right back"! He spoke about how developers can help make the web better, what are tools for web today, cloud computing, web-friendly sites, firefox 3 etc.

Tony Hsieh (CEO, Zappos) co-founder of Link Exchange (was a cooperative advertising network) in 1996 sold to Microsoft in 1998 for US$ 265 million. He is now CEO of Zappos, a US$ 834 million business and spoke about his relation with the customers, focusing on the best service they can offer to them, listening to them (24x7 support and 1-800 number in every page).
Zappos takes "the best sale for the customer" motto seriously: if a customer cannot find a referred show in their shop, they redirect the customer to one of the competitors' sites!!
The word "transparency" was repeated many times during Tony's speak! Having the right culture and spreading (they have a book explaining the company's culture) to everyone. Tony shared some stories with the audience (flowers to the widow, money in the returned purse, pizza order) to emphasize the cultural aspects of the company and its employees. "Culture and brand are two sizes of the same coin".

John Donahoe (President and CEO, eBay) is now on stage commenting on how eBay tries to assimilate this concept of focusing on the client just presented by Tony from Zappos, by executive meetings with them. He said at the beginning of his presentation "You [developers] are very important to us!". He also mentioned that eBay is very excited with Project Echo and asked for feedback, thoughts, support and ideas from the developer community.

The days has reached an end (on eBay Devcon, at least) :)