“It is too hard in the world to survive alone” the human adage seems to have gained two more believers in the form of social networking giant Facebook and the auction giant eBay. The two are in the process of forming an alliance and the entry of Facebook executive Katie Mitic to eBay’s board of directors comes as a confirmation of the same.
Mitic will now become the twelfth member of the board of directors which currently comprise of founder Pierre Omidyar, Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Andreesen-Horowitz), Scott Cook (Intuit) and William Ford, Jr. (Ford Motor Company); Mitic is currently working as the director of platform and mobile marketing at Facebook and was previously an SVP at Palm and VP at Yahoo.
Talking about her background, Mitic is considered a connoisseur when it comes to mobiles. She helped to launch the Palm Pre and the company’s app store before it was taken over by HP. Her background in building and promoting developer platforms, especially in the mobile world, should prove useful as eBay desires to manifests its aspirations of replacing wallet by mobile by 2015 in reality.
The appointment also comes at an interesting time for eBay as the auction giant will be hosting a conference on its X.Commerce Innovate in less than two weeks time, an event where the company will communicate its vision for the future of e-commerce under the PayPal, eBay, Magento and GSI Commerce brands. Katie Mitic herself is expected to be one of the keynote speakers at the conference and both the companies are anticipated to me a joint announcement at the conference.
We predict the announcement to be related to the Facebook Platform and the new Facebook Open Graph. It is most likely to give extra advantage for Facebook credits however nothing is confirmed and we are trying to unleash further information about the subject. For more updates, do look out for the space.
