Notable this year is Apple, with its whopping $156 billion in 2012 sales, jumping into the top 10 for the first time in its 37-year history. And Google, with its big $50 billion year, bulled its way up almost 20 spots to hit No. 55. Perhaps most impressive, however, is Facebook, which with the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500 made the list for the very first time at 487.

Ranking companies by income is a fairly arbitrary measure, since it reveals little about how much companies actually earn, but it does show scope and scale. A grain of salt is definitely indicated, however, as Google’s profits, for instance, are many multiples of Dell’s despite that Dell is ranked No. 51 and Google is No. 55.

Here are the 41 technology companies that Fortune included on its list.

• 6: Apple
• 15: HP
• 20: IBM
• 35: Microsoft
• 49: Amazon
• 51: Dell
• 54: Intel
• 55: Google
• 60: Cisco Systems
• 80: Oracle
• 131: Xerox
• 133: EMC
• 176: Computer Sciences
• 163: Jabil Circuit
• 194: Qualcomm
• 196: eBay
• 218: Texas Instruments
• 222: Western Digital
• 240: SAIC
• 267: CDW
• 270: Liberty Interactive
• 302: Applied Materials
• 304: Motorola Solutions
• 318: Micron Technology
• 326: Corning
• 327: Broadcom
• 352: Congnizant Technology Solutions
• 379: Symantec
• 408: NetApp
• 420: Sanmina
• 429: Harris
• 436: Booz Allen Hamilton Holding
• 441: NCR
• 473: Priceline.com
• 464: AMD
• 477: Avaya
• 482: Facebook
• 487: SanDisk
• 489: Pitney Bowes
• 494: Yahoo
• 499: CA Technologies

A couple of caveats:

I have not included telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, although a good argument can be made that they are now, primarily, technology companies, simply because Fortune did not classify them in any recognizable technology category. And I have included retailers like CDW and companies like Pitney Bowes, which Fortune classifies in categories like Computers, Office Equipment, and Information Technology Services.

One interesting note: While Facebook has the Fortune 500′s youngest CEO, Dole Food’s David Murdock, at 90 years old, is the Fortune 500′s oldest CEO.

photo credit: mikesolita via photopin cc

Q1 was solid for eBay, pretty much in line with expectations, although revenue was down a little from analyst expectations. The stock, however, is down almost 3 percent in after-hours trading, as the company’s outlook for Q2 is in the 61 cents to 63 cents per share range. Analysts were hoping for 66 cents.

The future of eBay is mobile payments, however, and for investors willing to overlook some short-term pain, there may be some long-term gain as PayPal transaction volume increased a strong 21 percent in the last quarter, and PayPal merchant services jumped 25 percent.

Source: MarketWatch

eBay stock is down almost 3 percent.

By the numbers:

• PayPal users: up 5 million to 128 million
• PayPal at point of sale: now in almost 20,000 retail locations in the U.S.
• eBay marketplace customers: up 3.9 million to 116 million
• eBay transaction volume: up 13 percent to $18 billion
• Total “enabled commerce volume”: up 19 percent to $49 billion

Analysts had expected 62 cents a share of revenue, with total revenue of $3.77 billion, although the “whisper number” was 64 cents per share. eBay missed that number, hitting $0.63 per diluted share.

eBay had beaten its earnings whisper numbers in each of the last four quarters.

“We had a strong first quarter, with accelerating user growth across both Marketplaces and PayPal,” CEO John Donahoe said in a statement. “Technology is creating a commerce revolution, and we are in the forefront with strong mobile leadership and a focus on helping retailers and brands engage consumers anytime, anywhere.”

eBay’s original raison d’etre, auctions, is decreasing in importance to the company as net revenue, while still growing, was up comparatively less, 13 percent, and gross merchandising volume — the value of goods being sold via eBay Marketplaces — was up by the same number. In addition, GSI Commerce, eBay’s e-commerce solutions for enterprise division, had increased sales of 13 percent.

PayPal accounted for 41 percent of eBay revenue, a number that has been growing in the past, and the company expects it to continue to rise.

eBay has big plans for the future.

In a note to investors in March, eBay says it plans to enable $300 billion of global commerce by 2015, up from $175 billion in 2012, and expects revenues to grow by 50 percent by 2015 as PayPal continues to be the growth driver.

photo credit: OnInnovation via photopin cc

For laptops, Samsung and Apple were tied, according to the Brand Keys’ 2013 Consumer Loyalty Engagement Index, released today. But Samsung led in flat screen TVs, and, in perhaps the biggest shocker, beat out Apple for consumer loyalty in smartphones.

“This is the first year that Samsung beat out Apple in smartphones,” Brand Keys president Robert Passikoff told me this afternoon. “When Apple was number one, everyone said, ‘Well sure, it’s Apple.’ But the fact is that Samsung always had a larger share of the marketplace.”

Source: Brand Keys

Customer loyalty – smartphones

If you’re wondering whether this is just some dinky little no-name survey, think again. The Brand Keys customer loyalty index surveys 39,000 people, making it generalizable to the entire United States population with 95 percent confidence. And if you’re also wondering how big the delta between number one and number two actually is, Passikoff says there’s a “significant difference.”

“It’s not terrible to be number two,” Passikof said. “But in both cases I think consumers are looking for higher degrees of innovation. It was only after Samsung and other companies came out with smaller tablets that Apple brought out the iPad mini. It was only in reaction.”

Asus followed Samsung and Apple as the laptop vendor with the third-most-loyal customers, with Toshiba and Sony right on its heels. In smartphones, LG took third place after Samsung and Apple, followed by Nokia and Sony, who were tied for fourth. Motorola, HTC, and BlackBerry rounded out the top eight.

Amazon handed Apple some more bad news in the e-reader category, leading the field with its Kindle tablet. Barnes & Noble’s Nook took second, with Apple, Kobo, and Sony following. One big caveat here: it’s likely consumers don’t think of the iPad as an e-reader first and foremost, but rather as a general-purpose tablet, which may have affected these rankings.

I asked Passikoff about exactly that:

Source: Brand Keys

Customer loyalty – laptops

“That’s absolutely so. When we initially added the category, iPad never showed up. And then later it did … its primary product value is not as an e-reader. But we don’t define what products go in which categories: consumers do.”

But, adding injury to insult, Amazon beat out Apple in the dedicated tablets category as well. Apple and Samsung tied for second in that category, followed by Barnes & Noble in a tie for third, and Acer, Lenovo, and Toshiba in a tie for fourth. Google showed up in the tablets category, also in a tie, in fifth place with Sony.

Clearly, consumers are a little confused about what is a tablet and what is an e-reader — a rapidly disappearing difference — and that confusion played a role in Apple’s rankings. But just as clearly, Samsung’s products, innovation, and advertising are helping that company shape an extremely positive reputation.

Image credit: Dean Takahashi

That’s up 18 percent year-over-year for the fourth quarter, and it’s up 21 percent for the full 2012 earnings.

“We had a great finish to an excellent year, with fourth quarter results exceeding our expectations,” eBay president and CEO John Donahoe said in a statement. “eBay Marketplaces in particular had a terrific fourth quarter, with growth in the U.S. accelerating three points, outpacing ecommerce.”

Source: Google Finance

eBay stock today

Key payments division PayPal, which has been a critical revenue driver for eBay in previous quarters, continues to do well, with payment volume up 24 percent … which, given PayPal’s fairly linear revenue structure, means that earnings were also up 24 percent.

PayPal clients sent nearly $24 billion to each other in 2012 — 250 percent more than in 2011 — and PayPal reported adding two million accounts a month in the fourth quarter, which the company says is PayPal’s fastest growth ever.

PayPal’s growth is important for eBay, as mobile payments is an increasingly growing market. PayPal put mobile commerce first explicitly in July of 2012, when mobile boss Hill Ferguson was elevated to VP of global product and saw a huge jump in mobile payments this past Thanksgiving. The company also teamed up with NCR to attack Square just a few days ago.

eBay as a whole generated $2.6 billion of cash flow in excess of expenses in the past year and is now sitting on a nice little nest egg of $11.5 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and non-equity investments. Not exactly Apple-sized, but certainly nothing to sniff at.

And for 2013?

eBay expects to earn $16-16.5 billion and make between $2.23 and $2.29 per share. The company’s stock is up $0.40 on the day.

photo credit: Ryan Fanshaw Photography via photopin cc

SellSimple is launching its iPhone app today that people with too much stuff can use to sell it to people with not enough, simply by snapping a picture, adding a price, and selecting any number of marketplaces to post it.

“Using eBay is way too complicated, and Craigslist is a little bit sketchy,” SellSimple chief executive Julian Sarokin said yesterday from West Hollywood, where the company is based. “This is a way to sell from your phone … an easy way to just get it done.”

Letting buyers easily get it done, however, has taken a significant amount of hard developer work getting it done. Initially, SellSimple was just a way to post and sell via your phone on the company’s own marketplace. After initial demos, however, advice from mentors and investors convinced the 21-year-old CEO and his 20-year-old cofounder that posting to multiple existing marketplaces with significant buyer scale was a better idea than starting with an empty storefront.

In other words: chicken, meet egg.

Those mentors and investors include rapper/actor Nas and musician/producer Dr. Luke – who has worked on albums for Katy Perry and K$sha — among others. Together with a few additional angels, they’ve injected $250,000 in SellSimple, making it more than just another app. Which Sarokin is well aware of.

“There’s a really big distinction between an app and a company,” he told me. “Our goal … is that we would become the new eBay or Craigslist.”

That’s of course no small goal. SellSimple wants to achieve it through user experience, a built-for-mobile buying and selling experience that is better than existing sites. And by providing an initial benefit of listing everywhere with one simple tool, easily. In addition, it has built the capability to buy items from eBay, Craigslist, and other sites right into the tool.

One question I had: Will eBay, Etsy, and Craigslist be OK with SellSimple posting listings to their sites and selling items from their services? Craigslist, for one, has had numerous disputes with companies like PadMapper that tapped into its listings.

“We haven’t actually talked to anyone at Craigslist yet,” Sarokin said. “But there are some other apps that do this, and I don’t think it’s gonna be a problem. PadMapper was pulling data, while we’re adding data.”

The app went live yesterday in anticipation of the the launch today, and Sarokin said that the reception has been unexpectedly good: #18 in the list of top free iPhone apps for lifestyle, without any promotion.

He expects to monetize the app with shipping integrations, a 5 percent fee if items are sold via SellSimple’s own marketplace, and commissions on sales of products on eBay or other listing sites. Items sold via other marketplaces, however, are free (minus any fees those sites might charge). And if you list your items for sale via SellSimple, the service will delete your postings on all site as soon as your items are sold.

Here’s a look at the app via video:

In fact, Alibaba chairman Jack Ma said only two companies have ever recorded annual transaction volumes at this level: Wal-Mart and Alibaba.

Alibaba — which recorded $3 billion in sales in a single day earlier this year — is a conglomerate primarily composed of Tmall, which manages e-commerce operations for thousands of companies in China, and Taobao Marketplace, a rough equivalent of eBay. All payments are handled by Alipay, the company’s own payments processor, and Alipay has over 700 million registered users — with credit card information.

The company has grown massively in the past four years as the Chinese middle class increases in size and wealth, and as it has become a hub for a massive share of Chinese e-commerce. E-commerce has been growing at 60 percent year-over-year in 2012 in China’s third and fourth-tier cities, the company says, and currently just over five percent of all Chinese retail spending – RMB 18.39 trillion — passes through Alibaba websites.

And it’s not looking backward, as chairman and CEO Jack Ma made clear:

“It’s very likely that next year our transaction volume will be bigger than all the American e-commerce companies combined,” Ma said in a company statement.

In 2012 so far, the company has accounted for an amazing 60 percent of all packages delivered in China — an astounding 12 million packages a day. That’s up from an average of eight million packages a day in 2011.

The company measures GMV, a sales equivalent that takes into account all product sold by clients who use Alibaba’s e-commerce infrastructure to enable their own sales, and all Chinese consumers or businesses that sell their products on Taobao’s marketplace. The measure is roughly equivalent to gross sales, but an important distinction is that most of the profits of each sale do not reside with Alibaba, which takes a small percentage. That’s not entirely dissimilar to Amazon, which facilitates the sale of many other companies’ products, or eBay, which takes a small percentage of any item you might sell on the site.

Alibaba is predicting three trillion RMB of total volume of sales through its various sites in 2017, which would be $471 billion, and would surpass Wal-Mart’s current sales of about $444 billion.

Amazon’s annual sales volumes are in the $50-60 billion range, with quarterly sales of $13 to $15 billion. eBay sold about $5 billion 2011 and is projecting about $8 billion in sales in 2012. The U.S e-commerce market, however, is much more fractured than the Chinese market, with many companies taking small slices of the overall pie.

Yahoo still owns a stake in Alibaba — about 23 percent after selling half of its shares for $7.6 billion earlier this year.

photo credit: Jim Nix / Nomadic Pursuits via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Surprise, surprise, Apple is being sued again. A San Diego gaming and restaurant software company is suing Apple for infringing four of its patents in the new iOS 6 Passbook app.

While it’s no shock to hear Apple’s being sued, it’s a tiny bit shocking that Samsung’s not on the other side of the V. A little more shocking is that the company involved is not, exactly, a patent troll — Ameranth actually has real, for-sale products. And perhaps even just a bit more shocking is that the company has received strategic investments from both Microsoft and Motorola.

Ameranth v. Apple is all about about Passbook.

Passbook is Apple’s entrant in the mobile wallet sweepstakes. Currently, it’s for tickets, boarding passes, and gift cards, and while it may graduate at some point to hold your VISA or American Express credit cards, currently Apple has only lightly integrated with  one credit card provider.

But it has the potential to grow, and to grow into the mobile wallet space highly coveted by giants such as Google, Microsoft (which just demoed a mobile wallet on Windows Phone 8), eBay, MasterCard, and others.

Ameranth says the software violates four of its patents: 6,384,850, 6,871,325, 6,982,733, and 8,146,077. The first two are both titled “Information management and synchronous communications system with menu generation,” and the second two are similarly titled: “Information management and synchronous communications system with menu generation, and handwriting and voice modification of orders.”

And yes, the patents are just about as bland as their titles: fairly generic-seeming data synchronization routines, plus data display.

But, Ameranth states in its court filing, several of its patents have been cited by Apple:

One of the Ameranth patents-in-suit, U.S. Patent No. 6,384,850 — the first patent issued in this Ameranth patent family — was cited as a prior art reference in two Apple iPhone patents issued to named inventors Bas Ording and Steven P. Jobs.

That, plus the fact that Ameranth has actual products, makes this more than just a money grabbing patent troll assault. Perhaps not much more — a cursory glance at Ameranth’s home page reveals more focus on patents than seemingly anything else — but definitely more.

The really interesting part comes in Ameranth’s PDF product overviews, such as this one for its Poker Room Manager software. Just after the obligatory “Ameranth has a very strong IP portfolio” statement, with reference to acquired patents, is this: “Ameranth has received strategic investments from Microsoft, Motorola/Symbol, Springboard Capital, and Western Pacific Capital.”

A strategic investment is often small in dollars but large in, well, strategy. And sometimes strategic investments cover a company’s posterior portions via guaranteed patent protection.

Food for thought, no?

VentureBeat contacted Ameranth for more information, but we have not heard back yet. We will be contacting Microsoft and Motorola for any comments as well.

photo credit: LucasTheExperience via photopin cc

When I first typed this company’s name into my search engine, porn showed up. Then I qualified my phrasing with ‘$40 million’, and I found what I was looking for.

Online fashion company Nasty Gal announced this significant second round of funding today, following on the [platform studded high] heels of a $9 million Series A that closed just 6 months ago.

The site is billed as a “global online destination for fashion-forward, free-thinking girls.” According to the mission statement, a Nasty Gal is the coolest girl in the room, rocking outré and unique outfits that capture attention. I am hesitant to self-identify with any moniker that includes “nasty”, but will admit that while researching this article, I fell in love with every item I saw.

It is the retail offspring of fashionista Sophia Amoruso, whose edgy taste has spawned a devoted following and wild growth. The company has experienced almost 400% year-over-year growth rate. According to Inc. 500|5000, it is one of the fastest growing private retail companies in the US.

On Nasty Gal, shoppers find a selection of vintage and non-vintage apparel hand-picked by a legion of style mavens seeking out original and provocative pieces. They search everywhere from flea markets to designer show rooms to create a diverse inventory that makes fashionistas everywhere salivate with desire.

Recently, Amoruso launched an in-house collection called Weird Science that draws inspiration from unusual sources, like 1980′s BDSM wear and computer files. A lifestyle magazine is in the pipeline as well.

Nasty Gal’s valuation is now set at $240 million and is projected to bring in $128 million of revenue this year. It has grown tremendously since its inception in 2006, when Amoruso began selling clothing on her own website instead of through eBay. Now, she has sold to around 400,000 customers in 60 countries and her site gets 5 million visits a month. The typical customer is an 18-24 woman who lives in L.A. or New York, but a third of the sales come from abroad, despite no direct marketing.

The company is based in Los Angeles. Amoruso relocated there from the Bay Area to be closer to her vendors and the fashion scene. Both rounds were led by Index Ventures, which also invested in Etsy.

With $49 million in the bank, the only kind of bootstrapping she needs to do is on the studded ankle kind.

The project is an innovative new model of collaboration between industry and academia: eBay staff are spending a day a week with the class, and the UCSC students are getting to work directly with industry-leading designers and executives.

“Our first goal is impact,” says Jane Pinckard, UCSC professor and associate director of the Center for Games and Playable Media. “We want to build things in an academic setting that can go out there and win in the world and change things.”

For eBay, the goal is actually pretty well aligned: to observe how game design and design in general is colliding and build the next great interfaces for buying and selling. I spoke to Matt MacLaurin, the eBay executive who’s running the program.

“We already have point systems and reputation,” MacLaurin says, “But we’re exploring playful new dimensions in buyer reputation as well as seller reputation. And we’re experimenting around how to put prettier faces on it.”

The company is looking to build micro-communities on eBay around niche products, and it is exploring new large touchscreen interfaces for retail or shopping areas. In both they’re looking for fresh insights into both old and new user experience and user interface problems.

One example was how to enter user credentials in a public space. Big interactive kiosks in cafes or libraries could be great for engaging new eBay users, but how can people privately enter their passwords?

The students’ answer? Face recognition.

From the academic side, the program has been a huge success. After a small pilot program over the summer, a larger class of 30 students will be participating in the fall.

Pinckard said she was surprised at first to get the call from eBay and wondered where games fit into the company’s strategy. But then she realized that “everyone wants more engagement,” and that’s exactly what games, well-conceived and executed, can do.

And for eBay, the benefits are beyond just new insights on today’s business challenges. They include new employees for tomorrow’s needs, because, as MacLaurin says, each class is a bit of of a recruiting pipeline.

“We’re trying to hire our next generation of employees right from university. It’s very personal, and we can see emerging leaders.”

One of the creative ideas that the students thought up?

A new Dungeons & Dragons-style game in which characters fight and search for treasure. The gold and jewels of the game, of course, are objects for sale on eBay, and each character’s power was driven by the value of the goods.

That’s precisely the kind of treasure eBay wants to hire.

photo credit: JD Hancock via photo pin cc

Ubokia, the reverse Craigslist where buyers tell sellers what they want, is releasing a new capability called Ubokia Everywhere, which will enable any site on the Internet to create its own unique marketplace of wants.

And the new update seems to be a direct response to sort-of-kind-of competitor Zaarly.

But where Zaarly is focused more on services and activities, like finding a neighbor to set up your Christmas lights, or getting a custom treehouse built just like that one you saw in House & Home, Ubokia is focused on stuff and places: an Android phone with a micro-SIM and at least a 4.5″ screen, or, a vacation rental in La Jolla, on the beach, for August 5-10, 2013.

The story of Ubokia

The site launched in November of 2011, but to little fanfare. Ubokia chief executive Mark Pine, a former VC at Sigma Partners, wanted to build out the service more completely before hitting the marketing gas too hard.

So Ubokia focused on building out key categories: sports, musical instruments, vacation rentals, automotive, housing, and more. You post what you’re looking for; sellers compete for your business.

But Pine wanted to move beyond the website.

Now he has, and today is the first public announcement of Ubokia Everywhere, which allows sites to create an ecommerce channel right on their site, focused on their niche. Golf site? Now you can help your members buy and sell clubs, memberships, tee times. Home-school mothers site? Now your readers can swap lessons and resources.

“There’s two primary advantages,” Pine says. “One, it allows you to create a customized market for that specific site or vertical. And two, you perform everything on that site … you don’t have to leave it.

In other words, Ubokia is bringing the marketplace to the buyer, instead of forcing the buyer to come to the marketplace.

After very softly launching the service, Ubokia has 160 partner sites signed up and running, mostly tiny niche sites like Saving Cents with Sense and Clever Housewife. Partners share in the transaction fee that buyers are charged, but currently Ubokia is taking nothing. Only later, at scale, will Ubokia take a slice of PayPal’s transaction fees — two to three percent — and start to monetize.

Of course, Mohammed can still come to the mountain if he wishes. All items for sale in any individual site’s marketplace are also cross-posted to the main Ubokia store.

And the strategy is working. Ubokia is now adding 1,000 new users daily. The service now has 220,000 members and 400,000 unique visitors a month. Compete.com, which isn’t perfect but is usually close, agrees:

The competitive landscape

It’s only now, as Ubokia starts to stretch its legs, that Pine is opening his mouth.

Zaarly, he says, “is very good at marketing … they’re making a lot of noise. But really, Zaarly Anywhere is just an affiliate marketing program with a slight kink.”

Source: Zaarly

A cupcake that you can find on The Fancy and get made via Zaarly

And he’s not impressed with the integrations that Zaarly has announced with companies like TheFancy and Cookstr.

“The examples seem like toys,” Pine says. “I’m on Cookstr … I see a recipe … and then I’m going to get someone to make it for me? I see that as kind of a joke.”

I asked Zaarly about Pine’s comments, and co-founder Eric Koester replied:

“We are obviously very bullish on this person-to-person space and believe there will be a number of exciting companies built in it — we certainly hope to be one of them.

The Zaarly team continues to hear some amazing feedback from our buyers, our sellers and our partners, so we’re continuing to follow their lead and build something they love that helps them buy and sell with each other right in their own neighborhoods.

With any new sector, there is lots of innovation still to come, but thus far it’s great to see more entrepreneurs and companies working to empower person-to-person commerce.”

The bigger question

I guess the bigger question is this: both Ubokia and Zaarly have two massive, entrenched competitors in eBay and Craigslist. Why not focus on them? At least first?

In fact, both Ubokia and Zaarly are getting traction and making partnerships. You might almost argue that a partnership of a buyer-side marketplace of services and a buyer-side marketplace of things would be a marriage made in heaven.

One thing I will add …

The Ubokia model of embedding a store in every site is a real winner. Zaarly, are you up for some shameless stealing of great ideas?

photo credit: szeke via photo pin cc

eBay met high expectations for its second quarter earnings today with revenue, net income, and user growth up double digits from last year.

The company reported a revenue of $3.4 billion, up 23% compared to the same period in 2011. eBay also brought in $692 million in net income, with share prices coming in at $.53 per share, up from the $.22 per share last year.

“This was eBay’s strongest quarter of year over year organic … growth since 2006,” said eBay CEO John Donahoe on the earnings call. “eBay is revitalized.”

PayPal was a major driver of this performance, reporting that its revenue increased 26% year over year to around $1.4 billion and 113.2 million active accounts. That’s nearly 42 percent of eBay’s overall revenue. eBay attributes this to the fact that PayPal now appears in more places on the website, and that buyers are using the “Bill Me Later” function more, which is based on PayPal. PayPal also announced today that it is rolling out a point-of-sale service for retailers to use in stores. In just over four weeks, Abercrombie & Fitch beta-tested and began rolling out PayPal at more than 900 locations across the U.S.

Mobile was a major contributor to the growth with 600,000 new customers making their first purchase through eBay’s mobile apps. PayPal Here, eBay’s answer to Square’s mobile payments dongle has also been doing well. PayPal Here is officially open to all markets for anyone interested in signing up. Though it doesn’t affect the second quarter, PayPal announced yesterday that it acquired Card.io, a mobile app that reads credit card information using a smartphone’s camera.

“Mobile is impacting a significant portion of eBay’s business,” said Donahoe. “Mobile shoppers and mobile payers are three to four times more valuable than Web only.”

Another factor is the recent partnership between PayPal and major Japanese venture capital firm Softbank to create “PayPal Japan.” This new focus on Japan is intended to help the adoption of e-payments in Asia, and hopefully grow small businesses in the region.

Despite analyst expectations of low profits this quarter, due to the issues engulfing Europe and a slow downing the Asian market, the outlook for eBay was high after eBay stock hit a five-year high in April. eBay has long been the world’s largest online marketplace, with millions of buyers and sellers operating through the website. eBay products and companies include eBay Marketplace, Media Marketplace, PayPal, Half.com, MicroPlace, Shopping.com, Rent.com, Stubhub and various online classifieds.

For its third quarter, eBay expected to bring up to $3.4 billion in revenue, and a diluted share estimate of $0.42 – $0.44 a share. For 2012 overall, the company expects revenue to sit between $13.8 billion to $14.1 billion.

I’m talking, of course, about PayPal, the “subsidiary” that now accounts for well over a third of eBay’s total revenue — and gaining.

Since the deal completed, PayPal has moved more than half a trillion dollars in payments and grown from 23 million regular users to over 110 million. VentureBeat spoke to PayPal’s senior director of global communications, Anuj Nayar, about the anniversary.

Source: eBay

PayPal revenue as a percentage of eBay revenue

“There’s very few of these acquisitions that are universally seen as a success story,” Nayar said. “But eBay buying PayPal was maybe the most successful acquisition in Silicon Valley history. PayPal now accounts for 38 percent of the total company’s revenue.”

The purchase price was $1.5 billion dollars, but not a penny was actually paid. Instead, the deal was a tax-free stock-for-stock exchange: .39 eBay shares for every PayPal share.

In return, PayPal has generated about $20 billion in revenue for eBay over the past decade. In fact, this year alone PayPal expects to process more than three times the initial purchase amount — $7 billion — in mobile payments alone.

There’s some irony there, as Nayar notes:

“In 1998 the original business model was to move money between two Palm Pilots … and the online payments was a side business.” Now, he says with a trace of humor, “the hot new thing is to use your mobile phone as a wallet.”

Source: Dipity.com

It all started on a Palm Pilot?

Money on a mobile device is essentially how PayPal began. And a recent re-organization by PayPal president David Marcus has refocused the company on mobile, putting former mobile chief Hill Ferguson in charge of all PayPal product groups.

It’s a needed change, says Nayar.

“The payments market is getting more and more competitive … every morning I check VentureBeat and there’s another digital wallet company starting up. We are definitely doubling down on accelerating innovation.”

Of course, it’s not just small startups challenging PayPal.

As we reported late in June, competitors include Facebook, Google, and Apple. None of those are competitors to be taken lightly. One owns the world’s largest social graph, and the other two have a stranglehold on the mobile devices that hundreds of millions of people currently  use … and billions more probably soon will.

Nayar knows PayPal is in for the fight of its life but likes the company’s chances.

“There’s a very different level of consumers buying in when you’re talking about your money. You need scale and you need trust.”

PayPal will need to grow both of these to have a future decade as successful as its past decade.

A brief history of PayPal:

• 1998: Peter Thiel and Max Levchin develop a service named PayPal as a secure way to beam money between Palm Pilots
• 1999: Nokia Ventures and Deutsche Bank “beam” Peter Thiel $4.5 million in venture funding from a Palm Pilot
• 2000: PayPal enables eBay payments
• 2001: PayPal goes public on the NASDAQ
• 2002: eBay acquires PayPal for $1.5 billion and begins to integrate PayPal into eBay
• 2004: PayPal launches its first API and introduces Web Services
• 2005: PayPal introduces micropayments
• 2010: PayPal launches the new Send Money application for mobile devices, processes $750 million in mobile payments
• 2011: PayPal processes $4 billion in mobile payment volume for the year
• 2012: PayPal partners with Home depot: can be used for payments at 2000 stores

Image credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki/ShutterStock

Zaarly is simple: You need something done, you find a neighbor who can do it. Or if you have a unneeded item, you sell it to someone who lives right around the corner. It’s local commerce, mediated by the internet: eBay for your block.

As of today, users on The Fancy can sign up for commerce and sell their creations. Two charming examples the company provided are cookie monster cookies, and lego-head propane tanks.

Who would not want one or ten of these?

In a statement, a representative for The Fancy said that “with Zaarly, the barriers to entry for commerce on The Fancy are much lower. Anyone with the time and energy can now become a merchant through our platform.”

Users simply see an item they want, click the Make it for Me button, and enter their details:

I’m not sure if eBay or Etsy should be worried, but The Fancy is growing quickly.

The only question: Will the site be overrun by ugly items that people want to sell out of their garage? That certainly doesn’t fit The Fancy’s elegant interface and brand.

Image credit: ShutterStock

In an effort to rev up the social engines of race car lovers everywhere, eBay is launching an extreme Twitter conversation hub for the Toyota Grand Prix in Long Beach.

eBay, in partnership with social media experience generator BumeBox, is going all-in on social with an eBay Motors’ branded microsite that aims to bring the live and behind-the-scenes drama of the IndyCar event to viewers at home.

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The eBay racing page, which pulls in Twitter content with #ebayracing and other hashtags, includes official photos and videos from event participants, fan tweets and photos, a live leaderboard, tweets from the track, a Twitter-powered voting module for cheering on drivers, and social sharing options for site visitors.

“We think the needs of the consumer have changed,” BumeBox founder and CEO Jon Fahrner told VentureBeat. “The consumer wants a compelling real-time experience, especially if it’s from a premium brand, and we’re the framework for those types of experiences.”

BumeBox, the mastermind behind eBay’s Twitter-ific racing page, makes a sophisticated application that powers real-time social experiences for large companies that want fully-branded “Twitter parties on steroids,” live video experiences, and interactive events on their own websites or Facebook Pages. The one-year-old Palo Alto-based company counts 20th Century Fox and Marc Jacobs as clients.

For eBay Motors, already a sponsor of IndyCar events, the social media push is designed to make gearheads think of eBay for their car parts and accessories needs, Fahrner said. This weekend’s Grand Prix is just the first of several #ebayracing events BumeBox and eBay Motors are collaborating on.

“We want to make it so that the experience means something to someone at the race and to someone at home,” Farher said. The companies have even put the #ebayracing hashtag on a race car. “It may be the world’s fastest hashtag.”

And, according to Fahrner, the campaign should slip in nicely with the existing Twitter culture of racing events. “This is just a natural progression, a reaction to what was organically happening for racing fans.”

Joined by existing investors Accel Partners, Jafco Ventures and DAG Ventures, the company also plans to use the funding to expand its global presence by addressing the increased data privacy challenges across the world. By simplifying privacy management for companies and its consumers, TRUSTe hopes to ensure safe online interaction for shoppers, advertisers and even users in the mobile realm.

“TRUSTe has a unique combination of robust technology, an innovative compliance methodology, and the most trusted and recognizable privacy brand through its pervasive online trustmark – enabling it to continuously deliver industry leading privacy management solutions,” said Steve Anderson, Baseline Ventures. “In less than one year, their TRUSTed Ads online advertising compliance solution has become the market leader in this fast growing segment.”

Best known for its work with known companies like eBay, Apple, Microsoft and over 4,500 others, TRUSTe anticipates its accelerated development with privacy technology will expand its connection to new online businesses.

Over the past 18 months, not only has the company tripled in sales, product offerings and employees, but it has also increased interest in investments for additional staff to support its growing need to address management for complex technology and complicated compliance agreements.

Chief Executive Chris Babel plans to speak in Chicago Jan. 24 about data collection and the concern with online privacy at the 2012 Privacy & Data Protection Town Hall.

Partnering with The Home Depot, PayPal tested its state-of-the-art Touchstone technology in over 51 store locations. Customers are able to pay by just entering their mobile number and PIN or swiping a PayPal credit card at checkout.

“We’ve reached a critical milestone in PayPal History,” said West Stringfellow, PayPal Emerging Opportunities in a press release from eBay. “The Home Depot is our first major stride in bringing the PayPal vision to life.”

PayPal’s expansion into the offline world could mean competition for Visa and MasterCard. Last year, the company boasted over 350 million users, which surpasses the number of credit card holders for both MasterCard and Visa respectively.

PayPal has additional plans to team up with ABJ Software and partner with other “large and mortar retailers” in the months ahead.

Photo via laihiu/Flickr

Zvents, founded in 2005, lets users to find out what events are going on locally, and also helps advertisers promote those events to gain better attendance.

With more than 600,000 current event listings at any given time, Zvent will drastically increase StubHub’s own event listings database, which contains around 30,000 events.

Media and entertainment strategy advisors MESA advised Zvents on the deal.

Sources told former TechCrunch editor-in-chief and current CrunchFund investor Michael Arrington that the purchase price was around $80 million.

Hunch, founded by serial entrepreneurs Caterina Fake, Chris Dixon and Tom Pinckney, launched in 2009 as a question-and-answer decision engine. The startup later switched gears to focus on building a “taste graph” to connect web users around their affinities. The site uses this data to make predictions about its users and provide them with personalized content recommendations.

“Hunch’s technology talent and its deep expertise in areas like machine learning, data mining and predictive modeling are expected to help eBay expand and grow merchandising and relevance capabilities to further improve the shopping and selling experience for eBay customers,” eBay said in a statement. “Hunch will enable eBay to move beyond standard item-to-item recommendations and use a broader variety of members’ online tastes and interests to suggest new and interesting items for them to browse and buy on eBay.”

Hunch, a New York-based company, had raised more than $19 million dollars in funding before being acquired.

[Image via Flickr/Rob Blatt]

Particle Code, which was a DEMO 2010 DEMOgod winner, allows developers to create a unified web experience across devices. Appcelerator is known for its Titanium tool, which is used by clients such as NBC, Zipcar, eBay and others, to power their mobile apps.

“The real story here is they were weak where we were strong, and they were strong where we were weak, so it’s a really good match,” says Benartzi.

The Particle Code-Appcelerator tie-up is happening amidst a flurry of activity on the HTML5 platform development platform front. Today, Sencha announced a $15 million investment round to boost its platform, which creates native app functionality on mobile devices such as the iPad.

“It’s a really interesting time, and I’m glad we’re part of that story, and the excitement in that space,” says Benartzi. Particle Code was launched at DEMO 2010, and Benartzi says after a transition period with Appcelerator, she’s probably going to launch her third startup, “If she can help it.”

Particle Code had previously received $3 million from Benhamou Global Ventures.