Shoestring Theory

Intensity by Brandon Parkinson.

Saturday night, we all headed out to Henry’s Coffee Shop at 8th and New Hampshire here in Lawrence to see Brandon Parkinson’s first public exhibition of his artwork. Brandon is a very old friend. He works in a huge variety of formats, so you can’t really peg him as any particular type of artist. My poor words can’t begin to describe his work, so I’ve included some pics of the pieces I particularly liked. His work will be on display all month (March 2008), so I highly suggest if you’re a local to head over to Henry’s and see it in person. Otherwise, click here to check out his work online (more pics here after the jump).

[Click to read more →]

Tags:   art · brandon parkinson · henry's · offtopic1 Comment

Forbes Small Business has an exclusive interview with Richard Brewer-Hay, who will launch a new “no-holds-barred” blog for eBay in April called “eBay Ink.”

Unlike eBay’s existing blogs and forums, which focus on more traditional (and sanitized) corporate communications, eBay Ink aims to give readers a peek inside eBay’s internal operations. Brewer-Hay has pledged to write unbiased entries about what he observes as an all-access employee of the $7.7 billion dollar company.

When questioned about the influence eBay would have over him, Brewer-Hay responded:

RBH: My words go straight up onto the blog, unedited.

It’s got to be transparent. There’s got to be an authenticity to it, an honesty to it, otherwise there’s not point in doing it in the first place. I’m going to open up my e-mail to questions from folks. People can comment, too, and comments are going to be open. You’re going to get the good, the bad, and the ugly.

It kind of goes back to what I was saying at the beginning. They hired from outside the organization. I have no prior agenda with any of the execs or people in the company. I’m still in the process of getting to know them. I haven’t met a lot of them yet. That’s a big, important thing.

The other thing is, this is my job. There are no other jobs that I’m doing. Some corporate blogs are just side gigs for existing employees, but I’m doing this 100%, day-to-day.

Brewer-Hay said he buys on eBay and will begin selling now that he is working for them, so he hopefully he actually understands some of what the rest of us do on a regular basis. The interview is mostly background and some descriptions of what he hopes to accomplish.

We’ll see how good this is once it officially launches. I really hope this doesn’t evolve into another PR mouthpiece for eBay and actually shines some light into the corporate offices.

[Link to FSB Interview]

Tags:   blog · eBay · PR · richard brewer-hayNo Comments.

This was too appropriate not to post (especially given the news of the last month). Click the picture for a full size image where you can actually read the text (or go to Bunny’s site). You should go there anyway and enjoy the wonderfulness that is Bunny.

Bunny is created by Huw Davies and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Tags:   bunny · comic · eBay · webcomicNo Comments.

Kevin Kelly over at The Technium put forward an argument that artists on the interwebs really just need to develop 1,000 True Fans to make a living (and avoid ending up at the end of the Long Tail). It’s certainly related to the repeat customer business model, but tailored to artists in the digital age (regardless of the medium).

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day’s wages per year in support of what you do. That “one-day-wage” is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that. Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

Some food for thought for any artists. It doesn’t hurt for retail and service businesses to learn this lesson either. Establish great relationships with your best customers and give them reasons to keep coming back to you.

I originally picked up Kelly’s post from Jonathan Coulton’s blog (who makes his living following this model).

Tags:   1000 fans · e-biz · kevin kelly · long tail1 Comment

Classy folks, real classy.

So normally I despise the celebrity gossip/rumor mill, but this one intersected with two of my favorite sites, Wikipedia and eBay.

The St. Petersburg Times is reporting:

It’s war of the Web roses between St. Petersburg’s Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, and his ex-girlfriend, Rachel Marsden. She claims he dumped her via his Wikipedia page. So, natch, she appears to be selling his junk on eBay for revenge.

Apparently, this line was added to Wales’ Wikipedia entry: “Wales had a brief relationship with Canadian journalist Rachel Marsden.” Marsden, apparently, didn’t know the past tense now applied to the brief relationship. Wales has made an announcement about the situation on his personal blog.

There are two auctions up by user ID americanada1 for a t-shirt and sweater. The combined bid value on the two items is $3,136 (though both high bidders have 0 feedback and one is a new user). I can’t imagine how this seemed like a good idea. But, Marsden has a history of personal relationships ending badly and in the news according to her Wikipedia bio. Both her and Wales’ bios have editing locks on them currently.

News sites are reporting that Marsden met Wales after she complained about the Wikipedia article on her.

Here’s a head’s up to media people reporting on eBay and Wikipedia: link to the relevant information. The vast majority of the time I see eBay auctions reported on, there is no link to the auction nor an auction number to search for. The same goes for Wikipedia. Let your readers examine the source material for themselves and make their own judgments.

Tags:   eBay · gossip · marsden · revenge · rumor · wales · wikipedia1 Comment

I had known this was coming, but eBay sent out a notification to buyers today announcing that complete user IDs will no longer be displayed on any auction format listings.

Soon we will no longer display the complete user IDs of people bidding on any auction-style listing. Instead, we’ll use asterisks such as x***y to protect our members’ identities. Sellers will continue to see complete user IDs on their listings and the winning bidder’s ID will be visible to everyone after the auction ends.

We haven’t provided this information on listings of $200 or higher for some time and it’s been a very effective fraud deterrent for those items. For safety reasons, we’re now expanding this protection to all auction-style listings.
We know many of you like to see who you’re bidding against. But displaying this information makes it too easy for scammers to send out fake offers that include convincing details of your actual bidding activity on a specific listing, such as the item number, description and exact amount you bid.

In recent weeks fraudulent email offers targeting listings under $200 has surged unacceptably. To keep eBay a top shopping destination we must choose safety over visibility and nip this in the bud. We recognize for some of you this may be an unwelcome limitation but we hope you’ll support our putting more muscle into fraud prevention.

The prevalence of fake Second Chance offers has basically gutted that program. No one has any faith in it and almost all sellers I know have stopped using it (you routinely see auctions that announce that the seller does not use Second Chance offers). eBay certainly needed to do something about these scams.

While I know some change was needed, I do lament this as another loss to the community aspect of eBay though. I buy in the same categories over and over. I often find myself bidding against the same set of buyers (there are maybe 10 of us who commonly target one particular item). Even though I’ve never met any of these people, I feel I know them. I know what they bid on, whether they snipe or put in a big opening bid, and what their threshold for a particular item is. It makes bidding more fun and interesting for me.

Unless eBay changes this program, you can still figure out who is bidding. So far, the two letters used to identify a bidder are always the same (ex: user ID probidder would always be scrambled as something like d****r). So, many times I can still figure out who I’m bidding against if it is someone I see often. Who knows if that will remain though or if they will go over to a consistently random model.

There have also been concerns that this program makes it easier for dishonest sellers to use shill bidding on their own items (driving up the price). eBay has included some tools to allow people to see what percentage of a particular bidders activity is with one seller, but it’s not as handy of a tool as being able to review a bidders history over the last several weeks.

Tags:   auctions · bidding · changes · eBay · identity1 Comment

Looks like eBay has agreed to fork over some money to MercExchange and finally end the long patent battle over eBay’s “Buy It Now” feature. The San Francisco Gate is reporting:

As part of the agreement, eBay will buy three patents for e-commerce from its adversary, along with some additional assets. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In 2001, MercExchange, a tiny Virginia company, sued San Jose online giant eBay in federal court for allegedly infringing on its patents that allow consumers to buy products online for a fixed price. The case centered on eBay’s “Buy it now” button, a popular feature for shoppers who prefer to buy products outright rather than bidding in an auction.

It’s probably worth pointing out how the Bits blog at the New York Times described MercExchange:

Every big high-tech company, it seems, has at least one intellectual property adversary whose job is to harass the firm to the ends of the legal system, if not the earth itself.

For the e-commerce giant eBay, it was MercExchange, a Virginia-based intellectual property company whose business is asserting patent rights in courts against large companies.

If you really want to, you can read one of the patents here.

This patent essentially describes an auction run by a computer on the Internet, using a computer database, that “is terminated when the auction process reaches predetermined criteria.” Of course, it takes 16 pages to describe this in the patent.

Tags:   Buy It Now · eBay · lawsuit · MercExchange · patents1 Comment

Many years ago, I pissed away a golden opportunity. The University of Kansas, private organizations and assorted government agencies heaped money on me to go to school (hint: NMS). Who knew, brains actually can pay off. But, being young, foolish and a little lost, I dropped out, giving up all that money. Twelve years later, I did finally finish, but they don’t give out that free money the second (or third) time around. So, like lots of other grads, I’ve got a pile of student loans now. As a friend in a very similar situation recently told me, “Every time I make a student loan payment, I have a good hearty laugh…”

In January, I signed up for Upromise, Sallie Mae’s reward program. Its free and through it, a percentage of purchases made at certain stores gets applied to your Sallie Mae student loans or a college savings plan. You can also give your rewards to a relative or friend and help them out with college (great for parents and grandparents who do a lot of shopping). Everyone has a rewards program nowadays it seems: credit cards, airlines, box stores, gas stations, gaming stores, blah, blah, blah. Normally I don’t pay any attention to them. I have one debit card that returns instant cash back, good enough. Upromise, though, got me to take a look because of one line:

Earn 1% rewards on eBay purchases.

[Click to read more →]

Tags:   debt · eBay · Sallie Mae · student loans · upromise1 Comment

Dan Ariely explains why your life needs fewer options.

Keeping too many options open could actually hurt you. Maintaining options in life can sap time, money and resources, explained Dr. Dan Ariely of MIT in a New York Times interview.

Areily and economist Jiwoong Shin tested students at MIT with a simple computer game involving three doors. Students could only maximize their score by allowing options (doors) to fade away. You can play the game to fully understand the mechanics of it. They learned that players sacrificed high scores to maintain options. But, on further review of the players’ motivations, they found:

Apparently they did not care so much about maintaining flexibility in the future. What really motivated them was the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.

Ariely explores this and more in his book “Predictably Irrational.”

For a simple example of how maintaining too many options can hurt your business, let’s look at the dozens of ways eBay offers to enhance your listings: subtitles, extra pictures, themes, pricing options, highlights, enhanced gallery pictures, etc.

[Click to read more →]

Tags:   Ariely · eBay · NYTimes · options2 Comments

Let’s play a game! What’s under the keyboard? (Note, not the actual keyboard in question.)

Governments really shouldn’t use laptops. They just seem to lose, misplace or let the dang thangs get stolen a little too easily. In another privacy embarrassment for the British government, an encrypted CD with “highly confidential” government data was found inside a laptop purchased on eBay, according to the BBC.

The auction winner took it to a local computer shop because the laptop apparently wasn’t acting right. While checking it out, technicians found a CD hidden between the keyboard and motherboard. It was, helpfully, labeled “Home Office – highly confidential.” For those not familiar with the British government, the Home Office is “the government department responsible for leading the national effort to protect the public from terrorism, crime and anti-social behaviour,” according to the official site. But who protects Brits from them?

The BBC quoted a Home Office spokesman:

“Both the laptop and the disk were encrypted, thus safeguarding any information that might be stored on them.

“Investigations are now under way. It would be inappropriate to comment further while they are ongoing.”

I can’t tell from the photo that the BBC used whether its a mockup or an actual picture of the computer (I really wish news organizations would label such things). It looks like a late model Lenovo in the pic.

Tags:   british · eBay · laptops · malfesience · whoops1 Comment