AuctioneerTech

AuctioneerTech featured in Auctioneer magazine

Aaron — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:40:25 +0000

AuctioneerTech featured in January edition of Auctioneer magazine

In our minds, one of the best of the many benefits of being a member of the National Auctioneers Association is the Auctioneer magazine, a monthly periodical that is filled with information about auctions and auctioneers. Articles from NAA officers keep members briefed on the association. Articles from guest writers and other regular columns keep members informed about the industry.

Pages 26 and 27 of the January 2009 issue feature an article about AuctioneerTech and this author written by Hannes Combest, NAA Chief Executive Officer. If you’re a member, don’t forget that you can login to the members section of auctioneers.org to view the magazine even if you haven’t yet received yours in the mail.

eBay Live Auctions is dead

Aaron — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:23:20 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

We start the new year with an obituary for eBay Live Auctions, not to be confused with eBay Live!, the eBay convention for buyers and sellers held regularly in cities around the country. As of the first of the year, the website ebayliveauctions.com now redirects to www.ebay.com.

eBay Live Auctions was the division of eBay that allowed live auctions to take some advantage of eBay’s enormous bidder pool. Through the use of authorized providers such as iCollector and Live Auctioneers, auctioneers could post inventories and accept real-time Internet bidding like many other providers, but with the help of eBay’s bidding community which is still very large.

The downsides to eBay Live Auctions were many. eBay treated it like an unwanted stepchild by not allowing the items to be found by searches using the default search bar on eBay’s home page. The link to get to the live auctions always seemed buried and hard to access. The providers charged a percentage of each item sold to an Internet buyer in addition to a hefty setup fee per event.

Still, other Internet bidding providers charge a percentage of each item sold and eBay’s huge community still provided thousands of eyes on the live auction listings. The biggest problem was that eBay’s buyers are not auction buyers. While they may be much more familiar with Internet transactions than Joe Allbox, they balk at terms such as as is and buyer’s premium and simply don’t understand that there should be bigger punishments to not completing transactions than negative feedback. Unfortunately, eBay’s unwillingness to disclose personal information, to say nothing of credit card information, to the auctioneers it was attempting to serve made it very difficult to ensure buyer performance for transactions with eBay’s customers.

All in all, the death of eBay Live Auctions will be good for the auction industry and eBay. eBay has been good for auctions, but eBay Live Auctions has blurred the lines between eBay’s style of auctions and the methods of Internet auctions practiced by auctioneers, causing bidders to not understand how real auctions work. As eBay rearranges its deck chairs after hitting the iceberg, eBay Live Auctions is one of many logical cost-cutting culls.

As for those companies who had business models built around eBay Live Auctions, it seems that they will continue to operate by attempting to build their own buyer base, a task that is not hard as their auctioneer-clients will advertise their portals while advertising their events.

Did you use eBay Live Auctions or one of the providers associated with the service? What are your plans? Will you continue with the provider or switch to a different solution?

AuctioneerTech year in review

Aaron — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 17:08:32 +0000

It’s time for a little year-end housekeeping. With all of the top lists being created regarding the previous year, we couldn’t help but join in with a top list and a review of everything we’ve done so far. Here are our top six posts that we like.

Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES is the author of AuctioneerTech

Here is our year in review, with a summary for each month. Don’t forget that you can always go straight to the posts for any given month using the links in the side bar on the right.

July
While the site launched in September, we cheated a little bit by scraping from other sources and populating it with a few related posts made previously on the NAA discussion forum as well as aarontraffas.com. We covered the NAA forum, Ubuntu Linux, and PDF tools, as well as mentioned hosted exchange, some other email clients and Google Apps. We touched on how Internet Explorer is a great browser so long as it’s fully patched. We talked about how while Windows Vista is slower than XP in speed, it’s superior to XP in many ways that count such as security, stability and forward compatibility.

August
We only scraped one post for August, and that was a short post about Flash and website usability. We dove much deeper into the topic with a series of posts in November.

September
The site launched on September 8, but September 2 featured a scraped article from aarontraffas.com about the release of Google Chrome, which held our attention for a few weeks until we went back to Firefox and Opera. We covered OpenOffice 3, noted that eBay is declining and only accepting Paypal, and had the first article about auctioneers. We discussed advertising for Internet only auctions and Apple’s new iPods, as well as evangelized about Secunia, Twitter, and Skyfire. We migrated from one laptop to another and showed how MozBackup and Belarc Advisor help make the process easier. We examined how phpList makes bulk email list management easier for auctioneers and we also had two posts about PDFs showing that you should use them sparingly and never use Adobe products when the alternatives are faster and cheaper.

This author took part in the Kansas Auctioneer Association bid call competition at the Kansas State Fair and has a live blog from the experience as well as a video to prove it. The experience was the catalyst for a position post on why state associations should use computerized tabulation for bid call competitions.

September saw the first five Auction Podcasts as well as the listing of the series within the podcast section of iTunes. The episodes were based generally on content from existing posts on AuctioneerTech. There was the primier on advertising Internet only auctions, a tech roundup covering several shorter posts, and podcasts covering PDF and phpList.

Robert Mayo. CAI, CAGA, AARE was featured on Auction Podcast Episode 7

October
The first post in October was one of celebration after finally figuring out how to prevent the nasty screen flickering found when using an external monitor on some laptops loaded with Vista. While we were talking about multiple monitors, we showed how Synergy can be used to share your mouse between multiple computers, not just multiple screens. We noted and showed examples of how auctioneers are using Wordpress for auction sites and described in depth the new Auction Technology Specialist designation offered by the NAA.

A new resource list was created that is an ongoing project listing all companies and providers involved with auction clerking, cashiering and Internet bidding. We showed how OpenDNS makes the web faster and safer, and how Google Adwords allows auctioneers to find a very targeted audience in a very short amount of time. We announced a critical security update for Windows and explained the importance of keeping your data encrypted while showing how Truecrypt makes it crazy-simple to do. For collaboration needs, we talked about how UStream makes it easy for auctioneers to broadcast video of events for free and how ShowMyPC and LogMeIn make Internet meetings free and much more simple than other expensive solutions such as GoToMeeting or WebEx. For those auctioneers who want to be a little geeky, we gave away the secret to a free education at W3 Schools.

Brandon Harker with Auction Flex was featured on Auction Podcast Episode 9

October’s podcasts covered Internet bidding as well as Adwords and OpenDNS. October found the first podcast guests in interviews with Robert Mayo of Mayo Auction and Realty and Brandon Harker of Sebae Data Solutions, makers of Auction Flex.

November
In November, we caught election fever and wrote about the importance of science in society and of ensuring that our elected officials understand the importance of science and technology. We discussed how hosted Exchange lets companies share Outlook contacts and calendars properly without the headache of managing an Exchange server.

We got geeky with files and talked about how 7-zip is the best compression utility and how a Drobo will let you sleep at night. We broke a story about AVG flagging one of the files in Adobe Flash as a virus, and we’re still getting several visits each day to the website from users searching for information about flashutil10a.exe.
Toward the end of November,we launched a series of discussions on what could go in an RFP for an auctioneer looking to build a new or redesign an existing website. Thanks to our friend Rob Spectre for posting some additional topics. We repeated that it was easy to use Google Docs to build simple web forms and wondered aloud if having auctions on Black Friday was a good idea.

Darron Meares, CAI, MBA, CPPA was featured on Auction Podcast Episode 10

November saw the Auction Podcast shift from being rehashed content on a separate page to new content included on the main page. November’s podcasts included an interview with Darron Meares of Meares Auction Group, a show on how open source software makes life easier and reduces expenses on software, and a controversial episode explaining that in many cases if you’re shipping auction items you’ve failed in marketing.

December
We continued our discussion about RFP ideas with some notes and comments about accessible websites. We looked from a marketing perspective at the importance of never using letters in advertised phone numbers, making sure an auction website had the upcoming auction calendar front and center with thumbnails, and ensuring that video is distributed properly. We also emphasized how important it is to be careful when browsing, and showed that Firefox users can browse freely and safely when running NoScript.

There were some interesting ideas covered such as Mahalo’s introduction of human-powered answers, as well as a New York auctioneer offering to negate the buyer’s premium in exchange for prepaid transactions. The National Auctioneers Association released the NAA Newsroom and Auction Answers and some dude royally ruined an auction by the Bureau of Land Management. Purple Wave released a new twist on the Internet only bidding model, a grouped extension feature that extends the entire group if a bid is received in the last few minutes.

The final Auction Podcast of 2008 covered dual agency with regards to absentee bid implementation. The final posts of the year included articles on letting your computer help science when you’re not using it, using Foxit Reader’s new typewriter tool to write on PDFs for free, and using Mint to automatically track your finances. We thanked you for racking up over 1000 listens to the Auction Podcast and encouraged you to go vote for the coolest tech of the year.

Going forward
It’s been a great four months; thanks to everyone for the kind words. Thanks to all of you who have left comments or feedback in response to articles or other comments, your participation is immensely valuable. Thanks to the guests who have been featured in podcasts and thanks to the guests who have already committed to podcast appearances in 2009. Have a safe and happy New Year’s Eve. We’ll see you next year.

Vote for the Crunchies

Aaron — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 13:50:20 +0000

: Image by magerleagues via Flickr

No, we’re not talking about breakfast cereal. The Crunchies 2008 is a set of awards given to the top technology companies, products and ideas in a given year. The awards are sponsored by GigaOm, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider, and TechCrunch. Last years winners included Facebook, Digg, Tesla Motors, Hulu and the iPhone. What will the list of winners for 2008 look like? Vote now to have an influence. Voting ends January 5. Even if you don’t vote, it’s worth it to look at the nominees now and to revisit the site after January 9 to see the winners.

Mint tracks your finances automatically

Aaron — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:58:15 +0000

: Image by magerleagues via Flickr

We’re QuickBooks fans. That is to say once a year, usually after the first or second extension on taxes, we spend a day or two entering all the checks and deposits from the entire previous year. About six months ago, we stumbled onto a service called Mint. Having used it religiously since that time, we can safely say that Mint is perhaps the coolest thing to happen to finance since QuickBooks ended double-entry accounting for consumers.

Mint was the winner of last year’s TechCrunch 40, a contest among startup technology companies. The concept is that you provide it with the credentials to login to your checking accounts, credit cards, Paypal - even student loans and investments. It then aggregates all the information together and provides you with your spending habits and ways to save money. They’re adding more banks all the time, and they’ve just released an iPhone application that makes it easy to check all your balances when you’re on the go. You can even get account balances by sending an SMS message of “bal” or “balance” to 696468 to get a text message back with the current balance as of the last time Mint polled your accounts.

Mint makes money by suggesting ways to save you money. If there is a credit card that offers a better rate based on your spending habits, Mint will suggest that card to you and show you how much money you could save over the course of a year by using that card instead of your current card.

The way Mint uses your credentials will certainly make the more privacy-conscious among us think twice before using it. We here at AuctioneerTech can say with experience, however, that the benefits of using it vastly outweigh the alternative of checking each of many different account balances and manually doing the research to see which financial deals are the best.

Do you use Mint? Do you use a Mint alternative such as Yodlee, Wesabe or Quicken Online? Let us know in the comments.

CrunchBase Information on Mint

Foxit Reader gets new version, typewriter tool

Aaron — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:12:36 +0000

: Image by PiPiWa via Flickr

Now that PDF is an ISO standard and no longer an Adobe product, it has value for some types of content distribution. We’ve mentioned the benefits of using Foxit Reader for all your PDF viewing needs in two articles and a podcast. Foxit is faster than Adobe Reader and takes up much less disk space. Our favorite PDF reader received an upgrade in November that makes the decision between it and other free PDF readers simple. Unlike Adobe Reader, Free Foxit Reader 3.0 for Windows now lets you type on PDFs and save the result.

Previous versions of Foxit only supplied the holy-grail-of-all-PDF-tools typewriter functionality in the Pro Pack, which is a $39 purchase. Now, with version 3.0, the typewriter is available so long as you install either the Foxit Toolbar or an eBay icon. While toolbars are unequivocally bad, and icons to websites aren’t on the positive side of useful, satisfying either requirement is definately worth the use of the typewriter within the best PDF reader on the market. If you have a problem with the toolbar or the icon, you can simply elect to not display it after its installed.

Active Adobe PDF forms suck. They’re difficult to make, and getting good data in a good format is hit or miss. With Foxit Reader, now any PDF befomes a form. Simply view the PDF, select the typewriter tool from the toolbar, click on the page and start typing. If the text is too big or small, simply adjust it using the font toolbar, similar to that in OpenOffice, Word or any other familiar desktop application. When you’re done, simply save the file as a PDF and it’s ready to print or send.

If you don’t have Foxit Reader, shame on you. Here’s a link to the download page for the latest version. Click the link on the left and run it to begin the installation.

Auction Podcast milestone - 1000 listens

Aaron — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 08:19:21 +0000

Auction Podcast

The Auction Podcast has reached its first milestone. We’ve recently rocketed past 1000 listens to the series. Indeed, according to Wordpress plugin Podpress, each of the first five episodes has over 100 listens.

When we first started the podcast, the goal was a weekly release. We have some exciting plans for the podcast series in 2009, but in order to focus on the quality of episodes and guests we’re going to step back to a monthly or semi-monthly release schedule.

We’d like to continue to cater this podcast to the listeners. If you have suggestions for topics or guests, or if you are interested in being a guest, please let us know by visiting the feedback page and leaving us a message.

BOINC lets your idle computer help science

Aaron — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 15:31:48 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

In this time of giving and over the course of the next few weeks that begins the new year, many of us may be looking for was to give to good causes. As many of us may have difficulties giving financially during these times, we look to alternative ways to help others. If you’re a fan of science like we are here at AuctioneerTech, you’ll appreciate the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC.

We were first introduced to BOINC when we installed SETI@home on several computers at home and at the office. It not only allows an idle computer to aid in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, it also presents a pretty darned cool screen saver of the data as it’s being analyzed.

: Image via Wikipedia

The underlying concept of BOINC is a kind of distributed computing known as volunteer computing. In volunteer computing, volunteers donate extra computer resources - essentially the time when a computer isn’t being used such as at night or while it’s otherwise idle - to a project or cause. It’s different from grid computing in that it’s not managed and there isn’t any commitment given by the computer owner.

BOINC allows the volunteer to select among a number of different research projects, categorized into earth sciences; multiple applications; mathematics and strategy games; astronomy / physics / chemistry; and biology and medicine. It’s possible to divide the time you donate from your computer to be spent on multiple projects if you can’t decide between Proteins@home and Einstein@home.

BOINC is simple to install and takes no system resources until it begins to run, which only happens when you’re not using your computer. BOINC clients run on Windows, Mac and Linux. As of December 17, some select BOINC projects support using specific graphics cards in addition to CPU power. If your computer has a recent NVIDIA GPU, you can compute 2X to 10X faster than with your CPU alone.

It’s true that it’s much better for the environment and your electric bill if you turn off your computer (or hibernate it) should you be leaving it for more than 15 or 20 minutes. However, BOINC projects can still be useful should the be run for 5 or 10 minutes frequently throughout the day.

Any time you see a screen saver, think to yourself how much more valuable it would be were that computer connected to BOINC and helping science. Also, if you for some expensive reason don’t turn off your computer at night, at least put it to use for a good cause.

Purple Wave unveils grouped extension system for equipment auction

Aaron — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 18:30:19 +0000

Example of extended bidding caused by a bid submission in the last few minutes of an Internet only auction

We discussed back in September how Internet bidding has been referred to as eBay style or static bidding, and we’ve explained why those are bad descriptions for this type of bidding. Features like automatic extension and staggered ending make most modern Internet only auctions nothing like eBay and they certainly are exciting and dynamic enough to not come close to deserving to be called static. Now, a new twist has been released by Purple Wave, an auctioneer based in Manhattan, Kansas. This twist is grouped extension. Here’s the explanation from Purple Wave’s website.

Purple Wave is pleased to announce a new feature called grouped extension has been added to its industry-leading Internet auction platform….Occasionally, Purple Wave will group together similar assets in an Internet only auction and place them in a bidding extension group. Any bid within the last few minutes that causes an automatic extension of bidding on any one of the assets in that group will now automatically extend the bidding on ALL assets in that group. When no more bidding has occurred on any assets in a group for the specified time, then bidding on all assets in that group will close simultaneously.

“We continually look for ways to try to translate traditional auction concepts into the Internet auction world,” said Jerrod Westfahl, Purple Wave’s Executive Vice President of Business Affairs. “Our grouped extension feature does just that. It’s really all about creating aggressive bidding activity without creating unnecessary risk to the bidders. This feature is a win for both buyers and sellers. Buyers don’t miss out on what might be an otherwise good value. It allows auctioneers to add value for sellers by exercising their professional judgment in deciding how to create the groups.”

This new feature allows the Internet only auction to more closely replicate a choice sale at a live auction. When items are sold as a choice at a traditional auction, the winning bidder gets to select among a group of items at the winning bid price, taking one or multiple items with each item costing the high bid price. The auctioneer then sells the remaining items to other bidders, usually in the same way. While it’s true that some real-time Internet bidding platforms have options to facilitate choice sales, we don’t know of any companies outside of Purple Wave that yet facilitate choice bidding for Internet only events.

grouped extension example - the group association is listed at the end of the description

Take for example the equipment auction for which Purple Wave will be unveiling the new grouped extension feature. There are three 2004 John Deere combines. Let’s suppose for this example that there may be one that is more desirable than the others. Let’s take the example of a traditional Internet only auction where the one with the best current bid is listed first and the other two are listed directly after it in descending order of current bid. As the bidding begins to end, more bidders are bidding on the first item, the one for this example we’ve assumed is more desirable. This bidding activity causes the item to extend for a greater period of time than the two items following it. When the second-highest bidder realizes that he cannot afford to bid again on the first item and decides to try to bid on one of the other similar items, he cannot place more bids because the other items have closed at lower prices than he was willing to pay. Since he wasn’t willing to pay those prices on the other items until he was absolutely sure he wasn’t able to purchase the first item, he was unable to purchase any combine at the auction.

With grouped extension, any item in a group receiving a bid in the last few minutes will keep all of the items in the group from closing for a period of time. This new method solves the problem above by allowing the second-highest bidder on the first item to bid strongly on that item while knowing that he has the option to bid on either of the other two items should the price on his preferred item exceed that amount which he is willing to pay.

This grouped extension system is an interesting twist on the way items are offered at Internet only auctions. Do you know of another company who offers this kind of service? What are some other twists on Internet only auctions that haven’t yet been discussed here? Let us know in the comments.

As a matter of disclosure, Purple Wave is this author’s employer and this author was directly involved in the development of this new tool.

Activist disrupts auction

Aaron — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:46:22 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Red Green and Blue recently posted an article about an activist who wrecked havoc at an auction by the Bureau of Land Management. The bidder essentially ran up the price on several tracts to knock out other bidders, while having no intent to actually purchase the properties himself.

We all have difficulties with bidding mistakes from bidders who are perhaps not well-informed as to the terms of the sale, or disruptions from bidders who are unhappy about the way an auction is being conducted. Politics aside, how would you deal with this type of economic terrorism from activists during an auction?

NoScript add-on provides security in Firefox

Aaron — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:54:16 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Bad things lurk on the interwebs. Viruses are marginalized by Antivirus software, but most Antivirus software doesn’t protect against malicious websites. Websites can phish and clickjack. They can display an invisible button that infects your computer on top of another button that says “download this antivirus software”. There are actions that can be triggered simply by your mouse moving over an element on a page.

Firefox is a web browser that is constantly gaining market share against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. While it’s true that Firefox is a secure browser, as is a fully-patched copy of IE, any browser that properly executes JavaScript and other web standards is vulnerable to scripts that are written to do malicious things. The only way to ensure safety on the modern web is by only allowing scripts that you authorize. Later we’ll examine how this safe practice works with Opera, my new favorite web browser, by today we’re going to look at NoScript.

NoScript is a browser addon for Firefox. I first tried it over a year ago and gave up after a matter of minutes. The default settings for NoScript call for it to present a security warning whenever a website attempts to execute JavaScript, Java, Flash and other scripting technologies on sites you haven’t authorized. Because pretty much every website uses one of these scripting languages for something, and because when you first install NoScript none of the websites are listed as trusted, every single page will present the user with a security warning. The sheer annoyance caused by this behavior resulted in a quick removal from my browsing environment.

NoScript integration with Firefox right-click menu

I was recently listening to Security Now, my favorite Internet security podcast. NoScript was mentioned as a must for Internet security, along with the secret to maintaining sanity while using it. The secret is to turn off notifications. With notifications turned off, the popups are gone but the security remains. Only if you realize that a site isn’t functioning properly do you need to specifically grant that site permissions to run the scripts. It’s as easy as right-clicking on the website and telling NoScript to allow the site to run scripts. To the right you can see how NoScript shows the scripts that AuctioneerTech attempted to run that were blocked successfully with NoScript.

True, AuctioneerTech doesn’t look as cool without scripts. The pull-quotes - sections of text that are larger and served like pictures showing important passages - don’t work, and neither do the CrunchBase widgets. You won’t see the Google Adsense links to the right or the Google Shared Stuff list at the bottom right, nor will my Google Analytics function. For this reason, I encourage you to select the “Allow all on this page” option if you’re viewing AuctioneerTech with NoScript. However, if this were a malicious website, you would already be infected. This is the reason you should install NoScript on Firefox. You’ll still be able to get at the content you want, without having content you don’t want forced upon you and your computer.

Here’s how to do it. Assuming that you already have Firefox installed, launch it.

Click the Tools menu at the top of the browser and select Add-ons
Click the Get Add-ons button at the top left of the box that appears
In the search box, type noscript and hit enter
Click on the first return that has the icon that looks like the picture at the top right of this article
Click the button that reads Add to Firefox…
You’ll be prompted to confirm your decision. Click Install now on the pop-up.
Restart Firefox

That’s it. NoScript is installed and you’re safer now than ever before. Here’s how to disable the notifications so you can browse in peace.

There is now a small NoScript icon at the bottom right of your browser. Click it and select Options.
Select the Notifications tab at the top
Un-check the option listed as Show message about blocked scripts

Now you won’t get any popups telling you scripts were disabled. Browse the web with peace and security. If something doesn’t look right, simply enable the scripting on the page.

Video marketing must account for playback quality

Aaron — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:50:54 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Video can be a fantastic marketing tool. The same video can convey a sense of incompetence if not distributed correctly. Ignoring the difference between an expensively-produced video and simple footage captured with a camcorder, both of which can be effective and important as components of marketing campaigns, the way a video is delivered can mean the difference between a customer’s respect and a customer’s desire to do something else.

I’ve seen video delivered poorly. I’ve seen video actually attached to email. I’ve seen video so small that it could have been attached to email delivered on CDs and DVDs. Improper or inappropriate video delivery can result in both poor video quality as well as customer annoyance. Here are a few tips for video content delivery that will help to prevent both of these issues.

Never email video
Email over a megabyte or two annoys customers. Perhaps not everyone gets frustrated by large attachments, but plenty of people do. Some are on slow connections, some use POP email, some use POP over dial-up which means they’ll have to download the entire email before the next emails download. The other factor is that if video is smaller than a few megabytes, it’s probably not worth sending in the first place. YouTube makes large, high quality video distribution very easy. True, YouTube videos are branded for YouTube and allow links to other auction videos, but the benefits of being able to email a link to a video far outweigh the issues created by trying to actually email the actual video. For a more advanced and non-branded solution, there are Flash video players that will allow you to directly place video content on a website without embedding content from a third party such as YouTube.

Physical media should contain high quality video
The benefit of delivering video on physical media like CD, DVD or flash media is that quality doesn’t have to be compromised. Promotional video can be delivered that looks crisp and clean on even the higher quality HD TVs and computer monitors. Unfortunately, I’ve seen plenty of promos on physical media that look pixelated and blurry when made full-screen. It’s important when creating the video to maintain the quality. Most of the consumer camcorders can take video that looks fair in high definition, but one improper mix-down in Windows Movie Maker can ruin the future chances of playing the video on anything bigger than a postage-stamp-sized video window on a computer.

Build menu systems on optical media
Content delivered on CD or DVD should be playable as a VCD or DVD with a menu system. Computers can read and play menu DVDs, but customers who receive a CD or DVD that don’t have a computer or don’t think to try it will receive an invalid disc message when they throw it into their TV’s DVD player. The odds favor them assuming a defect in the media rather than performing another attempt at reading the discs in their computers.

Remember that there are many ways to deliver appropriate video quality in a variety of methods. As long as production methods account for the quality at every step, the final product will be easy to upload to YouTube as well as serve as a source for DVD or VCD creation that will play in a customer’s home DVD player and computer at high resolution. A thousand dollar video production can be worth next to nothing if the consumer sees a finished product of low resolution.

NAA releases Auction Answers, NAA Auction Newsroom

Aaron — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:51:52 +0000

Auctioneers educate consumers with launch of Auction Answers

The National Auctioneers Association has recently posted Auction Answers on its home page. The document is a PDF with answers to many common questions, such as “What is the auctioneer really saying?” and “Why sell at auction?” Auction Answers originated in partnership with USA Today and its semiweekly feature, Auction Showcase, which advertises auctions from around the country.

“Auctions fascinate consumers. They’re not only entertaining and fun, but also a great place to buy and sell goods and assets,” said NAA President Randy Wells. “For many, auctions can be intimidating and confusing at times. The goal of Auction Answers is to clear up much of the confusion surrounding auctions, such as terminology and its process. We want every bidder to be prepared to bid on auction day and feel comfortable when they raise their bid paddle.”

In addition to launching Auction Answers, the NAA recently made available from its website a link to the NAA Auction Newsroom. This site offers links to news articles related to the auction industry. There are already several ways to get news about the industry, most revolving around setting a notification using Google Alerts or Google News. What makes the NAA Auction Newsroom different is that the NAA has already filtered the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and eliminated all the non-relevant articles relating to eBay and other celebrity or non-professional auctions that would turn up in a search but not be related to the auction industry. “This is a very exciting tool because prior to this we could not replicate new stories due to copyright restrictions,” wrote Chris Longly, Director of Public Affairs and Communications for NAA, in an email. “I would add that members can place this link on their business website as well as another avenue to promote auctions.” Longly said the NAA Auction Newsroom would be featured in January’s Auctioneer magazine, so keep an eye out for yours in the mail if you’re a member of the NAA.

Over a quarter-trillion dollars in goods and services sold at auction in 2007, and it’s great to see the NAA take a leading role in evangelizing the auction method of marketing. We’ve mentioned previously some of the great educational offerings from the association, and we’ll be talking more about the USA Today Auction Showcase very soon.

New York auctioneer implements unique payment arrangements

Aaron — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 23:21:01 +0000

Mooney's Auction Service

The Maine Antique Digest is running a story about Al Cardamone of Mooney’s Auction Service. According to the story, Mooney’s recently sent out a bulk email announcing a prepayment program in which prospective bidders can exempt themselves from the buyer’s premium, as well as obtain a $7.00 concessions coupon at each auction they attend, by prepaying at least $1000 for purchases. There is no time limit or expiration on the use of the prepaid funds and the entire program is capped at $125,000 on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Does the math add up? If someone prepays for $1000 in purchases - and then purchases $1000 after eating at the concession stand - the auctioneer lost $107, supposing the details of the program are accurate in the story. There was no information available at mooneys.net regarding the program at the time of this posting.

Does the program make sense? Does the possible increase in cash flow justify the loss of the buyer’s premium for the auctioneer? First person to post a comment gets a $7 gift certificate at the AuctioneerTech concession stand.

Mahalo introduces human-generated answers to questions

Aaron — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 14:54:59 +0000

Mahalo Answers offers people-powered answers to questions

Mahalo is an interesting search engine. Relying more on people than algorithms, Mahalo has a staff that builds pages for common search results. When auser submits a query that doesn’t match one of the prepared pages, Mahalo returns search results from many popular search engines - including Google, Yahoo and MSN - allowing the user to select whch set of returns he wants to parse.

Mahalo has just released Mahalo Answers. It’s similar to Yahoo! Answers in that users can ask very specific questions and other users post direct answers. It’s a unique business model, however, because of the way it’s monetized. Users post rewards with their questions, and the successful answer gets 75% of the prize money.

For example, as I write this article there is a question currently posted that reads “What is a good kind of bicycle suitable for city driving?” It has a bounty of $1 Mahalo dollar, which means that the person who answers - and has his answer selected as the winning answer by the person who posted the question - will get $.75 and Mahalo will get the balance.

Some of the questions currently posted beg very opinionated responses, though those are the questions I would seed if I were looking to kick-start a service similar to this. As the system matures, I expect Mahalo Answers to be a vibrant community-assisted platform for finding fairly objective answers to tough questions or questions that aren’t easy to find answers to using other, more traditional search engines. The financial incentive here will give the service a huge edge over Yahoo! Answers in a space that Google surrendered when it retired Google Answers.

CrunchBase Information on Mahalo