Oh man, people are mad at eBay. So angry, in fact, that there is supposedly a boycot starting on Monday to protest changes the auction site has made to the way feedback is handled, raised fees, sellers standards, and the way search works. Many people make their living on eBay and fear the changes, which they deem “unwarranted”, would make it harder for them to depend on eBay for income.
The main bone of contention is that the new feedback system would allow more access to shifty sellers and dilute the already fragile reputation system. While there’s no doubt that the feedback system is flawed, many sellers think this change is going in the wrong direction.
What remains to be seen is what impact, if any, the boycott will have on eBay itself, and more importantly to the buying public.
XamBox may be the single best intermediary device between analog and digital I’ve ever seen. Paper documents, receipts and business cards are scanned in and dropped in a box. Software converts the paper to PDFs and catalogs in what order the hard copies are stored in the box. When the box is full, you label it, seal it and store it. If you need the document again, the software will tell you exactly where to look, or you can just print a fresh copy.
Ziszor! (with an exclamation point like Yahoo!), is a portable handheld shredder that shreds up to 5 layers of paper at a time. I’m thinking about a year on the road so small and portable is on my mind.
Litepanels Micro is a consumer version of what the pros use for lighting faces. It’s LED so it doesn’t use much energy and it doesn’t put off much heat. It fits on a small DV camera and runs on four AA batteries.
There is a new portable version of Guitar Hero that will be released next month.
Going through boxes of stuff to sell on eBay, I came across our very first digital camera. It’s a Vivitar ViviCam 3000. It shoots .77 Megapixel images and has 1 MB of internal storage and I want your suggestions for what I should do with it.
Hello I am priest of cloth. Meg Whitman set to retire, my friend, and we in St. Victual’s School for Girls in Lagos, Nigeria would like for to buy your item as a present for her. We will send you money order check for $100 over the amount and you please to keep $75 and give $25 to my friend in Detroit who will ship present to Lagos. Please inform me the soonest possible of when you can send the item and I will contact John Donahoe who will replace Mr. Whitman at eBay. I am glad we can to do business together and many returns of the season.
Wondering why we haven’t recommended Amazon’s Kindle for the holidays? Well, it’s been sold out since week one and it’s rather pointless to recommend something you can’t get before the end of the year, right? In case you’re desperate to find one for that lucky geeky bookworm of yours you’ll have to pay a premium. They’re going for double the normal retail so break out that piggy bank.
The Big Daddy suit has now come full circle. From an odd Halloween costume to a VGA-feted wonder-thing, it has been through a lot and now it’s for sale on eBay. Bidding starts at $999 but expect it to go for more than that. I hear the Society for Creative Ayn Randianisms is nosing around as is a Bay Area cosplay fetish club. Has someone been good this Christmas?
Peter Ha and I went out to see eBay in action — and got to hang out with THE Cat Schwartz, the official eBay toy and gadget gal. One thing they showed us was the odd look book that lets you see popular toys through the decades and even buy them online.
Just for kicks, tell me about your favorite childhood toy gets a $50 eBay gift card in comments. I’ll pick one winner at random but be sure to include you real email address.
I had a pretty respectable Star Wars collection back in the day. I even had the original, hard-to-find B-Wing fighter. I’ll be you didn’t even know that existed (there’s one in this photo). But this guy, man, he’s some sort of collecting monster.
The scope of his collection is as vast as the space opera itself. Remember the protagonist’s house in The 40 Year Old Virgin? Think that, but real.
The starting price is $25,450, with a “buy it now” of only $34,500. He’s throwing in the Spawn series at that price, a steal!
Why, after all this work, would mcfaydenb be selling all of his gear? Read More
The green Eee wasn’t supposed to be available until early next year and it was supposed to be the 2-gigabyte version. Well there’s apparently a 4-gigabyte version shipping out of Taiwan that’s only being offered by two Taiwanese sellers on eBay’s German site. Weird.
Both sellers appear to be established enough (one’s got a 417 rating, the other is 2260) that they wouldn’t be fly-by-night operations, so this could very well be legit. There aren’t any actual photos of the green models aside from ASUS promotional photos, so please proceed at your own risk and remember not to talk to strangers.
A man in Italy bought the small Texas town of Albert on eBay for $3.8 million on Friday. That’s awesome. I wish I had my own town. Lucky jerk. Good for him, though.
Nobody currently lives in the town, but there’s a bar that’s open on the weekends. Go figure. The town is about 13 acres large and includes "a pavilion, an 85-year-old dance hall, a tractor shed, a three-bedroom house, plus peach and pecan orchards."
That actually sounds like kind of a good deal for $3.8 million even in light of the fact that the reserve price was set at only $2.5 million. Apparently this is the second town to be sold on eBay (Bridgeville, California was the first).
Don’t you think $12,000 for an NES game is outrageous? I don’t care that it’s a super rare 1990 Nintendo World Championship cartridge. But I guess when there’s only 116 copies and it being the third rarest game of all time may warrant such an astronomical price tag. Of course, you need to find an NES that won’t crap out. I had no idea that there were 26 gold versions of the 116 and one recently sold for over $20,000. Feel free to Buy It Now.
Well look at these humdingers. They’re up for auction on eBay right now with a current bid of $1000 and there’s still three and a half days to go. They come with some pretty loud purple laces that you can’t see in this photograph, but why not just click on through and see what all the hubbub’s about? Man, these are size 13. I wear size 13. Should I buy them? I can’t think of a much better use of (at least) $1000.
If you sent a package to the offices of eBay, you’re in trouble. The wonderful cheap-ass auction site had to evacuate one of its office buildings earlier today when a “suspicious package” of unknown origin showed up in the mail room.
I’m waiting on some AV cables for my new iPod Touch. If you were trying to send them to me but sent them to eBay instead, you’re doing it wrong.
Another Monday morning with nothing to buy with the $11,000 burning a hole in my pock — what’s this??! Over 1700 video games, systems, and accessories on Ebay?!
Shipping varies based upon your location but costs can get up around $1500 unless you use the Buy It Now option ($10,979) in which case shipping is free. The first line of the auction makes me sad; “After decades of painstakingly collecting video games and consoles, I’ve finally decided to part with my entire collection.” What happened, friend?
The auction ends in about 5 days and at the time of this post, the bidding is up to $2,225. If you’ve never played a video game in your life but have always wanted to know what all the fuss is about, now’s a great time to jumpstart your collection.
Auction powerhouse eBay posted a Q3 loss of roughly $936 million dollars, making it the second time in the company’s history that it’s reported a loss. It’s not all doom and gloom, though, considering that the company claimed a $1.4 billion charge to write down its purchase of VOIP provider, Skype. Take away the Skype purchase, and eBay more than doubled its earnings per share compared to last year.
In a rather odd move not normally seen in the business world, anti-piracy company ViralG has put some of its technology up on the digital auction block. For $1 million, you can acquire all of the patents and (I suppose) software that ViralG has developed to combat P2P piracy. This is no joke either, as the company has won awards such as the ICT Prize in 2005. Its client list includes companies like Atari, Sony Computer Entertainment, Vivendi, and many others.
So how does this magical P2P killer work? Apparently ViralG has worked out a way to implement corrupted files with working hashes. You download the file that looks legit, only to find it’s screwed up and you’ve just wasted your time. One problem though: the system is outdated and won’t be effective against Bit Torrent. Hmm, so for $1 million, I could get outdated software that can catch all 13 people using BearShare? No thanks.
Oh, yah, here’s the auction. [eBay]
Auction powerhouse eBay posted a Q3 loss of roughly $936 million dollars, making it the second time in the company’s history that it’s reported a loss. It’s not all doom and gloom, though, considering that the company claimed a $1.4 billion charge to write down its purchase of VOIP provider, Skype. Take away the Skype purchase, and eBay more than doubled its earnings per share compared to last year. 
