ReadWriteWeb

What's to stop you from posting an auction on online auction site Ebay and then bidding on it yourself from another fake account to boost the price? Nothing, if you don't mind the idea of breaking the law and possibly facing jail time and a $7,500 fine when you get caught and convicted.

Paul Barrett was the first U.K. seller "to be prosecuted for artificially inflating prices by bidding on his own eBay auctions has been told to pay £5,000 in fines and costs, and ordered to do 250 hours community service," according to an article in The Register.

Online auction and marketplace eBay announced today that it has acquired the popular iPhone barcode scanning application RedLaser. The application and the image recognition technology behind it are built by Boulder-based TechStars graduate Occipital, who says the application "[outgrew] our basement office." While the team at Occipital is refocusing its efforts to new fronts, eBay says it will pick up where the startup left off by continuing to develop the app and it's third-party SDK users.

It's human nature - we are wired to be averse to change. When something new comes into our lives, we inherently approach it with caution, and at times, with negativity and hostility; but if that change is fundamentally good and right, it will gradually become widely accepted. For startups, especially those in the early stages of existence, changes come frequently and now and then in large chunks, which can be jarring for users who may have just become accustomed to the previous version of a product.

Over the past decade, Amazon.com and eBay have continued to dominate the online retail market in the United States. However, there have been signs that more social and distributed forms of online shopping are gaining traction. eBay, in particular, is beginning to lose ground.

In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. Advances in recommendations technology, together with the emergence of social media and mobile commerce, have combined to change the way e-commerce is transacted. In a follow-up post, we look at current statistics for online retail.

Skype's litigation woes with eBay had businesses a bit worried. Funding Skype in the enterprise looked risky with the potential that a judge could at some point pull the code base out from under Skype and leave businesses stranded.

But that's not an issue anymore. According to Network World, Skype now has rights to the code that is essential for the service to run. That means Skype for business is a green light for the companies seeking to use the VOIP service.

The Inside Source is eBay's latest announcement. The searching, buying, and selling habits of its 88 million active users have added up to an enormous dataset, one that could have easily been hoarded and sold to marketers, brands, and others with a vested interest in online retail and trends.

Although eBay isn't releasing raw stats into the wild, it is publishing editorial content and news on trends as well as a tag cloud of most popular searches right now. Coming soon are multimedia galleries and real-time visualizations of current eBay searches. Can we get an open API? Read on to find out.

After waiting for two months for PayPal to release its much-anticipated platform, the day has finally arrived for PayPal X. ReadWriteWeb first covered the company's announcement in late July and today, at San Francisco's Concourse Exhibition Center, developers and press people waited with bated breath to see what was earlier described as a "platform as ubiquitous as the electrical outlet."

In a surprise announcement, eBay, and Verizon have been awarded the top titles of "Most Trusted Companies for Privacy" by the Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe. According to a recent survey, these companies were shown to offer clear privacy statements, customer-friendly notices, great access to information, solid cookie management and sound data sharing practices. While the companies may excel on paper, it's hard to believe these are the top privacy-related companies based on public sentiment alone. It appears that the Ponemon Institute's expert panel and the 6,486 US consumers surveyed have lost their long term memories.

Update: This news is now official.

Online telephony service Skype will be sold by eBay to a group of private investors, possibly including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen's new venture capital group, and the deal will be announced on Tuesday according to a report by a team of reporters from the New York Times.

EBay faces legal challenges from Skype's founders that the company said earlier this summer could mean the end of Skype as we know it. From an innovation perspective, we're always excited when such an interesting company breaks free from a slow-moving monolith that acquired it.

According to Ina Steiner from AuctionBytes, eBay experienced a major drop in traffic over the last few months. Based on data from Nielsen, Steiner concludes that eBay's page views in May 2009 dropped 32% compared to May 2008, and compared to May 2005, page views were down by 40%. With a 7% drop from May 2008 to May 2009, the unique visitor numbers show a slightly less dramatic decline, but things are clearly not going too well for eBay right now.