iphoneapplab.com

1st Place in eBay’s Inaugural Innovate Widget Contest

From 30 July 2007 to 13 August 2007 innovate.ebay.co.uk, an eBay group dedicated to promoting the development of projects by the eBay developer community held a competition for all developers residing in countries with an eBay site to build the most innovative widget. If you are like me I immediately scratched my head and said “well define a widget”. As expected the term widget, I expect purposely so, is defined in the guidelines of the competition quite loosely. This is most likely to get everyone thinking out of the box.

Well the contest has ended and I am pleased to write that we have been notified that iphoneMyeBay has taken 1st place!

We could not be happier with the news. The judging was done by an independent third party and the overall results can be found here.

To see iPhoneMyeBay’s entry click here.

Make sure to check out the other awesome “widgets” that were developed:

• 2nd place - eBay Sidebar Tool
• 3rd place - My eBay for iGoogle

As well, want a preview of tools coming down the pike for both eBay buyers and sellers? Or have a suggestion for a tool? Check out the innovate radar! http://innovate.ebay.co.uk/radar

Just in case you were curious, it looks like the iPhone is on pace to beat Apple’s internal sales estimate of 730,000 units this quarter. That’s a heck of a lot of iPhones.

According to UBS analyst Ben Reitzes, the iPhone could sell as many as 800,000 units this quarter:

According to a UBS research note on Tuesday, Apple Inc.’s iPhone may reach a unit sales figure of 800,000 in the current quarter. By doing so, it would beat Apple’s own hopes of 730,000 over the same period of time. “Our checks continue to indicate solid demand for the iPhone despite typical moderation in excitement from launch and extremely high expectations,” analyst Ben Reitzes wrote.

- Taken from Information Week, August 27, 2007

 iPhoneMyeBay has made it into the August 2007 eBay Chatter Blog that can be found at either ebay.com–>Community–>Blog or just by going to www.ebaychatter.com.

Delyn Simons, Manager of Platform Marketing for eBay posted a review from Sunny Li, who works in the eBay Partner Development Program of the iPhoneMyeBay application.  Here is a small snippet:

“This iPhone application really speaks to the eBay crowd, especially the diehard fans, because it is a ‘must have’ shopping assistant if you want an upper hand in winning an eBay auction.”

To read the article in its entirety, the direct permalink is below:

http://www.ebaychatter.com/the_chatter/2007/08/developer-silks.html

The reception of the first application, iphonemyebay.com for bidding on eBay will soon have additional functionality based on requests we have received.  A bidding list just that will show you the items you are bidding on, along with if you are the high bidder or not will be included.

And shortly we will finally officially name the application… stay tuned.

We are excited that iPhoneMyeBay has been accepted as an entry in the inaugural eBay Innovate contest! The eBay Innovate initiative is designed to spark the imaginations of developers to create new and exciting tools that integrate with the eBay API.  Recently eBay Innovate has embarked on a contest for new “widget” type tools and iPhoneMyeBay has been submitted on our behalf.

If you like the tool or just think that it is so cool that you can bid from anywhere through the custom iPhone interface, please vote for the iPhoneMyeBay application.  The competition link is :

http://innovate.ebay.co.uk/competitions/show/2-inaugural-innovate-widget-contest 

As well check out the innovate site and if you are a developer consider making a brand new exciting widget!

http://innovate.ebay.co.uk/

Rob does his usual great podcast and features iPhoneMyeBay.

Check out Rob’s 29th Today in iPhone podcast here

<Listen Here> 

And Rob, we hope you don’t spend too much on eBay…

If you are a seller on eBay then you are most likely familiar with the AuctionBytes.com web site and email newsletter.  If you aren’t then you should take a look as they have a lot of great information about being online merchants.

Just posted today is an article by Ina Steiner, Editor at AuctionBytes about the iPhoneMyeBay application based on a great conversation we had just yesterday. The link to see the full article is below but here is a teaser:

“Users of Apple’s new iPhone can bid on eBay items thanks to a new shopping application released by SilkSystem Solutions called iPhone My eBay.”

 http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m08/i01/s03

Thanks Ina for the great article and we look forward to driving more business to your online merchants.