Written by By Ryan Gallagher, CNN
Ryan Gallagher is a senior correspondent on the business and technology beat.
Pandemic has been on the rise. The first of these new diseases, like Ebola, was then followed up with another like MERS and then H1N1.
Now, because of genetic mutation, we are bracing for a second one: Anthrax. The threat of such an epidemic is not hypothetical anymore.
How could this epidemic be so deadly? How could an anthrax attack potentially kill millions?
According to the US Centers for Disease Control, anthrax spores are “extremely contagious and inhaled spores are life-threatening to people who are already sick and those who may be exposed to an aerosolized aerosolized anthrax. Anthrax can also be spread via contaminated animals, including rodents, and through their feces.”
There’s no vaccine available to fight a deadly anthrax infection, so humans will have to do so alone.
How did a Danish-born entrepreneur build eBay into a global eBay?
I caught up with Christophe Bisciglia, now eBay’s new CEO, at the Techonomy conference in Chicago. Here are some highlights of our conversation.
Ryan Gallagher: What are you going to do differently as eBay’s new CEO?
Christophe Bisciglia: The key is to listen to and learn from all of our customers. The more you know your customer, the more you can anticipate their needs. And the customer is the most important stakeholder we have. I am very excited about being able to trust in people and to understand what it is they care about. What they want, what is the passion of their products and services and what is their expectation from eBay.
This probably goes back to my past activities at Leetchi. It was truly building trust between customers and when we do that, it’s easy to be innovative.
RW: How are you going to deal with counterfeit products? How are you going to deal with cyberbullying? These are hot issues that the government and corporations care about and consumers also care about. How do you deal with the issues so customers don’t think you’re too removed?
TB: I would say the whole trust aspect, and trust is a bit more complicated than that. It’s got a lot of layers to it, but I think when trust and trust is given, it’s sustainable and organic. From our viewpoint, our approach on trust is we follow our customers. If their trust is important to them, then we obviously pay attention to them. We’ll also pay attention to how they are engaged on social networks. Trust is highly aligned with our customers’ experience at the moment, as we feel that people trust us. But trust and trust also have to be genuine. Trust has to be real.
RW: With Amazon Prime, it seems as if you don’t have to worry about counterfeits. Amazon Prime customers don’t have to worry about counterfeit goods as they come directly from Amazon.
TB: Amazon is in a privileged position in the market because they not only have supply chains that are already in place, but they also have a really great distribution infrastructure. So any time you look at Amazon, the quality of the product is really important.
I won’t say counterfeits is not a problem. But there are certain illegal activities like counterfeiting that are really difficult to control. You look at the market at large and I would say there are a lot of brands that today are monitoring their product activities closely. So in the long run, I think most of the counterfeit activity should be limited. But today, a lot of it is not restricted to only eBay.
RW: How are you going to deal with the privacy issues surrounding artificial intelligence?
TB: AI is an incredibly important technology that’s going to be in many different areas. AI is going to power an incredible amount of innovation that we see going forward. At eBay, we do a lot of work with AI in inventory management for sellers. We also see technology being applied to make sourcing selection, predict future trends, enhance the overall experience of the customer.
But AI will also have privacy implications. It’s not just a case of creating algorithms that will automate certain things. It will also be an issue of how you run data and to what extent you do utilize it.