The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘auction’

There are people out there who take to World of Warcraft ’s Auction House like NYU Stern graduates take to Wall Street. The Auction House, for those unawares, is a place where WoW gamers can buy and sell in-game items using in-game currency.

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Man alive, the World of Warcraft economy is quite elastic!

Last summer, we wrote about the launch of Retweet.com, a Tweetmeme knock-off with a killer name. Mesiab Labs, a company associated with some spammy Twitter projects like Hummingbird, launched it in August with some fanfare. However, since then, Tweetmeme has remained the king of the space. And now Mesiab Labs has put the killer domain up for auction.

As you can see on this Flippa page, the current bids for Retweet.com stand at $20,000. This is a huge increase from yesterday when the bids hovered around $10. So far, there are 27 bids. The listing on the site claims the domain gets 12 million uniques a month, and 26 million pageviews. If that’s the case, you have to wonder, why sell?

Well part of the reason has to be that Twitter itself is trying to trademark the word “retweet.” Mesiab Labs was also apparently tried to trademark the name, though it’s not clear if that failed or if they are simply moving to sell before that happens. Twitter also tried unsuccessfully to trademark “tweet” last year.

We also asked Mesiab Labs about the auction. Here’s what they had to say:

When we initially conceptualized Retweet.com, we realized the importance of the new shift that social media sites like Twitter are making on how we filter and consume news.  We developed and fostered Retweet.com and its resulting network to help explore this concept. It has been quite exciting to see stories break before some of the major news media outlets and to watch blogs gain near mainstream status.  It’s also exciting to watch the pulse of the social world shift and sway.  But more than novelty, we are demonstrating incredible new ways to apply crowd-sourcing to answer the question ”What matters, right now.”

There are some truly remarkable things about the term ReTweet. First, as we all know it was created by the users of Twitter – NOT by the Twitter itself. Second, like “Googling” something has become synonymous with using a search engine, “Retweet’ing” has become synonymous with the act of spreading online content virally.

While we aren’t the only ones in this space, we feel privileged to participate.

Now that we’ve grown and scaled the Retweet network and infrastructure, we’re ready to pass it on to someone who can truly push it to the next level. We’re excited about the opportunity for a new passionate owner to foster and grow Retweet.com and continue to tap the potential of what is undeniably becoming a monumental shift in news consumption.

They go on to note that if they don’t find a suitable buyer in 30 days, they’ll continue to operate the site themselves. It is a pretty killer domain, but is it worth the risk if Twitter gets the trademark?

StuffBuff, a TC50 company, has officially launched bringing with it social, embeddable auctions for the masses. What is StuffBuff? It’s basically an auction site with a social bent. Instead of wading into a mess of used sleeping bags and broken Nintendo DSes on eBay (true story!), you head over to StuffBuff and set up an auction. You can then embed the auction into your FaceBuzzBookTwit page. Unlock “entertainment auction” sites like Swoopo, this is a straight up auction service with two little additions.

From the press releases:

• LiveHaggle – This “first of its kind” chat-based auction system was
developed using PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API, and enables members to
engage in real time chat with sellers and other bidders across any Web
site or blog, while committing to bids in the conversation.
• Blink! – An addictive twist on Dutch-style auctions, this tool asks
users, “How long can you hold out?” Items are presented for sale at a
starting price that drops throughout the course of the auction, the more
auction participants the faster the price falls. The first bidder takes
home the product.

To show you dudes an dudettes how it works, StuffBuff has set up an auction for a PS3 with all proceeds going to Stupid Cancer/I2Y.

It can only be a matter of time before eBay tries their own embeddable auctions so StuffBuff has a short window of interesting opportunity. How could you use it? Well, maybe you could auction off a date with yourself on your blog or Facebook page! Just imagine if all your readers could compete for your undivided attention and, in this amorous month, affection.

Yo, there’s a Woot Off going on right now. Hit me up if a LeakFrog lands on the auction block. I need one.

Read the original here:
Woot Off!

It was a long time ago but I could swear that Resident Evil came out on the Playstation. Yes.

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Resident Evil on NES? Now wait just a darn minute

Microsoft (and particularly Bill Gates) is well known for it’s philanthropic work, including a charity auction conducted each fall.

Here is the original post:
How much to tour Bill Gates’ house? About $35k

Anyone that has used both Windows 7 and OS X can see the similarities.

Read more here: 
Windows 7 was in fact inspired by OS X, says some random Microsoft manager

Dan Hentschel is a video game collector. He has 2000 video games for multiple systems and now he’s selling is entire Nintendo collection, including a thumb drive containing a full catalog of his collection. That is, friends, 700 different games, consoles, and controllers for on low, low price of whatever the madmen out there bid this up to.

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Man to put entire collection of 700 Nintendo games up for auction

In the down economy, the housing market has taken a turn for the worst, with landlords struggling to fill apartments and developers having trouble offloading new properties. iBidCondo is a new site launching this summer that’s looking to help: the site offers an auction system that gives property owners an alternative method to sell their real estate (and make a profit doing it), while also giving users a chance to acquire real estate at very, very low prices. The site just held a test auction in May that sold off a $690,000 condo for only $86,840, and it’s going to begin another auction later this month.

The auction strategy is one that reminds me of Swoopo, a controversial auction site we recently covered that allows users to buy inexpensive ‘tokens’ that they use to make bids (even if you don’t win the item, you’re still out the cost of those tokens). With iBidcondo, the site requires potential bidders to pay for a $100 ’seat’ to have the right to bid on the real estate auction. The auction itself has no reserve and often sells for much lower than its normal price, and over half of the final auction price goes towards the charity of your choice. If you don’t win, you’re still out the $100 seat fee.

It almost sounds too good to be true, but a look at the details reveals how iBidCondo manages to pull it off. The site recoups the costs of the real estate through the seat prices — if it’s looking to sell a property worth $280,000, it will sell a maximum of 2,800 seats which will pay for the entire price of the property before the auction even starts (developers can choose if they’d like to wait until the maximum is reached or if they’re comfortable starting with fewer purchased seats). The developer who owns the property takes this money, as well as half of the final auction price (the other half goes to charity), with iBidcondo taking a 5% cut.

It’s definitely going to confuse some people, and it isn’t hard to forecast some problems. The auction is time-limited (sometimes as short as 7 minutes), and price increments are limited by which stage you’re in: first you can only increase your bid by $10, then $100, then $1000. In effect, the only time period that actually matters is the last minute or so, when every bid coming in is going to be $1000 and anyone seriously interested in buying the property is going to be clicking furiously. There’s no limit to how many times you can bid, so if you wind up in a horse race with a few dozen people the price can easily increase very quickly, perhaps far beyond those magical low price points the site is currently advertising. An iBidcondo spokesman says that the company can typically guess how high these bids will go and sets the time limits accordingly, but I’m wondering how effective that will be. After all, it would only take a 30-person horserace with each one bidding 30 times in the last minute to add $900,000 to the final auction price.

That said, there’s at least a chance that you’ll walk away from an iBidcondo auction with a new condo in tow for 15% of its list price, which may well be enough to entice people to try their luck. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, use the code iBidTC, which will get you $25 off the $100 fee.

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It’s been a while since we last took a look at Swoopo, the “entertainment shopping” site that’s one part auction-house, one part virtual casino. Since launching in late 2008, the site has closed a $10 million funding round led by August Capital, and has grown to over 2 million members. Now, the site has quietly expanded to launch a Canadian portal, and is also beginning to test a ‘buy it now’ function on its German site that allows users to apply the costs of their previous bids towards the purchase of an item.

For those that aren’t familiar with Swoopo, here’s how it works: the site uses a unique pricing model that invites you to purchase virtual “bids” for 75 cents, which can then be used to bid on goods ranging from video games to high-end televisions. Whenever you bid on an item, its price increases by fifteen cents and an extra 20 seconds are tacked on to the duration of the auction. Oftentimes items wind up selling substantially below their market value, but this lower price comes with some risk: if you bid on an item, you don’t get that 75 cent bid back when the auction concludes. Even if the item winds up selling below its normal market price, Swoopo can make money from these bids (the site does sometimes lose money on an auction, but relies on the proceeds of other auctions to cover them).

It’s definitely a departure from traditional auction sites like eBay, and after navigating through the flashy site it’s easy to see why it might be a bit more fun. Sure, there’s always a chance that you’ll throw away a few dollars on lost bids, but you also have the potential to score a TV for a fraction of its typical retail price (of course, dozens, or even hundreds, of bidders might be competing against you). To help take some of the risk out of bidding, the site is experimenting with a ‘buy it now’ feature (apparently only on its German site for now), which allows you to apply the cost of your bids towards purchasing a product outright for its normal market value. You won’t be able to get the low auction price, but you’re not throwing away the cost of those bids, either, which should be enough to drive even more bidding.

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