The Online Dutch Auction

By | November 23, 2011
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Good piece by my old friend Rani about how online auctions work in Singapore: 

When I tried to sell my xda II online, I was surprised to find out that the logic of online auction is almost totally different in Singapore. At first, I tried to sell my xda II in Singapore Pocket PC user group (PPCSG). However, I can say that, although PPCSG market place forum is a great place to buy stuff, it is not a great place to sell stuff. People from the forum would mercilessly bargain 40-50% from the initial price. Having been unable to sell my xda II with a good price in PPCSG, I looked for other alternatives.

Enter auctions sites, namely, Yahoo Auctions Singapore and ebay Singapore. And I was surprised to find out that… nobody bids on those auctions sites. It was not long until I find out the unwritten rules of the online auction game in Singapore, which is totally different from my experience doing online auction in the US and UK.

Basically it’s like a reverse auction: Put your highest price as the opening bid, and wait for folk to call you with lower bids. Then you just seal the deal over the phone. I wonder how true this is elsewhere? And I wonder, too, whether Rani’s suggestion that eBay and co actually build the capability for reverse auctions into their software, so that in places like Singapore, people actually use their services?

Podcast: Online Shopping

By | November 23, 2011
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From the BBC World Service World Business Report: Online shopping

Here’s an excerpt from the original WSJ.com piece (subscription only, I’m afraid):

Why does buying stuff online still look so similar to buying offline?

First, Web sites still use the whole browsing-shopping basket-checkout metaphor, an approach that even real world shops are trying to get away from. Then you have in-your-face promotions, top 10s, on-sale items, buy-two-get-one-free offers, which to me don’t sound that different to your average supermarket gimmicks. Amazon has made some steps forward, such as pointing out that purchasers who bought a certain product have also bought other products, and allowing users to search for text inside books. But these are hardly huge leaps. After all, couldn’t we look inside books in a bookstore, or ask an assistant for suggestions about similar books?

And for those looking for links, I mentioned Etsy in the piece; a couple of others worth checking out are Kaboodle and Wists.

Headsets Get the Bling Treatment

By | November 23, 2011
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A few weeks back on my WSJ.com column (subscription only; I’ll update you when it’s out on the BBC World Service) I explored the world of bling cellphones, including the Vertu range, the Kathrine Baumann “Wireless Wardrobe” Collection (inexplicably that collection is now password-protected since I last visited), the fancy wooden Mobiado range, and the diamond-encrusted, gold-set Samsung. I guess it was inevitable that headsets would start getting the bling treatment, and here’s the first: the Dimante Pink Bluetooth Headset (via Red Ferret:

Hedset

The Pama P7008 Bluetooth headset comes with the usual Bluetooth Version 1.2 compliancy, with Headset & Handsfree Profiles, One Button action, up to 5 hours talk time and 200 hours standby, weighs “just 12.7g”, and is the Ideal Bluetooth Hands Free Kit Gift for the Woman in your Life! (it says here).

Frankly I feel insulted. Why can’t us fellas have one? The only problem I can see is that with all that bling on your ear, aren’t you becoming a walking mugging invitation?

Of course you might be asking yourself why a diamond-encrusted handsfree weighs the same as an ordinary headset and costs about the same (£47.95, or $84) as an ordinary headset. That’s because of the $17 Crystal Bling Design Kit which lets you jazz up your accessories — from cellphones to iPods — with little bits of shiny crap, sorry, Crystal Diamante. I think I’m going to bling up my Treo 650.

Another Way to Measure Fame

By | November 23, 2011
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Here’s another way to measure how famous you are on the Internet: egoSurf – ego surfing without the guilt (via MicroPersuasion and Mashable):

egoSurf helps massage the web publishers ego, and thereby maintain the cool equilibrium of the net itself.

We, the publishers of this here internet thing, need the occasional massage, the odd stroke. We aren’t paid. We aren’t recognised. Our sites hit count used to be enough, but no longer.

Enter your name and URL (or URls) and you’ll get an ‘ego point’ ranking for the number of links of your name to those URLs, as well as a cute meter (or bank of meters if you’re searching more than just Google):

Egometer

This is cute, and has some nice features (like RSS feeds of your ranking) but not new. There’s Preople, who have been doing something similar for a while. Preople does a slightly different calculation, whereby they

visit a few search engines, search for your name, get the number of times your name is found online and perform a complicated calculation to extract a Preople Rank. We guard this formula with our lives because it is what makes our service, and your Preople Rank, unique. We know you are curious but don’t even ask us to disclose our formula!

Just in case you’re interested, I have a Preople ranking of 68,700, which puts me somewhere outside the top 100 (the Dalai Lama is at 99 with 6,490,000) and come out at 9161, or a couple of notches outside the fame belt, on Egosurf. For WSJ.com readers, I wrote something about Preople and Internet fame (subscription only, I’m afraid) a few months back.

Non-intrusive Advertising in Your Browser

By | November 23, 2011
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Here’s a new  idea for non-intrusive advertising: T&S Advertising. It’s basically a way for your website to rent out space in the title bar of your browser and its status bar (the bit at the bottom) to outside advertisers. Like this at the top:

Ts1

and this at the bottom:

Ts2

The idea here is that such advertising doesn’t take up any extra space, isn’t intrusive and could be easily configurable. A website would rent out space there in the same way it would rent out space to Google Ads, banner ads, or whatever. It’s the brainchild of a 23–year old Dutch student called Johan Struijk, who according to a press release made available yesterday hopes that

at only $1 per 1000 views this is a low cost but effective form of advertising. “I think this will mainly appeal to modern, forward thinking businesses,” Johan said, “and perhaps some of the larger blue chip companies who have established brand names and slogans.”

I’m not as convinced as he that this would take off big time since those places on a screen are so unobtrusive as to be invisible, but I could be wrong. And it’s good to see folks exploring ideas like this which don’t involve hoodwinking the user. Johan might want to run a spell checker over his website and press release, though, just so the blue chips take him seriously.