The 171-year-old jewelry company Tiffany & Co lost to eBay on a suit filed by Tiffany on counterfeit auction listing on eBay. This could be a pleasant surprise for auctioneers like Amazon, Yahoo and Google.

Tiffany’s lawyer’s contacted eBay in 2003 stating that any seller who sells five or more pieces of Tiffany jewelry should be automatically deleted. eBay in turn did not consider this demand and stated that, “we are not prepared to do at this time”. This frustrated Tiffany who again approached eBay to ban all silver Tiffany jewelry. eBay again refused the request. eBay was not willing to accept this demand because it felt that considering a listing infringing just because the seller sold multiple items at the same time is not reasonable.

This long argument was finally put to an end by Judge Sullivan on Monday. He mentioned that eBay always removed listings promptly whenever Tiffany notified of any counterfeit goods. He also mentioned that eBay even delayed listings of Tiffany products by 6 to 12 hours just to do a manual check before making the products live. The judge stated, “As a factual matter, there is little support for Tiffany’s allegation that a seller listing five or more pieces of Tiffany jewelry is presumptively trafficking in counterfeit goods.”

It should be noted that eBay provides the service VeRO – Verified Rights Owner were a trademark owner can report or remove infringing listings. There are more than 14,000 companies and individual merchants participating in this program. Tiffany is one of them.

eBay spends $5 million each year on its fraud search engine identifying counterfeit listings. The search engine has 13,000 rules set to find out fraudsters through a keyword search algorithm.

Just Google the word “Web 2.0” and you would end up with 94,100,000 results. Well what does this mean? Why has this word become so popular? Is this an application? A concept? A marketing term? No, it’s just a pattern or business model to help a website  survive and grow in today’s web world.

In the end of the last century, there was a severe boom and hype on the Internet industry. People believed that no one would go to a shop, office or school again as they would use internet for all these activities. However, soon the world came to know that the web was overhyped and the dot-com burst fell drastically. Internet boom was busted.

This marked the birth of new age websites. The websites which prevailed the burst also had something in common. This was first noted and presented at the O’Reilly Media Web2.0 conference in 2004.

Web 2.0 defines using the web as a platform and building services and applications around it.

O’Reilly formulated Web 2.0 as below:

Web 1.0                        Web 2.0
DoubleClick                –> Google AdSense
Ofoto                      –> Flickr
Akamai                     –> BitTorrent
mp3.com                    –> Napster
Britannica Online          –> Wikipedia
personal websites          –> blogging
evite                      –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation    –> search engine optimization
page views                 –> cost per click
screen scraping            –> web services
publishing                 –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy)     –> tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness                 –> syndication

Lightweight business models can be enabled by syndication of content and services. Web 2.0 relates to such websites which communicate, share and publish content with other websites.

O’Reilly described that the Web 2.0 tagged websites fall under four hierarchy levels.

Level-0 : Applications work online as well as offline. Examples of such websites include Google Maps and Yahoo! Local.
Level-1: Applications which can work offline and have to connect to internet to download features, plug-ins or updates fall under this category. iTunes, Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets are some examples.
Level-2: Sites like Flickr can operate offline however, if connected online can acquire additional features like photo sharing and community features. Such sites are termed Level -2.
Level-3: Level 3 applications live on the internet. They are dead when offline. A large number of applications fall under this category. Skype, Adsense, online community and sales websites like del.icio.us, eBay, Craigslist all fall under this category.

O’Reilly also specified that email, telephone and instant-messaging clients do not fall under this hierarchy.

Many technology experts have however argued upon these hierarchy, stating that these are not properly defined and do not have a reason based guideline.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who implemented the first successful communication betweek HTTP client and server via Internet, considered as the father of Internet questions whether one can use this term in a meaningful way. He mentions many of these Web 2.0 technology components existed since early days of the web.

John Donahoe, the new boss of eBay announced that he wants Ebay to work as a strip market and not as a unruly flea market. Amazon as of late has been taking over most of Ebay’s best buyers and sellers.

Ebay is striving hard to bring up sales and gain vital market places which they lost to close competitors. These competitors had also taken a large pie of Ebay’s financial results. However, Ebay still announced an increase in earnings of 22 percent in the last quarter. The increased profit might be due to its other businesses like Skype an Internet calling service and PayPal a payment service.

eBay stocks have also up by 20 percent to $32.12 after mid march. However, eBay users have not much grown during the last year. The company reported a increase of just 1 percent to 83.9 million.