Ebay

The day after I spoke to Rich Barton by phone last week, he laid off 25 percent of his staff at Zillow.com.

According to New York Times blogger Damon Darlin, Zillow "has been the envy of many a Web entrepreneur because it has a healthy $87 million in financing (about $540,000 per pre-layoff employee)."

The company, founded in 2006, boasts 5.4 million monthly visitors, but has yet to turn a profit.

Say you want to reach an old friend who's always on the move. Calling her at home using the number listed in the phone book [what a quaint notion!] probably won't work. But how else can you find the various other ways to reach her -- via mobile, or at work, or perhaps e-mail, instant messaging, Skype (EBAY), Facebook, or Twitter addresses?

Online auction house eBay said Monday it will place a global ban on the sale and purchase of ivory products on its site. The announcement comes nearly a year after the company banned cross-border trading of ivory products.

eBay, one of the largest marketplaces for ivory, first decided to ban international trade of ivory in January 2007 after a wildlife group found that nine out of 10 ivory products sold on eBay was illegal. Trade of ivory products in the U.S. was still accepted until now. The global ban will go into effect on Jan. 1, 2009.

I generally think of eBay as a force for environmental good...creating markets for items that would otherwise be trash but, instead, get to continue being useful. But this is very upsetting. It turns out that eBay is responsible for 2/3 of the worldwide online market in products made from endangered species.

When the e-commerce giant eBay emerged from the last U.S. recession seven years ago with an aura of invincibility, its chief executive, Meg Whitman, boasted that "eBay is to some extent recession-proof."

As the online auctioneer's revenue and stock price kept climbing, one of its main rivals, Amazon.com, just limped along.

How times have changed.

There's no shortage of U.S. Internet companies that have failed to replicate their successes at home in Chinese cyberspace. Despite throwing considerable resources at its Chinese-language operation, for instance, Google (GOOG) is a distant No. 2 in online search [BusinessWeek.com, 8/30/07] behind local champion Baidu.com (BIDU). In online auctions, eBay (EBAY) threw in the towel [BusinessWeek.com, 12/19/06] in December 2006 after failing to dislodge the market leader, Hangzhou-based Taobao, and joined forces with Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing's TOM Online.

One of the Internet's long-running success stories, global auction operator eBay, announced Monday that it is laying off 10 percent of its workforce in the coming weeks. Roughly 1,000 permanent employees and several hundred temporary employees will lose their jobs.

The company also announced that it expects its third-quarter revenues to be on the low end of previous estimates. Ebay's report will be released on Oct. 15.

Ever since the credit crunch first gripped the financial world, Silicon Valley has watched from the sidelines, secure in the faith that it was insulated from the coming storm.

With the stock market in turmoil, a U.S. bailout up in the air and recession seemingly inevitable, that faith is now being seriously undermined. High-tech entrepreneurs, investors and executives now believe the question is when, not if, the financial chaos will have an impact on the cradle of innovation in the United States.

Skype is answering concerns about its joint venture with TOM Online in China. A report released Thursday by Canadian human-rights activists revealed a massive surveillance system that monitors Skype messages containing words China's government deems offensive.

Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, released the report, Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China's TOM-Skype platform.

Skype Speaks Out

Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers have uncovered a massive surveillance system in China that monitors Skype messages containing words deemed offensive to the Communist government.

Specifically, the technology is keeping track of messages TOM-Skype customers are sending. TOM-Skype is a joint venture between eBay (Skype's owner) and a Chinese wireless company.