Up to now, the online tool for managing and tracking listings on eBay, called eBay Selling Manager, has only offered sellers direct access to applications that the e-commerce giant developed in-house. But that’s about to change.

Project Echo, unveiled at this week’s eBay Developers Conference in Chicago, takes the company’s online platform to the next level by enabling outside developers to embed applications in the eBay site.

“Third-party developers want our help with marketing and distribution, and sellers consistently seek better tools to help them scale,” said Max Mancini, senior director of platform and disruptive innovation at eBay. “Opening eBay.com directly to third-party applications through the selling manager gives developers an immediate channel to growth-minded eBay sellers.”

New Revenue Streams

Developers meeting the site standards for trusted buying and selling experiences will have an opportunity to showcase their tools as well as realize direct sales to eBay’s 700,000 sellers.

“This move presents a great opportunity for us to tap into the distribution and marketing scale of eBay in a way we’ve never been able to utilize before,” said Jerad Schempp, CEO of Hosted Support.

Developers will embed their applications in selling manager through an ‘Echo Canvas’ window slated to appear within My eBay. They will be able to promote their products based on keywords as well as manage the delivery of important information to subscribed users over a secure on-site communications channel.

Developers will also be given the opportunity to benefit from real-time promotions and placements. Listings for their applications will appear within popular eBay site flows based on context-sensitive user profile data, with sellers shown the applications most relevant to their needs.

Trusted Access

According to eBay, subscribing to a third-party application or feature in selling manager will be identical to how eBay-developed selling features and applications are offered. Business sellers will be able…

Everyone is talking that innovation is the way to business success, but no one is talking about what to innovate and when to innovate. Actually innovation is the product of necessity and necessity itself is a product of desire to be the better; better in appearance, better in quality, better in service and better in cost-effectiveness. Every successful businessman know that there will be hardly any successful innovation if you are planning to innovate, but will be plenty if you sincerely want your dreams come true.

So how innovation starts? It starts from the realization that one or more of your business plans/processes are not delivering the result you want or from the thought that you can transform existing products/services/plans for better results or you can create a better product/service. You start to modify/create the plan with respect to your goals, your mind become dedicated, you starts to think merits and demerits of each plan/step, you want to magnify the advantages and minimize the disadvantages. And ultimately you will be innovating some thing, which is most suitable for your way of thinking and business.

So what determines success? It is determined by things like your desire to be successful, open-mindedness, knowledge, ability to realize what is good and what is bad, capacity to stop/change bad plans and practices, and politeness to admit you are wrong when you are wrong.

What does being an entrepreneur really mean? How do you make your work a meaningful part of your life without becoming consumed by it? How do you revive your own entrepreneurial spirit and even incorporate it into your workplace? Gregg Vanourek, co-author of Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives, answers these questions in a Q&A about his book published in U.S. News & World Report.

Some highlights:
•According to Vanourek, people confuse owning a small business with entrepreneurship, but these aren’t exactly the same. Rather entrepreneurship is a state of mind that encompasses ingenuity and innovation. “You can’t be entrepreneurial without being innovative,” Vanourek says.

•Integrating your personal and professional life is not about working through the weekends; instead it’s about “being the same person in your personal life that you are at work,” Vanourek says. It’s “knowing what your values are, what your strengths and passions are, and bringing those to bear in your work, and your personal life, so that you’re the same person across all of those different roles,” he says.

AMD’s Puma is coming onto the stage. The new laptop platform from Advanced Micro Devices, with AMD’s dual-core Turion X2 Ultra mobile processor, a seven-series chip set, and ATI Radeon HD 3000 series graphics, was to be unveiled Wednesday at the Computex conference in Taipei, Taiwan.

The target markets are consumers, notably gamers, as well as small and midsize businesses. AMD President and COO Dirk Meyer said the “interrelated innovations” in the Puma platform deliver both “enhanced business productivity and the ultimate in HD visual performance on the go.” The company noted that business users with Microsoft Windows Vista are utilizing applications that are more graphically intensive.

Radeon HD 3000 Series

The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series was first announced in January, and offers a new family of discrete graphics chips. At the time, AMD noted that the 3000 series was optimized for Puma to provide what it called “The Ultimate Visual Experience.” Several major laptop makers, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Toshiba, Asus, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, NEC, Toshiba, and Acer are planning to use the Puma platform in upcoming products.

Among other things, the company touted the 3000 series’ support for Microsoft DirectX 10.1, which can provide a high level of lighting and rendering techniques for 3D games.

The Puma platform mixes integrated and discrete graphics, with the first for basic graphics with low power and lower cost, and the second for turbo performance. Usually, a laptop provides one or the other, but Puma can turn on both at the same time for 3D games and high-definition video.

AMD said the Puma, running both integrated and discrete graphics, can utilize ATI CrossFireX Technology for a performance boost of up to 70 percent.

The Radeon graphics will allow users to download and watch high-definition video, and is also designed for efficient use of battery power. Enhancements in…

In the world of technology, success is linked to perceptions. Microsoft demonstrated its multi-touch technology in a Windows 7 demo at the D: All Things Digital conference this week, and the software giant may have hoped to overcome the perception that Apple owns touchscreen interfaces. Instead, some observers are wondering if Microsoft is making the same mistakes that now plague Windows Vista.

“We are always looking for new ways to deliver great experiences for our customers,” Chris Flores wrote on the Windows Vista blog. “This is especially true of Windows — where we’re constantly examining trends in hardware, software and services to ensure that we continue to drive the innovation.”

Copying Apple

But Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at JupiterResearch, is among those who are scratching their heads about Microsoft’s moves this week. He has one overarching question after viewing the demo: Is Redmond making the mistakes it made with Vista all over again?

“Some of the mistakes Microsoft made with Vista were talking up the next version of Windows way too early, showing off features out of context with the rest of the operating system,” Gartenberg said. “The second mistake was focusing so much on multi-touch.”

Apple didn’t invent touchscreen technology. In fact, Microsoft was working on the concept long before Apple publicly demonstrated its efforts. However, touchscreen technology has become almost synonymous with Apple and the iPhone, Gartenberg said, and he wonders why Microsoft is showing off a feature that makes the company appear as if it is copying Apple instead of innovating on its own.

“Yes, Microsoft wants to recapture the notion that Apple didn’t invent multi-touch, that they have their own implementation of it, but is that really the right way to go about this?” Gartenberg asked. “It’s a perception issue. It makes Microsoft look like it is chasing after Apple. Microsoft probably…

The browser, that porthole onto the broad horizon of the Web, is about to get some fancy new window dressing.

Next month, after three years of development and six months of public testing, Mozilla, the insurgent browser developer that rose from the ashes of Netscape, will release Firefox 3.0. It will feature a few tricks that could change the way people organize and
find the sites they visit most frequently.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft recently took the wraps off the first public test version of the latest edition of Internet Explorer, which is used by about 75 percent of all computer owners, according to Net Applications, a market share tracking firm. The finished version of Internet Explorer 8 could be released by the end of the year and is expected to have additional features.

Even Apple, which once politely kept its Safari browser within the confines of its own devices, is making a somewhat controversial push to get it onto the computers of people who use Windows PCs.

In other words, the browser war — the skirmish that landed Microsoft in antitrust trouble in the ’90s — is heating up again.

“The typical browser for today’s consumer doesn’t look all that different than it did 10 years ago,” said Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, one of the firms that invested in Flock, a browser startup. “That is an unsustainable trend that is the launching point for the second browser war, which will not be won by monopolistic muscle but by innovation.”

Browsers have always been viewed as crucial on-ramps to the Web. Nevertheless, after vanquishing Netscape, the first commercial browser developer, Microsoft waited five years before releasing the sixth version of Internet Explorer in 2006. Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer group, says the company was focused on plugging security…