About the Author

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.

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There Are 6 Responses So Far. »

1. 

   Comment by Tomek on 15 November 2005:

   “Contest is open to confirmed registered members of the eBay Developers Program, who are legal residents of _the United States and the District of Columbia_, 18 years of age and older.”
   Hold your horses Europeans!
2. 

   Comment by Adam Trachtenberg on 15 November 2005:

   Don’t blame us, blame the lawyers. We wanted to open it up to as many people as we could.

   However, contest law is extremely specialized and varies not only from country to country, but even within a country.

   (For example, in the US there is special stuff for the state of Arizona and in Canada there is special stuff for the providence of Quebec.)

   This made adding the legal documents for new countries and translating the pages very expensive because not only was there a lot of work to be done, we couldn’t handle it inside of eBay.

   Therefore, we decided it was better to spend the extra money on cash and prizes for coders than on lawyers.
3. 

   Comment by Morgan Schweers on 15 November 2005:

   Greetings,
   Heh… What’s the official word on pre-existing apps being moved over to the API (from scraping, natch) being entered into the dev challenge?

   — Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!
4. 

   Comment by Adam Trachtenberg on 15 November 2005:

   Hello Morgan —

   You are always more than welcome to move JBidWatcher over to the API, and it’d certainly be eligible for the Developer Challenge.
5. 

   Comment by Morgan Schweers on 15 November 2005:

   Greetings,
   If I can get the PlaceOffer API, I’ll be doing just that…

   I’m downright excited about this development (eBay’s free APIs).

   Once the only hurdle (PlaceOffer) is cleared, I want out of the scraping treadmill asap. :) And hey, JBidwatcher’s a pretty impressive app, maybe worthy of entry into the challenge…

   — Morgan Schweers, CyberFOX!
6. 

   Comment by Adam Trachtenberg on 15 November 2005:

   Alas, I’m not in charge of who does and doesn’t get access to the PlaceOffer API. Has anyone gotten back to your request?

   However, I do believe there are some terms and conditions surrounding PlaceOffer, such as not offering timed bidding, but only real time bidding. I don’t know how that syncs up with product vision, but I wanted to give you a heads up on that.