www.auctioneertech.com is home to the Auction Podcast

I don’t know too much about it, but it seems a new site that’s billed as a social media auction is about to launch.

LikeBids looks to be a site that allows users to win items by convincing the most people to like or share links. I’m guessing that if you’re the person who convinces the most people to like and share the newest CD released by your favorite band, you may win a copy of the CD or at least get a discount.

Is it a true auction site? I wouldn’t go as far as to say that, but I will say that the concept sounds very fascinating and I look forward to the beta launch to try it out.

LikeBids

I first wrote about Mint in 2008, after having used it for six months and being pleased with the results. If you’re unfamiliar with Mint, it hooks to your financial accounts and automatically analyzes your spending and saving and investing habits to provide you with trends and charts as well as suggestions for improving your financial health.

I was disappointed when it was acquired by Intuit and the innovation subsequently slowed to a crawl. I’ve been waiting for months to get their tech support to correctly categorize an auto loan as a loan instead of a credit card, and finally received a response that’s not much more than “we’re working on it.”

My love-hate relationship with Mint aside, they released a pretty impressive infographic about credit cards last month. If you’ve ever wondered what the numbers on a credit card mean, or if you foolishly thought it was a 16-digit random number made just for you, you should roll on over and check it out on the Mint blog.

Cracking the Credit Card Code

Friend of the auction industry Carl Carter over at NewMediaRules Communications is conducting an anonymous survey about the auction industry. The stated goal is “to collect data on how auctioneers are using a full range of media to promote their auctions.”

The survey itself contains 11 questions ranging from the types of assets sold and the way the auctions are conducted to the types of media used and how the marketing mix is configured.

Carter regularly publishes articles on his blog and in various auction-related publications connecting the auction industry with media and publications, both old and new. There’s no question that the information will be kept anonymous and put to good use. Take the two minutes it takes to head on over and take the survey now.

Software patches are a continual pain in the ass. Windows Update takes care of Windows and some Microsoft programs, but does nothing about all the other software on your system. One of the first posts I wrote when AuctioneerTech launched in September of 2008 was about a company called Secunia that helps you check the software on your computer for vulnerabilities. I’ve been a regular Secunia user ever since, using their Personal Software Inspector (PSI) to keep my personal machines up to date.

Yesterday, Secunia released version 2 of their PSI, which boasts a new, even easier-to-use interface. If you haven’t used Secunia before, now is a great time to start.

I’ve had a Eee PC 901 netbook for the last couple years. I’ve had various version of Ubuntu Linux installed on it, including the netbook remix, and recently tried Peppermint and Lubuntu. By far the most enjoyable netbook OS I’ve tried – and am currently reinstalling because it’s better than everything else  – is Jolicloud.

Jolicloud was designed from the ground up to be a netbook OS. The environment is closer to the functionality of a smart phone – iOS or Android – than it is to a desktop OS like Windows or Ubuntu.

Jolicloud is truly a cloud OS. Like Google’s upcoming Chrome OS, Jolicloud synchronizes all your settings to your account, so when you login to a Jolicloud installation on multiple computers, your history and settings are retrieved and accessible. Unlike Google’s Chrome OS, however, Jolicloud offers the power of a traditional OS, allowing you to install standard Linux applications and alternative browsers as well as access local file storage and devices.

The cloud installation is so well-done that you can actually use your Jolicloud environment from any computer that runs Chrome. Simply go to jolicloud.com and login to see your netbook’s desktop and applications show in your browser.

The best part about using Jolicloud isn’t the simplicity, but the speed. Recent versions of Ubuntu – even the netbook remix – are slow on my old Eee 901. Scrolling seems sluggish, and there’s always a second or two that I have to wait for applications to load. Jolicloud is so light and fast that it hides the weaknesses of the hardware on which I’m running it.

Jolicloud recently launched the Jolibook, the first netbook that comes with Jolicloud pre-installed.  It’s available in the UK only at the moment, but for anyone looking for a netbook with a netbook OS – especially if you weren’t lucky enough to capture Google’s attention and get a Chrome OS C4 – it’s a fantastic option. It’s also a great option to turn that old, sluggish netbook into a fast, hip cloud appliance.

Jolicloud is a free download, and has an easy step-by-step tutorial for making a bootable USB stick if you don’t have a USB CD drive for your netbook.

Do you prefer a different OS on your netbook? Let me know with the comments.

As auctioneers slowly come around to the concept that consumers want items, not auctions, they invariably struggle with the intricacies involved with listing their items in their auctions. There are many places where the same inventory needs to be listed, ranging from advertising venues like Internet auction calendars to software packages for clerking and cashiering to web apps for Internet bidding, each with its own specification for importing inventory.

The tried-and-true gold standard for inventory entry is the spreadsheet. It’s almost synonymous with inventory management, with many auctioneers using the word Excel generically to mean “that program that we use to generate our auction catalogs.”

Spreadsheets may work fine for one destination, but the different specifications for each listing destination mean that each different upload requires reformatting the column order – and sometimes the contents of the columns. For example, one listing may support HTML in the description field, while another may choke on markup.

Spreadsheets have other problems. Traditional software applications like Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc allow only one user to edit a spreadsheet at a time. While some newer web apps like Google Spreadsheets allow multiple users to make changes simultaneously to the same file, it’s still a hassle to configure a spreadsheet for data validation – only allowing a small selection of valid seller numbers in the seller column, for example.

Many auction software packages have an included inventory management system, but these systems are usually very specifically tailored to the features of the software package. Excellent data quality in the auction software doesn’t translate to feature-complete exports for the many different Internet bidding providers or auction calendars.

Lotting Solutions is the company that recently released version 1 of LotSmarter, software that aims to be an inventory management system that lets auctioneers list inventory faster than ever before and port that inventory to every possible destination.

LotSmarter is stand-alone software that installs on Windows XP or Windows 7. On installation, the user selects from a list of exports those that will be used. These selected exports actually dictate the fields that will be available on each item. For example, an auctioneer can select Maxanet for Internet bidding, Auction Flex for clerking and cashiering. LotSmarter adjusts the data capture fields to include those used by Maxanet and Auction Flex and leaves out those required by the other options that aren’t selected.

Data portability is paramount to LotSmarter, but it does more than make your data easy to backup, import and export. Integration with Dragon Naturally Speaking – optionally included in the pricing plan – provides the capability to forgo the keyboard in favor of voice dictation. While reports abound of lackluster attempts at dictating listings, Lotting Solutions boasts stories from auctioneers who have trained successfully trained Dragon and LotSmarter to realize substantial time savings.

For auctioneers with galleries, LotSmarter eases the process of associating the pictures from the camera – as they’re taken – to the items in inventory. Eye-Fi is a type of memory card that has a built-in wireless device which transfers the pictures from the camera to LotSmarter without the need to wait to connect the camera to a computer with a cable. The software imports the pictures directly to the lot in progress.

Eye-Fi is an option, as is traditionally dragging pictures from the file system to the active lot. Once the picture is in the system, LotSmarter provides an integrated mechanism to rotate, crop and balance the pictures without using third-party software. The pictures are optionally watermarked and exported with the inventory for easy upload to any of the various outputs.

For auctioneers unsatisfied with the listing capabilities of spreadsheets or cramped by the limited exporting abilities of auction software packages, LotSmarter fills a significant niche by taking the pain out of data entry and solving the compatibility issues related to using multiple providers for advertising, bidding and clerking.

LotSmarter is available from www.lottingsolutions.com and offers a time-limited free trial.

Have you used LotSmarter? Why or why not? Tell your story in the comments.

I’m not quite sure how this gets to be called an opera, but it’s quite some entertaining fun with numbers. Multimedia artist Doug Aitken wrangled several top auctioneers, several IAC champions, as talent for this production.

If you have more information about this performance, help us out in the comments.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of OpenOffice.org. I covered it in one of the first posts on this blog, and have mentioned it on and off ever since.

I covered the difference between free and free in episode 11 of the Auction Podcast. In a nutshell, not all open source software is free and not all free software is open source. There is a difference between content that is free like beer and free like speech. In an effort to provide some disambiguation between the different kinds of free, many times the neologism libre is used to describe free like speech.

OpenOffice.org was a derivative of StarOffice, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999. Sun was a strong supporter of open source software development until it was acquired by Oracle in April of 2009. At that time, many in the open source community were quite scared of the way Oracle would deal with Sun’s assets that were community-based like MySQL and OpenOffice.org. Since that time, the community has been uneasy and discontent that Oracle wasn’t free enough.

In late September, the OpenOffice.org volunteer development community forked the project and created the Document Foundation. They publicly invited Oracle to be a member of the foundation and donate the OpenOffice.org name to the foundation for continued development. Until Oracle decides to donate the OpenOffice.org brand, the Document Foundation will push forward under the name Libre. Oracle has announced that it is committed to OpenOffice.org development, so it doesn’t seem like they’ll be playing ball any time soon.

Until they do, I’m switching to LibreOffice. The logic goes like this. If you don’t care about openness and you have a lot of money and like software that’s bloated and harder to use, go buy Microsoft Office. If you care about getting solid software at no cost but don’t care that it’s completely open, download OpenOffice.org. If you care about software that’s both free like beer and free like speech, download LibreOffice.

My friend Forres Meadows from TexasBid alerted me to the fact that my favorite utility, Dropbox, is now in beta for BlackBerry. While I’m not a huge BlackBerry user, I couldn’t imagine a day without Dropbox.

Dropbox for BlackBerry beta is available to the first 5000 applicants, so get yours before they’re full.

Yesterday, the news was released that Proxibid has appointed former eBay and PayPal executive Ryan Downs a new President of the company. An interview with Downs has already been posted by Ina Steiner from auctionbytes.com. The press release is below.

Proxibid, the world’s largest provider of live auction webcasting services, today announced that Ryan Downs has been appointed as the Company’s president. Bruce Hoberman will maintain his role as CEO of the Omaha-based firm that brings auction companies and bidders together via its sophisticated online bidding solution.

Mr. Downs brings to Proxibid a rich understanding of ecommerce, auctions and payments. He joins Proxibid from eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), where he served in a number of roles, most recently as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations for PayPal, eBay’s payments division. In that role, Mr. Downs was responsible for customer service, risk operations, merchant operations and various other functions. As one of the top executives at PayPal, Mr. Downs was instrumental in PayPal’s integration with eBay, expansion to Europe and Asia, and the launch of the merchant business. Mr. Downs also spearheaded efforts to improve the end to end user experience for PayPal and eBay customers.

“We are thrilled to have an executive with Ryan’s knowledge of the auction industry join the Proxibid family,” said Bruce Hoberman, CEO of Proxibid. “Ryan’s experience enables us to continue to strategically grow our business while continuing to provide auction companies with access to the world’s largest online auction marketplace. He brings to Proxibid a mix of Silicon Valley experience with Midwestern values that is sure to drive our Company into its next growth phase.”

“Proxibid is an amazing company that combines disruptive web technology, a relentless focus on customer experience, and the desire to build a great culture for its employees,” said Downs. “I am extremely excited to join a fast-growing and dynamic company located right here in my home town of Omaha.”

Mr. Downs holds a bachelor’s degree in Agribusiness and Agricultural Honors from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln, and a Juris Doctorate from Harvard Law School.