The Innovate developer conference 2011 was held in San Francisco on 12 and 13th Oct 2011. Team CIGNEX was there in full force to interact with the attendees and participate in the latest Ecommerce conversations. We were also spotlighted for working with EBay Inc. in bringing forth the extreme makeover of Soccer PRO, a small retail store in Redwood city, CA. Over the past month we have collaborated with EBay team to bring SoccerPRO’s retail business online using Magento. Our work also enabled EBay in showcasing some of the capabilities of the freshly minted X.commerce fabric during the keynote demo.
Now I want to switch gears to mention a few highlights from the Innovate Conference. The biggest announcement at the conference has been the unveiling of X.commerce. I will try to keep it short in this blog to describe it as the new Ecommerce Message Bus also known as the Fabric. X.commerce is a platform that will bring together the merchants, the developers and the consumers to a common place with an easy solution for all to leverage the various Ecommerce capabilities and services being offered. This is the beginning of technology powered buying and selling. Read more>>.
A little background on why we need this. There is a paradigm shift in the way Ecommerce is being done today and will be in the near future. The key mantras for every merchant and consumer alike are around how we do our buying and selling:
1. Digital
2. Mobile
3. Local
4. Social
X.Commerce platform is trying to make it easy to address these needs for merchants, consumers and developers alike in making this possible. Many partners of EBay have already jumped in to embrace this platform. Adobe, Kenshoo, Terapeak, Milo, Facebook to name a few showed some very interesting extensions and services on Magento. The Soccer PRO website was used to showcase these demos during the keynote address. The platform is still in its infancy and thus a lot of push by X.Commerce folks to the developer community to congregate on this platform and help it grow by developing capabilities and extensions that interface with it.
The ecosystem for the Ecommerce community had a very strong presence at the conference. Though most of the companies were small but they had some great products that would be value add to the Ecommerce value chain. A few that caught my attention were Milo, RedLaser for Mobile and local selling, PayPal access for Commerce identity, MoonToast for Social Commerce and Kenshoo for Digital Marketing.
There were excellent Keynote speakers on both days and good breakout sessions. Links to all of the X.Commerce sessions are available at the YouTube Channel xcommercechannel#g .
