About the Author

author photo

Adam Trachtenberg is the Director of the LinkedIn Developer Network, where he oversees developer relations and marketing for the LinkedIn Platform. Before LinkedIn, Adam worked at eBay in platform product management and marketing. Even earlier, he co-founded Student.Com and TVGrid.com. Adam is the author of PHP Cookbook and Upgrading to PHP 5. He lives in San Francisco.

See All Posts by This Author

eBay on TV & DVRs

May 20th, 2005 • Related • Filed Under

One of the cool things about Web services is seeing people use them in unexpected and non-traditional ways to do cool stuff. For example, one of our developers, BIAP, just launched a trial service in Austin that lets you use eBay on your TV.

They’ve hooked up our API with a Time Warner DVD settop box. Unlike other “interactive TV shopping” experiences, this product is more than just finding products to buy. You can actually keep up-to-date on all your eBay auctions. For example, you can arrange to automatically see a pop-up notification on your TV set when you’re outbid on a listing, and rebid just by hitting the “B” key on the remote. (Or not, if you find that kind of thing annoying.)

If you’re like me, and don’t live in Austin, but still want to get a look, check out their demo.

Earlier this year, Dan wrote a different type of DVR program — one that lets you search eBay using your TiVo and buy fixed price items in our media-related categories. His was just a proof-of-concept, but we’ve open sourced the code, so feel free to check it out and hack on it.

There Is 1 Response So Far. »

  1. Comment by Art Luff on 21 August 2007:

    Couldn’t access the TiVo Download.

    Art