Comments on: eBay Developer Challenge 2006

By: Adam Trachtenberg

Adam Trachtenberg — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 22:18:28 +0000

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.

By: Morgan Schweers

Morgan Schweers — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 21:57:00 +0000

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!

By: Adam Trachtenberg

Adam Trachtenberg — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 21:16:48 +0000

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.

By: Morgan Schweers

Morgan Schweers — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 20:27:38 +0000

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!

By: Adam Trachtenberg

Adam Trachtenberg — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 16:05:58 +0000

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.

By: Tomek

Tomek — Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:17:45 +0000

“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!