VentureBeat

Auctomatic wants to make it easier for eBay’s most active sellers to manage sales. The San Francisco-based company launched its public beta yesterday.

So-called “powersellers” range from self-employed individuals to large firms like Dell. EBay doesn’t offer all the tools needed to manage the process of selling a lot of merchandise at once.

A range of third parties provide software tools designed to streamline the process. The largest, ChannelAdvisor, raised $30 million in May from New Enterprise Associates and other firms.

Below, Kulveer Taggar and Patrick Collison of Auctomatic tell me how they plan to compete against ChannelAdviser and other existing tool-providers.

Auctomatic has raised more than $400,000 in seed money from Y Combinator and other investors, including Paul Buchheit, creator of Google’s Gmail service.

VentureBeat: What’s wrong with the seller experience, as is? Since eBay is so big and established, why hasn’t it solved the problem already?

Kulveer Taggar: The eBay website works fine for the one-off sellers (which is what it was built for). As soon as anyone gets serious about selling, then they have to find software that helps them manage their inventory, listings, feedback, shipping, images, and so on.

To the second part of the question, there’s a big market of tools built around their platform (including eBay’s own tools — companies they purchased), but there’s lots of opportunity internationally, for seller optimization, and the ongoing efforts of Amazon and Google in e-commerce.

VB: How is this a big problem and what are you doing differently — since there are other third-party powerseller tool providers?

KT: Power-sellers bring in over $1 billion per month in gross merchandise value in the US alone. There are third parties that provide tools and make in the millions of revenue, but people tell us our user interface is a big improvement. Also, our back-end technology allows us to build new features much faster than the others.

For example, nobody builds good statistics support — the big toolmakers require that you use software provided by other third parties, and then manually cross-reference the results. We automatically generate statistics based on every view of any of your auctions, and integrate the results of that analysis into the app.

Patrick Collison: Ultimately, we want to rapidly build whatever it is that power-sellers need.

To do this, we use a lot of Smalltalk [a relatively obscure language; database startup Dabble DB is perhaps the best-known example of its use on the web]. Ultimately, it all comes down to being able to iterate and react faster, and Smalltalk puts us in a good position to do this — with our technology stack, we’re pretty confident we can out-develop our biggest competitor (which has more than 100 developers).

In Smalltalk, things that they’ve had for decades but are still absent elsewhere (like the interactive environment) really to turn out to be a big deal. A good example of this is data importing from eBay or other third party tools. It’s an inexact science. If someone encounters a problem importing their data (i.e., something we haven’t seen before in a test environment), instead of just giving up, we can log into their account and run a debug session right there and then, as they’re waiting on their browser to complete the request.

Or take international support. It has taken most of our competitors years to get anywhere with it. We implemented it in less than a week.

We definitely had to invest more in the set up — it’s not Rails [a popular programming language], where it’s most all ready for you. We had to build a lot of it ourself, and that took some time — but we’re definitely glad that we did.

VB: There’s a lot of buzz — at least in Silicon Valley — about developer platforms, at least for social networks. How’s eBay’s e-commerce platform for third parties?

KT: The last numbers I saw were that 56% of all ebay.com listings come through the API [application programming interface] and this number itself is growing at 27 percent, year-over-year. EBay’s international API markets are still open for growth, for a tools company like us.

I’d say that growth in API usage is because of the maturing of the platform (it’s been around for many years) and that the platform companies are doing better: There are now lots of people making money off the eBay platform, meaning there’s a lot of business for us to tap into. [Note: eBay as a company is doing quite well, aside from the write-down on Skype last quarter.]

In the early days, eBay couldn’t make up its mind about being a platform. They would charge for the API. That’s all changed: The API became free in 2005 and eBay made the decision that they were not really a software company, though on that last point, that’s my speculation.

Ultimately, I think they realise that having an open platform benefits them because it translates to more activity. Now, there’s a lot of internal support for the platform, with more resources being allocated towards it.

VB: Do you think any other marketplaces will be able to compete against this move? Example: what if Amazon decides to offer a competing marketplace? What about Facebook’s new API for its marketplace? How would that affect you? Would you look to integrate powerseller tools with other such marketplaces?

KT: I hear that Amazon is going to get aggressive with the “Merchants at Amazon” program, which will replace their marketplace. We’d definitely look to integrate with those marketplaces.

Facebook marketplace: It’d be interesting to experiment with different ways of making e-commerce [applications that make use of Facebook's social data.] We may apply to the FB Fund to that end [a Facebook-run grant program to finance outside developers in building interesting new applications on the site].

This talk of platforms should also include Google. We spoke to some of their people at eBay Live and they were very keen for us to integrate with Google Product Search — I’ve heard that 30 percent of all their searches are product searches. With google, it’d be interesting to let power-sellers buy their own traffic, though that’s likely a long way off for us.

VB: Tell me more about the international market, especially versus the US market. What are you seeing and how are you adapting?

KT: I think international users have been less well served by the other third-party tools companies as obviously the US companies have targeted the US market, which is about 50 percent of eBay overall.

So yes, a customised solution for UK/Ireland, Germany, India and other markets is a distinct possibility. We know of some British power-sellers who pay hundreds of pounds to have their accounts sync with eBay because all the US solutions obviously work with US accounting software. That’s a pain we’re looking to eliminate.

[Disclosure: I am personal friends with people in the company.]

 updated

Four former Google software designers who helped create its mail and mapping services have started a new Silicon Valley company Friendfeed, to help you track news items your friends are reading and their other activities.

It centers around a feature made famous by the popular social network Facebook: The “feed,” which gives you a steady stream of news about what your friends are doing, i.e., what they’re reading, what applications they’re adding, videos they’re viewing, and so on.

But Friendfeed goes a step beyond Facebook’s feed. It gives you a feed from your friends’ activities on 23 other networks, too. For example, it lets you see what they’re reading on Digg and Slashdot, what they’re watching on Netflix, YouTube or Flickr, or listening to on Last.fm.

There’s a huge upside and downside: On the up, it lets you finally track lots of core activities of your closest friends. On the downside, it requires significant investment, and dealing with even more noise than already have. All your friends have to sign up, if you want to see all their activities. Already, we know of people who have tired of all the updating on Facebook. Do they want more? Friendfeed walks the fine line between the simplicity of a Twitter (simple updates from friends) and being a firehose blasting you with more than you can handle.

The company was started by Bret Taylor (left) and Jim Norris (right), two of the original Google Maps engineers. They incubated the idea at Benchmark Capital, a well-known venture capital firm (see our coverage). They later teamed up with Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, two of the creators of Gmail. Buchheit, who led Gmail project, tells VentureBeat the company isn’t ready to release details today about funding just yet, but hopes that an announcement can be made soon, perhaps as early as next week. We suspect the final terms are being ironed out, because both sides aren’t saying much. “We’re delighted to be able to work with these very talented entrepreneurs,” Benchmark’s Peter Fenton messaged us through a spokeswoman, with the excuse that he was at the firm’s day long partner meeting and couldn’t say more.

Since leaving Google, Buchheit has been investing in start-ups, and so this is a new turn for him. Buchheit told us several months ago he was looking for a better way to track news.

The New York Times first ran a story about Friendfeed story this morning.

The “meta”-feed is not trapped inside Facebook, but can run anywhere. It can run within an application on our Facebook account or on your Google homepage.

Of course, a number of other content sharing sites exist. However, none of them have focused on aggregating news feeds in this way. With one exception: Mogad, which we wrote about here, but which is in very early days. Most notable about this is that Aydin Senkut, an investor in Mogad, and also a former Google employee, sits in the same office with Buchheit on Ramona Ave in Palo Alto. The launch of Friendfeed could make for some interesting (heated) conversations over there :)

Some other sites we’ve written about, including Spokeo and ProfileLinker (see coverage), have let you aggregate profiles of your friends and what they’re doing, but they haven’t really taken off — and haven’t focused on streaming feeds.

When you sign up for an account (it is limiting a the number of accounts it is giving out; you must sign up on the site), the company lets you tell it what sites your participate on, so that it can track you. Your friends have to do the same.

Weebly, the free AJAX website creator, has just raised a $650K angel round and launched a way for you to create blogs from within your site.

The move pits the young San Francisco company, which has garnered about 25,000 users, against entrenched players like Google’s Blogger, Automatic’s WordPress and SixApart’s TypePad — each of which have millions of users.

The money comes from Ron Conway, Steve Anderson, Paul Buchheit (a creator of Gmail), Aydin Senkut and Mike Maples. Weebly had received its seed funding from YCombinator.

Weebly’s blog creator deploys the same remarkably simple AJAX-based, drag-and-drop interface that makes their website design tool so easy to use. (See our previous coverage here.)

When creating blog pages, you get the extra option of a “Blog Sidebar,” from which you can drag Twitter, Flickr and del.icio.us Linkrolls widgets (partial screenshot below). Weebly intends to add to this selection of widget defaults, but for now you can add any widget you want by dragging in an HTML box and pasting the widget’s code.

The best thing about Weebly is that you see the effects of your edits at the instant you implement them. Unlike its biggest rivals — including Blogger, which has some AJAX controls — there’s no need to pop up another window, adjust some settings and look at the preview to make sure you’ve nailed it. While Weebly is simple and fun to use, however, you’ll need design skills to create a professional looking blog — with appropriate color matching, and so on.

Weebly, its rival SiteKreator and others represent a move towards the commoditization of basic website design. All of them are in the early stages and do not have wide reach or a robust business model. But they represent a growing, potentially critical threat to web designers not versed in the cutting edge of the art. As these companies — and their much larger rivals — continue to improve on this technology and implementation, this threat becomes even greater.