echoflip.com

Free customized business cards and business card holder received at eBay Live! 07

eBay held their 6th annual eBay Live! conference June 14-16, 2007 in Boston.  With 178 seminars in total, each attendee had lots of activities, classes, and speakers to choose from.

Since my brother and I had never used eBay,  or Paypal, Skype (both eBay companies), and pretty much every other tool concerning eBay, we started off the conference at the orientation, then went to Skype 101, and ended the first morning at Selling Basics: Paypal Payments.  eBay thankfully had structured the conference for an entire range of users from the very beginners (us) to the very advanced.

Here is a little lesson for those readers that are also unfamiliar:

Skype is software free to download from the site that allows you to talk over the Internet to anyone in the world for free (Skype-to-Skype) using a headset or any form of speakers and a microphone (note: most webcams have a microphone).  For a fee, you can also call any mobile or landline phone and use advanced features such as voicemail and call forwarding.  It is available in 28 languages and used in almost every country around the world.  The service makes online communication simple and efficient, particularly for small business owners (such as with eBay stores), and even provides features for webcams, conference calls with up to 9 users, and file sharing.  To give you an idea of the amount of users on Skype, at 10:30 AM on June 14, 2007, there were 9,025,169 users online.  The instructor cited 196 million Skype users in total.

Paypal lets anyone with an email address send and receive money securely, easily, and quickly.  There are 3 account settings: Personal (free), Premier, and Business.  To sell on eBay, a user must sign up for a Premier or Business account.  The service has acquired 100 million account members worldwide and is available in 190 countries.  Note: you can manage 8 different IDs with one Paypal account, which also is helpful to small business owners.

Other noteworthy items concerning the conference:

• Seth Godin gave a speech about marketing and the spreading of ideas.  His presentation alone was worth the entire cost of admission to the conference ($60 since I registered early).  It was that remarkable and warrants its own post - coming soon.

• Stair Advertising - my new favorite marketing tool

• Cell Phone Charging Machines - Saw the machine below for the first time at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.  I have a feeling I will see it a lot more in the future.

• Free conference CD - eBay gave each attendee a CD which contains the presentation slides for most of the seminars to review or in case you missed one and would like the information.

I only attended the conference on Thursday and part of Friday (it ran Thurs-Sat night).  For the time I spent, I got some great ideas and as a result, signed up to sell on eBay, opened a Paypal account, downloaded Skype software, and now I want to be an intern for Squidoo (more to follow concerning my Squidoo lens and vying for an internship position, but please check it out in the meantime!).