FollowAuction giant eBay and Facebook are quietly forging stronger ties with a secret joint partnership and the addition of Facebook exec Katie Mitic to eBay’s board of directors.
Mitic, the current director of platform and mobile marketing at Facebook, will now become the twelfth member of eBay’s board of directors. She will join a board of directors that includes founder Pierre Omidyar, Marc Andreessen (Netscape, Andreesen-Horowitz), Scott Cook (Intuit) and William Ford, Jr. (Ford Motor Company). Mitic was previously an SVP at Palm and a VP at Yahoo.
The appointment comes at an interesting time for eBay. In less than two weeks, the company will host its X.commerce Innovate Conference, an event where the company will unveil its vision for the future of ecommerce under the PayPal, eBay, Magento and GSI Commerce brands. Katie Mitic is already slated to be one of the conference’s keynote speakers. Both companies are expected to make a joint announcement at the conference.
We expect the announcement to be related to the Facebook Platform and the new Facebook Open Graph. Our bet is that Facebook Credits will be given the spotlight in a joint effort between the two companies. We’re digging to find out more about the partnership.
Mitic is a whiz when it comes to mobile. She helped launch the Palm Pre and the company’s app store before it was snatched up by HP. Her background in building and promoting developer platforms, especially in the mobile arena, should prove useful as eBay strives to replace the wallet with the phone by 2015.
Source: mashable
