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eBay Unveils Bargain-Hunting Deals App By Carl Weinschenk November 24, 2009 2:46PM The holiday shopping season is upon us, and eBay wants its share of the pie. eBay has announced its free Deals app for the iPhone and iPod touch, which will search through millions of eBay listings to help users find the best offers. eBay has made further inroads to mobile commerce by upgrading its existing iPhone app with social-media integration.   Related Topics eBay PayPal Mobile Commerce iPhone App Store iTunes Online Shopping Latest News Endeavour Inspected for Damage Autism Risk for Kids of Older Mothers Go Online and You Can Save the Planet In Haiti, Relief Gaps Are Spreading U.S. To Form Climate-Change Agency The ongoing holiday selling season -- both online and in the malls -- will enter the home stretch with the celebration of Thanksgiving, and eBay wants to be ready. On Tuesday, the company announced the Deals app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Deals is designed, eBay says, to make it easier to find the best offers from amid the millions of listings on the site. The free app can be downloaded from iTunes. eBay Deals is not the company's only recent development. eBay has also upgraded its existing iPhone app with social-networking integration and other features. The company also has made available a mobile web interface (m.ebay.com), which works on any browser-equipped mobile phone. A Different Approach for eBay Steve Yankovich, vice president of business solutions and mobile for eBay, said the new application takes a different approach than the mobile apps already offered by the company. The current apps focus on finding products that the user is actively looking for, while Deals monitors auctions against stored keywords and sends notices -- which are simply accessed and reacted to -- even if the customer isn't currently using the system . Saved searches, Yankovich said, become icons on the user interface. "The Deals is a little different in that what comes up may not be something on your [immediate] shopping list," Yankovich said. "It's basically an efficient way to get through the roughly 200 million listings to find something that is good for you." Clearly, Deals aims to optimize eBay's revenues during the holiday shopping season. Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis for comScore, said the online outlook in general is shaping up as somewhat better than last year, but qualifies the good news by noting that the comparison is to the months when the financial meltdown was at its worst. Marginal Online Improvement Tuesday, comScore released research that said the first 22 days of the holiday shopping season -- from Nov. 1 to Nov. 22 -- saw a two percent increase in online sales, from $8.03 billion to $8.21 billion -- compared to the same period last year. The company predicts an increase of three percent for the holiday season. Lipsman said the online mobile-auction sites represent a subcategory of online shopping not covered in the report. The mobile-auction numbers being released by eBay, he said, are impressive. "They are a lot higher than I would have anticipated," he added. "There may be something to the specific community and the way it works, a certain level of engagement in the way people monitor their auctions and the like. They want to keep tabs on their auctions through the day, and that may be helping."   Tell Us What You Think Your Comment: Also Visit: iPad Info Center Billions of Bytes Mobile Device Now Apple Info Center TopTechWire.com Advertisement  Digital Life 1.   Macworld Focuses on Mobile Apps 2.   Nexus One 'Support' Passes the Buck 3.   New Zealand Virgin Auctions Herself 4.   Google May Make Gmail More Social 5.   Analysts Expect iPad Price To Drop Sony Ericsson Unveils Aspen Handset Windows Mobile unit comes with Skype. Average Rating: Books on Social-Media Marketing Cost-effective ways to engage clients. Average Rating: Torrent Traps Used To Harvest Logins Web sites sold with backdoor access. Average Rating:

Enterprise Hardware Spotlight

Microsoft Says Battery Woes Not Caused By Windows 7 Battery problems on Windows 7 machines are not caused by the operating system. That's the position of Stephen Sinofsky, head of the Windows division, in a long posting on the Windows engineering blog.   IBM's New POWER7 Servers Save Energy with Big Loads IBM has unveiled high-capacity servers that are the first to be based on its new, multi-core POWER7 chip. It said the new line is designed "to manage the most demanding emerging applications."   'Dead Simple, Dirt Cheap' JooJoo Tablet Shipping Soon The JooJoo, a web-browsing tablet device that is the subject of a high-profile legal dispute, appears on track to reach buyers at the end of February, but the tablet scene has dramatically changed.

Mobile Enterprise Spotlight

To Love or Not To Love: Apple iPad Pros and Cons Now that the iPad has officially been announced, opinions are rolling in on this device that combines the features of an iPod, e-reader, and tablet PC. Will the iPad turn fewer heads than the iPhone?   Analysts See iPad Price Drop, with Some Cannibalization Just weeks before Apple officially rolls out the iPad, financial analysts are making pricing predictions. But could the analysis itself hinder the initial demand for the pricey tablet computer?   Bar Codes Go Mobile, Get Hip Again For decades, retailers have used patterns of black dots and lines to encode data onto products. Now, bar codes are gaining favor as an easy way for cell-phone users to view ads and other data instantly.

Enterprise Technology Spotlight

Google May Add Facebook, Twitter Links to Gmail Google will reportedly roll more social-networking features into Gmail, the fastest-growing e-mail service. The new features could save users the trouble of switching to Facebook or Twitter.   IBM's New POWER7 Servers Save Energy with Big Loads IBM has unveiled high-capacity servers that are the first to be based on its new, multi-core POWER7 chip. It said the new line is designed "to manage the most demanding emerging applications."   IBM Opens Eco-Friendly, Cloud-Focused Data Center IBM has opened its latest data center in North Carolina. Big Blue said the $362 million facility in Research Triangle Park is designed to support cloud computing and other new computing models.

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