On Monday, eBay announced it was canceling next year's "eBay Live" conference and also released the list of speakers at next month's Developer's Conference.
eBay executive Lorrie Norrington wrote on eBay's Announcement Board that the company would not be holding its eBay Live conference in 2009. She said instead, eBay would focus its energy next year on smaller venues "to facilitate more face-to-face interactions with our customers and community." A source told AuctionBytes eBay had booked eBay Live 2009, scheduled to take place in Atlanta on June 11 - 13, in 2004 but cancelled it in early 2006. (http://www2.ebay.com/aw/core/200805050941142.html)
eBay's two annual conferences - one for buyers and sellers, the other for developers - are 6 weeks away. After eBay Live 2008 is wrapped up in Chicago, the next conference will take place in Orlando in August 2010.
Meanwhile, eBay made some recent additions to its keynote lineup for the eBay Developers Conference 2008: Mike Shaver, Chief Evangelist for Mozilla Corporation; Adam Gross, Vice President, Platform and Developer Marketing at Salesforce.com; Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com; John Donahoe, CEO and President of eBay Inc.; Rajiv Dutta, president of eBay Marketplaces; James Barrese, Vice President of Systems and Architecture at eBay; Max Mancini, Senior Director of Platform and Disruptive Innovation at eBay.
eBay DevCon speakers will be addressing the importance of open platforms in improving user experiences, boosting customer loyalty and engagement, and helping entrepreneurial developers monetize their applications by taking advantage of leading ecommerce API platforms on the Web. The opening keynote demo features "Project Echo" for the eBay platform (http://ebaydeveloper.typepad.com/dev/2008/05/new-industry-ke.html).