eBay has acquired VUVOX to help further develop rich media capabilities in the eBay marketplace in order to create an enhanced customer experience. Patrick de Laive broke the story on his blog, The Next Web (http://thenextweb.org/2008/06/23/ebay-secretly-acquires-visual-media-company-vuvox). de Laive wrote that William Woodward (co-founder of Macromedia and an early investor and board member of Myspace) and Dane Howard (author of Future of Memories and designer) are part of the VUVOX team.
According to eBay's official blogger, the VUVOX team will be hired as eBay employees and will join the design and development teams on the main Marketplaces campus in San Jose (http://ebayinkblog.com/2008/06/23/vuvox-on-ebay).
Vendors at last week's eBay conference were buzzing about news that eBay would be limiting active content, including video players, but did not yet have details on whether their services would be allowed (http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2008/6/1214089365.html). And while not directly announcing the limitation to users, the news also appeared on a new eBay FAQ for sellers, which reads:
To remove the risk and still allow members to provide a rich experience similar to active content, eBay will gradually roll-out a safe mark-up language and approved "widgets" for uses such as counters, photo galleries, video, and cross-merchandising. Safe HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) will be allowed, but JavaScript and Flash will not be allowed. (http://pages.ebay.com/sell/June2008Update/faq/index.html)
http://www.vuvox.com
