User preference
Users are realizing the dangers of reading email as HTML. More and more users are switching off that functionality, and we couldn’t agree more. When an HTML email is sent to a client that reads email in plain text, it has the potential to look garbled. The user then has to decide if he or she wants to switch on the HTML view to see the message formatted in a readable way. The smart assumption is that this decision isn’t going to be made often, especially for solicitation email. Because most solicitation email is sent as HTML, users are more likely to spend more time reading emails that are sent as plain text.

Spam filters
Email sent as HTML is more likely to be caught by spam filters. An article called Get My Email Out of That Spam Filter from http://www.jsbwebdesign.com states the following.

Avoid high graphics and html emails as they send up a flare to the spam filter to look closer… By staying on top of why spam filters isolate certain emails and not others, you are thinking ahead and outsmarting the spam software so your customers and you can use the powerful tool of email to do business.

Email sent as plain text is much more likely to actually make it to the inbox of the recipient.

Mobile devices
Mobile devices have become quite popular. As the number of smart phones begins to dwarf all others, the more active population will be reading more and more email away from their computers. Most mobile devices don’t even try to render HTML email, and those that do try to do so render it poorly. Sending HTML email

Accessibility
One of the cornerstones of a competent web presence is consistency of message. The reason we use web standards to build fixed-width websites is so that our sites look the same on every browser. For this same reason, we should want our email to look the same to ever customer. Jan Meyer, on fixmypages.com, writes the following.

HTML email may look wonderful on your computer, but on the recipient’s computer it could look very bad and be unreadable. Most HTML email writers add in font types and sizes to the message. Differences between your system and the recipient’s system can change the layout, font type and size of the message the recipient sees. This means your carefully constructed HTML email masterpiece looks nothing like you think it does on the recipient’s system.

Also for accessibility reasons, we should avoid sending email as both HTML and plain text. A multi-part email message has both an HTML and a plain text version in the same container. This method is going against message consistency, as it assumes that some users will get one message and some won’t, and it also needlessly increases the size of the message.

Branding
Using HTML email tracking systems is very bad from a branding perspective. A proper marketing campaign should drive traffic directly to your website by promoting your website address. Email tracking systems use redirects to first count clicks before sending traffic to your website. Users reading your email as plain text will see these tracking links rather than a link to your website. Because most email clients highlight and activate links in plain text messages, these long tracking links will stand out to the user, highlighting that you’re trying to track his actions. The user may have clicked on the link that looks like http://www.abcauction.com won’t click on a link that looks like http://abcauction.mailtrack.com/?id=01928369872364U49854. Using HTML email doesn’t promote your brand, it confuses it.

Summary
When deciding how to conduct an email marketing campaign, you’re much better off opting to send that email as text. Your users will appreciate that you understand that HTML is for the web and text is for email. More users will be able to read it, both because fewer messages will be blocked by spam filters as well as because mobile devices will display the message properly. Everyone will see the same message, and your website and brand will be properly promoted.

Related posts:

1. Reading plain text email is safer and faster and preserves privacy
2. phpList provides free and easy bulk email list management
3. Hosted Exchange allows users to share Outlook without headache

Subscribers
Sandhills Publishing has recently added an “Online Auction Listings” section to its websites at www.machinerytrader.com, www.tractorhouse.com, www.truckpaper.com and www.controller.com. It has disallowed auctioneers who list items at Internet only auction from advertising in their publications and on these websites. This choice to become its own exclusive auctioneer for equipment at Internet only auction means its publications are less valuable to its subscribers who can no longer see the wide range of equipment available from many auction companies. Instead, the subscribers only see equipment listed for live auction and equipment listed directly by sellers on these websites for Internet only auction. This creation of a monoculture means that prospective buyers will increasingly turn to other venues for more comprehensive lists of available assets, reducing the value of advertising sale listings and traditional auctions in these publications.

Auction industry
What makes matters worse is that in addition to the reduction in value to the subscribers, Sandhills is playing the eBay game of calling itself an auctioneer and claiming that it doesn’t get involved in the transactions. The obvious question is, “who does it hurt?” – indeed, eBay has been around for a long time and has offered the ability for sellers to directly post items for sale. The problem is that the “Online Auction Listings” system does a disservice to auctioneers and the auction industry.

TractorHouse completely misses the definition of no reserve

Notice the image to the right, taken from tractorhouse.com. The system completely botches the concept of a no reserve auction by listing an opening bid price. This is an intellectually dishonest practice, since an auction with a significant required opening bid is by definition an auction with reserve. This misunderstanding of auction concepts causes confusion for sellers trying to decide how to liquidate assets and it makes it harder for auctioneers to educate the public that an auction can have either an opening bid or no reserve but never both. Will McLemore from McLemore Auction Company doubts that such systems are sustainable.

“Ultimately it will come down to who is able to conduct auctions with attractive and consistent terms on a regular basis. I highly doubt that any publication will be willing or able to book unreserved auction business online. It does concern me because their ineptitude will inevitably muddy the waters for those of us who understand what we are doing.”

Sellers
This kind of system is an easy sell. A seller who subscribes to the publication has the perception that the it’s local and has the bidders – solely in the other subscribers – who may be interested in the asset. The logic failure goes something like “I subscribe to this publication so everyone else interested in my assets must do the same.” This seller is perhaps one who may have sold the item with a real auctioneer and had access to a professional marketing campaign that included more than one publication and one website. Instead, he is led to believe he’s using the auction method of marketing when he’s doing nothing more than listing his item with a price in the classifieds.

Any auctioneer knows that he is an agent of the seller and has the specific duty to work in the seller’s best interests before, during and after the auction. The position taken by Sandhills is the same as eBay’s. They claim to not be involved in the transaction but merely to allow sellers and buyers to find each other. This hands-off approach can be a dangerous situation for a seller who, especially when dealing with assets of high value, should have professional services of an auctioneer at his disposal.

Diversity
It’s not just Sandhills Publishing. Other publications such as the Nashville Tennessean and Kansas City Star have at least kicked around the idea of building auction sections on their websites, and it’s inevitable that in a time of rapidly declining subscriptions, companies originally rooted in traditional publications will look to diversify into other arenas and undoubtedly step on some toes in the process. Carl Carter, president of Auction Communications and blogger at www.overcoffeemedia.com is closely following the plight of traditional media.

The crisis facing media — including newspapers, consumer magazines and trade media — is so enormous and so pervasive that some will inevitably be tempted to venture into new lines of business, including auctions. But these companies need to realize that their organizations are built around a totally different business model. The pitfalls are wide and deep, ranging from ill-fitted cost structures to potential conflict of interest.

An increase in diversification is a reduction in focus. We think companies should be auction companies or they should be something else. An attempt to diversify into the auction business by media companies does a disservice to their subscribers, the auction industry and their sellers.

Do you know of other publications who have tried to enter the auction arena? Let us know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. AuctionWally calls out eBay CEO
2. ATS designation – Auction Technology Specialist for auctioneers
3. Auction Listing Specialist Certification not for auctioneers

Install the client. You’ll find a “My Dropbox” directory in your documents folder, wherever that may be. Anything you put in this folder is automatically and immediately synchronized on the Dropbox server. If you have Dropbox installed on any other computer, it’s immediately updated there as well.

Not content with simple and secure synchronization, Dropbox provides the ability to share. A very convenient web interface lets you login from a web browser and have immediate access to all the files in your Dropbox. You have the ability to provide links to allow others to view the content you specify, and Dropbox has a very nice picture gallery system for any photos.  You also have the ability to see previous versions of your files as well as restore deleted files.

The service is cross-platform. We’re currently using it on 2 Vista machines, 4 Linux machines, Windows XP and a Windows 7 installation. Each of these 8 computers has the same files, and a change to any of these files is nearly instantly replicated on each of the others.

The service offers 2 GB for free. 50 GB costs $100 per year and 100 GB costs $200 per year. As a backup tool, it’s not quite as cost effective as Carbonite or, our new favorite set-it-and-forget-it backup tool Mozy, but neither of those services offers painless synchronization across computers nor the ability to share and have web access to your files.

We’re going to reiterate the power of this service. If you’re working on a file on the desktop at your office and have to go home, you don’t have to worry about copying the file to your laptop or netbook. Simply save the document in the Dropbox directory and it’s automatically on your portable device and the computer at your house. If you’re going to a meeting and need the file on the computer that’s running the projector, simply login to getdropbox.com and access it over the Internet.

If you have more than one computer, or if you would like the ability to access certain files from anywhere very quickly via a browser, Dropbox is a no-brainer.

Related posts:

1. Synergy uses one keyboard and mouse for multiple computers, displays
2. ShowMyPC provides free and easy remote support and collaboration
3. Secunia checks your PC for vulnerabilities

Auction Flex launches new blog

This helps because the clerk knows that every bidder number should be three digits. If the clerk mis-hears bidder number 23 they automatically know there is no bidder number 23 and they can ask the auctioneer to repeat the number.

We’ve known this for a while. Legacy permanent numbers are intended to make customers feel welcome and instead add to confusion that ends up costing their time and our time, not to mention making other customers feel unwelcome.

We look forward to keeping an eye on the Auction Flex Blog, which you can visit at http://blog.auctionflex.com/.

Related posts:

1. Auction Podcast Episode 9 – Interview with Brandon Harker – Auction Flex
2. NAA’s Hannes Combest launches blog
3. Auction Podcast Episode 9 Released

Chris Longly from the National Auctioneers Association talks about his role as Deputy Executive Directory and promotes the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and show. We’ll have a transcript posted here soon.

Related posts:

1. Auction Podcast Episode 14 – Interview with Scott Musser
2. Auction Podcast Episode 10 – Interview with Darron Meares
3. Auction Podcast Episode 7 – Interview with Robert Mayo

By far the most important part of advertising an auction is the item-level listing on the Internet. With that listing, a prospective bidder can find the items he’s interested in, not just a prospective auction that he may or may not have the time to investigate. One of the two crucial parts of listing an item for auction is the picture.

This article is the first in a series about how to handle auction pictures, from storing them to processing them to posting them on the web.

We’ve seen many cases where an auctioneer’s pictures for auctions were stored separately from the spreadsheets used to list the items. We’ve seen cases where one auction’s data was on one computer and another auction lived on a different computer. We’ve seen cases where it took an auctioneer 10 minutes to find the pictures of an item.

All data relevant to a specific auction should be stored in one place, be it a server in the office or a specific computer on a home network. This recommendation doesn’t mean that multiple people can’t work on data simultaneously, it simply means that when everyone is done they should store the files in a logical manner.

We recommend having a primary directory – a directory is the same as a folder – that contains all data relevant to all auctions. Inside this directory, create a folder for each year. Inside the appropriate year’s folder, create a folder for each day you have an auction. Most importantly, name this auction directory using the International date format. Before you wind up your propeller hat, here’s an example image that illustrates this hierarchy.

Naming and storing auction data

As you can see, this model is completely scalable regardless of the number of auctions you do. The benefit of using the international date format to name your auction directories is that they will always sort themselves chronologically. In order to find a file related to a specific auction, you’ll only have to know the date. This method is much better than some of the others we’ve seen, such as having a folder for each seller or naming the auction directory after the auction title, both of which require a better memory and better folder sorting skills. Do you have two auctions on the same day? Create a subdirectory within each day folder with the auction name.

We’re really big on organization, and so you’ll see in the image above a few folders inside the day directory. Each picture you post should be edited with picture editing software, and in future articles we’ll look at different programs and processes to perform on the images.

Originals
An important rule regarding picture storage is to always keep a copy of the original pictures you take for each auction.  You never know when you’ll want to use a specific picture for print advertising or when you want to re-process a picture to highlight a feature that you cropped out in your first pass. Once a picture has been properly processed and saved for the web, it’s no longer of high enough quality to use for much else.

Uploaded
We like to always keep a copy of the pictures we’ve uploaded to the web. That way, if something happens to our web server or if we overwrite the wrong folder or accidentally delete a directory, we’ll have an easy way to reupload the missing pictures from our local storage location.

Spreadsheets
The spreadsheet is still the clear leader in the way that item listings are generated. Sure, text documents are still widely used by auctioneers who don’t list at item-level (a big paragraph of items is NOT item level), but spreadsheets are the way to list items. We like to save many and save often.

You can have many other folders of file type such as marketing or video – or you can dump everything into the same folder. Find what works best for you. The important components to a data storing strategy is to find a logical system, store everything in one place, and do it the same way every time.

Do you have a better system? Let us know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Pictures added to KAA convention coverage
2. Dropbox synchronizes and shares files between computers
3. Internet auction calendars offer inexpensive marketing power

We try to cover basic security best-practices as much as possible. We talked about the value of NoScript, a Firefox plugin that prevents JavaScript from loading on web pages unless specifically allowed by the user. Today, we’re going to examine why reading email as HTML is a bad practice from a privacy, security and usability standpoint. We’ll also look at how to fix your email client to read all messages as plain text.

HTML stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language and is the foundation of the modern Internet. It is the way web designers can specify that certain text should be linked to other web pages and how images can be displayed on websites.

Email was never intended to be anything other than a messaging system. At some point, email clients began using a browser or browser-like rendering system to display any HTML in emails graphically. As if this wasn’t bad enough from a usability and privacy perspective, it soon followed that they began to interpret scripting as well, thus bringing all of the security dangers of malicious websites to our email boxes.

Privacy
Reading HTML email is bad from a privacy perspective. There’s a great article at About.com by antivirus professional Mary Landesman called Why plain is better. It states the following.

HTML-rendered email can be virtually wiretapped through the use of invisible images, specially formed links, and other techniques that allow email to be tracked. For example, unique serial numbers are often assigned to invisible images stored on a remote server. Each time the email is read, those images are accessed, providing a record of whether the email was opened.

Imagine if each time you checked your post office mail box someone recorded which letters you opened and sent a report back to each sender. It’s amazing that the objections regarding government wiretapping and the privacy of medical records are made by the same people who haven’t secured their inboxes from such observation.

In addition to tracking image loads, many times the links themselves are coded so that the sender can know exactly which link you click. The link connected to the words website.com at the top of the email may be a different link than the word website.com at the bottom of the email.

The same tracking systems in HTML used by over-zealous marketers are also used by spammers to tell if inboxes are valid. An email address that consistently loads the HTML-included image means that spam sent to it is being read – or at least opened – and is a much higher-value target than an email address that never loads the image.

Security
Reading HTML email is bad from a security perspective. Phishing is a common practice wherein a user is tricked into providing login credentials, like a username and password, or other sensitive data such as credit card information to a malicious website. One of the many possible baited-hooks used in these attacks is sending an email that looks like an urgent and official email from your bank. The pretty picture says click here to login and takes you to a web page that looks just like your bank’s login page. What you don’t notice is that the URL is slightly different. When you submit the form with your username and password, the malicious page sends your information to the hacker who then can use it to login to your bank’s real website.

Scripting refers to the ability of a program to interpret commands given to it by the content of the document it’s rendering. It’s very common on web pages, but has begun to creep into other types of documents where it doesn’t belong. PDFs, spreadsheets and email are just a few of the types of content that now interpret scripting and now have the associated security issues.

Scripting allows documents to essentially run programs on your computer. Benign scripts may simply ensure that the data you enter into a PDF form is valid, triggering a pop-up if you try to enter a letter into the phone number field. Malicious scripts, however, can be much more pernicious.

Steve Gibson from Gibson Research Center explained one possible scripting use in episode 52 of the Security Now! podcast.

standard JavaScript with no bugs, no exploits, no buffer overruns, no mistakes at all, can be used to port scan your internal network, identify devices, take them over, reprogram them…

Unfortunately, many email clients that render email as HTML allow JavaScript to execute when the document is loaded, so even the simple act of selecting an email with an open preview pane may be enough to cause serious damage.

Even without scripting, email can make use of advanced HTML and CSS techniques to overlay links on parts of the document that don’t look like links so that an accidental click anywhere might send you to a web site in your browser that has the malicious scripts there.

Usability and speed
HTML email is bad from a usability perspective. If you accept that the purpose of email is simply to receive messages, then what faster way to read those messages than in simple text? The different images, font sizes and color choices can take seconds to adapt to, and content in different areas or columns can be difficult to prioritize. This extra time and confusion adds up substantially for those of us with a lot of email to parse and very little time in which to do it.

Benefits of plain text email
Reading email as plain text solves all of the problems listed above.

• Plain text email doesn’t support images, so you can’t be tracked by the email senders
• Plain text email lets you see the links you’re clicking so you can tell if you’re clicking on a link that goes to capitalone.com or one that sends you to capitalone.evilsender.com.ru
• Plain text email doesn’t support scripting so your email doesn’t try to perform actions on your computer
• Plain text email is easier and faster to read

Fix your email reader
In defense of email readers, recent progress has certainly improved the security of clients like Outlook and Thunderbird. While they’re improved, they’re by no means completely secure, as each regularly releases security patches and updates to prevent the latest vulnerabilities.

Even if the browser is completely secure and rendering HTML perfectly, a link on an image or anchor text could still send you to a phishing website. Even if you turn off images and scripting and have the latest and greatest anti-phishing software running on your computer, you’re still left with the annoyance of varying typography and colors that simply aren’t an issue with plain text email.

Outlook
Here’s how to fix Outlook 2003 from the Microsoft support article on the subject.

1. Start Outlook 2003.
2. On the Tools menu, click Options.
3. On the Preferences tab, in the E-mail area, click E-mail Options.
4. In the Message handling area, click to select the Read all standard mail in plain text check box.

Here’s how to fix Outlook 2007 from the Microsoft support article on the subject.

1. Start Outlook 2007.
2. On the Tools menu, click Trust Center, and then click E-mail Security.
3. Under Read as Plain Text, click to select the Read all standard mail in plain text check box.
4. To include messages that are signed with a digital signature, click to select the Read all digitally signed mail in plain text check box.

Thunderbird
Thunderbird is even easier to secure.

1. Start Thunderbird
2. On the View menu, click Message Body As and select Plain Text.

Remember that neither modification is permanent. Outlook will tell you that a message has been converted to plain text and if you’ve decided that it’s from a trusted source and for some reason you wish to view it as HTML, you can click the header of the message to do so. All Thunderbird requires is that you simply select view > message body as > original HTML.

HTML is for the web, text is for email. Reading email as simple text is safer, faster and protects your privacy. Soon, we’ll look at this issue from a marketing perspective and learn why sending email as plain text is better for your brand and better for your subscribers and customers.

Related posts:

1. Sending plain text email is better for users and branding
2. NoScript add-on provides security in Firefox
3. Windows and email

We recently had reason to search for an alternative to the overpriced [read: not free] web conferencing solutions such as WebEx and GoToMeeting. A quick Google search revealed a relatively new service that claims to be “the world’s easiest web conference” and 10 minutes into our tests, we believe it.

Firmly grounded on an open-source platform, complete with GPL source code, Dimdim offers an enormously robust service at no cost. While other companies offer a time-limited free demo, Dimdim offers the their service for free for up to 20 simultaneous users.

The biggest problem with WebEx was the download. We’ve been on meetings where participants using Macs were left out in the cold, and we never even hoped – much less tried – to get it to work on Linux. Dimdim offers its service based solely on Flash and claims to support Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. We usually have bad things to say about Flash, but this application is a perfect use of the technology.

Not content with simple presentation sharing, Dimdim offers desktop sharing, chat, whiteboard and document sharing. That’s not all. Also included in the free plan is VoIP and a free teleconference phone number. To top it off, the free version allows the presenter to share his or her webcam to provide video to up to 20 meeting participants.

It’s tough for us to remember the last time we needed meeting software to support more than 20 participants, but if that’s necessary, Dimdim can certainly scale up to large enterprise needs at a fraction of the cost of the competition.

The features aren’t exactly easy to find on the website. Here’s the hookup to see features offered and a comparison between the free and paid plans.

Are you stuck with WebEx or GoToMeeting? Have you kicked them to the curb in favor of Dimdim or another service? Let us know in the comments.

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1. ShowMyPC provides free and easy remote support and collaboration
2. phpList provides free and easy bulk email list management
3. W3 Schools provides quick and dirty programming education for free

Fourth Wave, LLC

Fourth Wave, LLC, a vendor of auction clerking and cashiering software, has apparently closed its doors.

On May 13, we received an email from an auctioneer claiming that he had purchased the software and needed to contact Fourth Wave but was unable to do so. We noticed that the website, fourthwave.net, was indeed down and we sent an email inquiry.

Later that day, we got another email from the same auctioneer who reported he had just received a letter from Fourth Wave. The letter allegedly contained a refund and stated that the company may be going out of business.

Now over a week later, we have additional reports of other Fourth Wave users receiving similar letters. We still haven’t received a response to our initial inquiry and fourthwave.net remains down.

We were approached in February by Fourth Wave with a request from them to be featured on the Auction Podcast. We agreed but couldn’t nail down a time. This chain of events seems fairly quick, and the strange twist is that their website recently went back up at a different URL with no announcement other noticeable change of content.

Do you have any more information regarding Fourth Wave? Let us know in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Poor man’s auction software – Craigslist and Google Docs
2. Purple Wave unveils grouped extension system for equipment auction
3. Wakoopa makes a game out of using software and web apps

Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES

MANHATTAN, Kan. (May 19, 2009) – Aaron Traffas has been named a trustee of the National Auctioneers Association (NAA) Educational Institute (EI). The NAA Educational Institute offers opportunities for auction professionals to improve their skills and adapt to the rapidly changing industry. Traffas is currently the vice president of technology and auctioneer for Purple Wave Auction in Manhattan, Kan.

“We’re all very proud of and impressed by Aaron’s achievement. The expertise and dedication he’s brought to Purple Wave is sure to be an invaluable tool for the educational institute,” said Aaron McKee, president of Purple Wave.

Traffas is one of two trustees to be selected in 2009, and will provide guidance and oversight to all NAA educational offerings. According to Harlan Rimmerman, director of the NAA Educational Institute (EI), to become a Trustee individuals must be NAA members for not fewer than five years and hold a recognized designation. Trustees serve a four-year term as a member of the nationally recognized board of trustees.

“Aaron was chosen because he had excellent credentials and has been a very active and productive member of the NAA,” said Rimmerman, “He is the youngest Trustee since I’ve been involved with EI and possibly the youngest ever.”

Michael Fine, CAI, AARE, CCIM

Though young, Traffas already earned several of the industry’s most coveted professional designations. By completing the three-year Certified Auctioneers Institute (CAI) at Indiana University and also earning the Certified Estate Specialist (CES) designation, Traffas is part of an elite percentage within the auction profession. In 2007, Traffas served on the Auction Technology Specialist (ATS) curriculum development team. Currently, his is also one of two auctioneers involved in teaching the class to throughout the country.

“My experience with system development at Purple Wave lead directly to my involvement with the creation of the NAA’s Auction Technology Specialist designation course,” said Traffas, “The NAA has been very important to my growth as an auctioneer and to Purple Wave’s growth as a company.”

(obvious) disclosure: Aaron Traffas is the author of AuctioneerTech.

Related posts:

1. Auctioneers should promote NAA Education Institute designations
2. Auction Podcast Episode 1 – AuctioneerTech
3. CAI – Certified Auctioneers Institute designation

We’ve mentioned sporadically that Palm would be releasing the closest thing we’ve seen to an iPhone killer in the last two years. We just didn’t know when it would happen, though we knew it would be exclusively on the Sprint network for at least a while.

Today, Palm finally announced the official release date for the Palm Pre. It will be June 6 on Sprint, which matches to within a day of the most recent rumors floating around the Internet. The device will cost $200 with service plan and after rebate. This release date puts it two days before the World Wide Developer Conference, where Apple is expected to release a new iPhone to go with its recently-announced iPhone and iPod Touch 3.0 software.

The buzz about the Palm Pre started in January at CES. It’s going to be smaller than the iPhone, but the screen resolution is the same. This means it will fit the same amount of content on the screen but be more portable, less bulky. The screen will have a capacitive touch screen like the iPhone rather than a screen based on pressure like previous Palm phones. The touch-sensative part of the phone actually extends below the visible screen, and the Pre will use this area to enhance the multi-touch gestures. Unlike the iPhone, the Pre boasts a slide-out, physical keyboard and support for a MicroSD memory card. The Palm will be the first major phone that can be charged wirelessly by letting it rest on the Touchstone, a dock-like charging station that uses inductive charging rather than cables to charge the battery.

The operating system for the Pre is the WebOS, a new interface designed by Palm to make it easy to write software. WebOS applications are based on XHTML, CSS and Javascript – the fundamental web standards about which we preach constantly here at AuctioneerTech. Anyone who can write a web application should be able to code for the Pre without learning new technologies.

The Pre will have GPS, a 3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, an accelerometer and light sensors. Many of the new features announced by Apple recently for the iPhone 3 software are actually a response to features in the Pre such as copy and paste and correct Bluetooth implementation.

Where the Pre gets the better of the iPhone is in background applications and support for Flash. Multitasking on the iPhone is prohibited – listening to Last.FM and browsing the web at the same time, for example, is not allowed. The Pre has no such limitations, and in fact has developed an easy way to gesture between running applications – called cards – that makes multitasking easy. Support for Flash won’t be included with the initial release of the phone, but Palm has stated that it will be available in future software releases for the device.

Palm is betting the farm on the Pre. Sprint could use a boost as well. Right now, AT&T has the only device that is actually causing customers to switch carriers. Sprint needs this phone to be big to stop hemorrhaging users and Palm needs this device to be big so it can survive until this fall when it releases it’s next WebOS device – a smaller, non-sliding phone rumored to be called the EOS – to AT&T.

We’ll have a detailed review of the device in June when we get ours.

Related posts:

1. Apple releases new iPods, iTunes 8
2. Skybook Facebook client for Windows Mobile
3. Skyfire browser for Windows Mobile and Symbian

Real-time Internet bidding is a process that allows an auctioneer to accept Internet bids during an auction. A bidder downloads client software, usually either Flash- or Java-based, and can hear the auctioneer and place bids until each individual item is declared sold. There are several prominent real-time bidding service providers competing in this space, each with its own software and feature set.

One of the important features of any real-time bidding provider is the way bids are accepted by the software. There are two ways bids can be handled and today we’re going to look at the good and the bad of each. The players in this discussion are the Internet bidder, the auctioneer, and the auction staff member who represents the Internet bids and conveys the auction action to the Internet bidder – known as the bid implementer. Also relevant is the client software used by the Internet bidder, and the auctioneer interface used by the bid implementer.

Automatic acceptance
Internet bids can be accepted automatically by the software. An Internet bidder places a bid and the software automatically updates the current price and winning bidder, with the expectation that the bid implementer will let the auctioneer know that the price has changed due to a placed bid.

Manual acceptance
With manual acceptance, the Internet bids wait in a queue until they’re specifically accepted by the bid implementer, presumably once the auctioneer has acknowledged the bid.

There are problems with both methods. With manual acceptance, the Internet bidders perceive a delay in the action or a problem with the software or auction staff when their bids aren’t immediately impacting the event. With automatic acceptance, an Internet bidder may believe he’s the current winning bidder because the software reflects this status, while in actuality the auctioneer is currently recognizing a live bidder at the same increment.

Automatic acceptance is better for newer auctioneers with less-established buyer bases. Because their starting pre-auction bids are lower, perhaps less than 50% of the final sales price, the chances are higher that a couple Internet bidders will create a bidding war between them that is faster than the auctioneer and bid implementer can accurately represent. Automatic acceptance removes the human limitation in the speed of the bidding. Internet bidders are able to immediately see the results of their bids and they feel like they are taking part directly in the auction. The problem for more experienced auctioneers with larger buyer bases and more realistic starting bids is that the real-time Internet bids are both fewer and closer to the final sales price, increasing the chance that an auctioneer will take a bid from the crowd at the same time an Internet bidder is placing a bid. The resulting price collision could result in legal action being taken against the auctioneer, especially if the item is sold before resolving the collision.

Manual acceptance is perhaps a more accurate representation of a live auction. At a live auction, many ringpersons can signal to the auctioneer that a bid has been placed, but only the auctioneer decides which one individual bid is accepted at any increment. In the case of bid collisions, only the bid recognized by the auctioneer is legally valid. The problem with manual acceptance for the auctioneer is that it requires much more vigilance on the part of the auction staff. Internet bidders can only bid as fast as the bid implementer can accept bids, and an inexperienced auctioneer or bid implementer may have a hard time running the system with such a high level of maintenance. The problem with manual acceptance for the bidder, as mentioned earlier, is that it’s easy to perceive a problem with the software or the auction system as a whole. When bids aren’t immediately accepted, the frustration can lead to complaints or even bidders who refuse to participate in auctions conducted by the auctioneer or the bidding platform.

We’re currently in a time that could be described as the wild west of Internet bidding. Real-time Internet bidding is but one of three ways auctioneers accept Internet bids. There are several providers who specialize in this service, and they all continue to innovate and iterate. It’s our belief that there is room for all kinds of bidding. As the industry and products mature, we’ll eventually see some standardized practices fall into place by themselves, unless patents or lawsuits force faster, more immediate changes to real-time Internet bidding.

Related posts:

1. Auction Podcast Episode 17 – Starting bids for Internet bidding
2. Auction Podcast Episode 13 – Dual agency, Internet and absentee bids
3. Auction Podcast Episode 6 – Internet bidding primer

Optical media has had a great run. Music CDs are only now beginning to be retired after being the dominant distribution medium for the last two decades. DVDs continue to remain popular to distribute movies, though their days are severely numbered in favor of both Blu-Ray and, more importantly, Internet distribution of movies.

The CD-ROM achieved dominance as the successor to magnetic media – floppy drives and ZIP disks – about two years before the Internet obsolesced the technology. During that time, there were great products released on CD-ROM. Games like Myst and reference libraries such as Microsoft Encarta would never have been possible on floppy disks. We still have a box on a shelf with our beta copy of Windows 95 that was the last operating system we saw to be distributed on floppy disks.

All things end, however, and optical media is quickly going the way of the tape drive with regards to data storage. The netbook revolution is proving that consumers don’t need CD drives when they’re on the go. The additional weight and, more importantly, additional size added to the laptop chassis is just not something that consumers are interested in any longer. They want convenience and portability, and optical drives provide neither. The latest version of Ubuntu Linux comes in a version called the Netbook Remix that is tailored specifically to mobile computers and is meant to be installed from a USB key instead of a CD. It’s not only happening on the reasonably-priced side of the market, either. Apple’s failed huge-but-thin entry in the mobile market, the Macbook Air, also lacks an optical media device.

We routinely reformat and reinstall the operating system and all software on computers and the only time optical media is required is in the operating system installation. Once the OS is installed, we copy network drivers via USB key to get the machine on the Internet. Once connected, we download everything we need including Windows or Linux updates, antivirus and OpenOffice from the web. We use not a single program that comes on CD or DVD. It won’t be long before Windows retail boxes include a USB key instead of a CD-ROM disc.

Hardware drivers and software distributions were provided on floppy disks for many years after the market penetration of CD-ROM drives made this practice silly. Now that the market penetration of the Internet has made distributions on CD unnecessary, it doesn’t mean we’ll see the end of discs any time soon. We’d be silly to say that it’s time to get out the screwdriver and remove the drive from your desktop computer, especially while optical media is still a popular way to deliver audio and video content. We can say, however, that we look forward to the day when we buy a retail piece of software in the store and the only tangible thing included in the box is the license agreement and the website where we can download the release. Sure, we’ll still keep our $70 USB DVD-RW drive on the shelf beside our USB floppy drive for those just-in-case emergencies or operating system installs, but we’re done with the needless hassle that is CD-ROM.

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2. Netbooks
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Finishing our series on auctioneer education and designations offered by the National Auctioneers Association, the Certified Auctioneers Institute weighs in as the most prestigious and honored course available to auctioneers.

Held in Bloomington, Indiana, each year for a week in March, CAI is a three-year certification program that graduates the most professional and well-educated auctioneers in the industry. Attendees are housed in the hotel attached to the world’s largest campus union building at Indiana University.

CAI kicks off on Sunday with an opening brunch where class I is welcomed and awards are given to project winners from classes II and III. After a brief orientation, the course wastes no time getting auctioneers to class. The bulk of CAI is made of nine class sessions, 3.5 hours each, with activities most evenings. Wednesday night holds a benefit auction and Friday morning holds the final exam, followed by a final general session.

The course materials covered at CAI include a mix of instructors from both within and without the auction industry. Experts on a wide range of topics ranging from finance to marketing and from technology to real estate provide insight, examples and materials to help auctioneers learn to be more professional, proficient and powerful in their businesses.

Here’s the description from the NAA website.

Designed for leaders in the industry and auction firm decision-makers, the CAI is an executive development program focused on developing the skills and providing the tools necessary to run a top-notch auction firm.

Designation holders have the knowledge and skill necessary to provide high-quality services to all types of clients.

In addition, their designation indicates to attorneys, trust officers, government officials, financial planners, accountants and others who seek the services of well-qualified auctioneers that the CAI designation holder is an astute business person whose conduct will follow the highest professional standards.

With all NAA educational offerings, the true value of the materials is exacerbated by the networking inherent in the aggregation of over a hundred auctioneers from various sectors and experiences. No article about CAI would be complete without a mention of Nick’s English Hut, the traditional after-class destination of CAI candidates and instructors alike. There, the information presented during the course is casually discussed, disected and absorbed.

There are many CAI auctioneers who claim that this networking of auctioneers with different ideas and experiences is as valuable as the course materials presented, though we’re pretty confident that the networking wouldn’t be as valuable without the course materials. There’s no question that the networking from CAI results in life-long friendships and business relationships.

If you’d like to learn more about CAI, or find out about the application process, visit the course webpage.

Related posts:

1. Auctioneers should promote NAA Education Institute designations
2. CES designation – Certified Estate Specialist
3. Traffas and Fine named national institute trustees

Wakoopa makes using software fun. Very similar to the last.fm, which we covered in January, you install a small program that tracks which programs you use. Ever 15 minutes or so, it reports your usage to the Wakoopa servers. From this data, Wakoopa builds reports for you to see how you are using your time. It allows you to embed widgets that you can port to other locations like Facebook or your blog that show your top software or most recently used applications as embedded now in the AuctioneerTech sidebar. Wakoopa also uses this data to build anonymous, aggregated data sets to report on industry usage.

Wakoopa makes using a software a game. You get varying numbers of points for specific actions such as using a new application that you haven’t used before, writing reviews, inviting friends and using the tracker. You get ranked from newbie to overlord based on the number of points you acquire.

It doesn’t stop there. Wakoopa is a social network of sorts that allows you to make contacts and to see what software your contacts are using. Their teams functionality allows you to create or join a group and gain access to specific usage data. Concerned about Facebook usage eating up your employees’ time? Worried that your employer is too concerned about the couple of minutes you spend checking Facebook every now and then? Make an office team on Wakoopa to find out who is right. Wakoopa tells you – to the minute – how long you spend using each application. It also makes the distinction between applications you’re using and applications that are simply running in the background.

Wakoopa also serves as a recommendation engine. If you’re looking for the most popular apps in a specific category, like word processing, you can learn that the most used software is – no surprise here – Microsoft Word followed by OpenOffice.org in second place. Have you found an application that may work for you but you don’t know how much it’s used? Wakoopa can tell you about it as well as offer reviews from other users.

Concerned about privacy? You can hide the usage of specific applications or your whole profile, though it’s quite harmless to let others see the applications you’re using. Concerned about owning the data? Wakoopa allows you to export your usage data for use in a spreadsheet or other application. It also allows you to completely delete your usage history or your entire account at any time.

Wakoopa has clients for Windows and Mac, and promises support for Linux soon. We’ve been using the Windows tracker on XP and Vista machines and it’s very light with absolutely no performance impact on the system. It runs on startup and we haven’t had to touch it since installation.

Do you use Wakoopa? Visit our profile at www.wakoopa.com/traffas and add it as a contact. Do you work for Wakoopa? How about hooking us up with an invite to beta test the Linux version?

CrunchBase Information on Wakoopa

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1. Skybook Facebook client for Windows Mobile
2. Fourth Wave auction software
3. Twitter keeps friends and followers up to date

It’s no secret that we’re enamored with Twitter. Our AuctioneerTweet site has over 45 auctioneers listed and it seems we’re continuing to add several each week as more and more auctioneers join Twitter.

Twitter is useful. It’s replaced instant messaging and reduced our use of email and Facebook. Even so, the actual Twitter website leaves much to be desired in the way of a usable interface. Indeed, Twitter’s biggest strength comes from their open access system that lets anyone build clients or services around Twitter. We’ve tried many, and here are our favorites.

Desktop clients
Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop (known as Twirl until a week ago) are two clients that are currently vying for our attention. Unfortunately, each is built on Adobe’s Air platform which means that you have to install a framework package before you can actually install the application. Both clients support a multi-column view that lets you display your @replies and direct message in separate columns. Seesmic supports multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously and, on the surface, looks more polished, but so far it’s been a little buggy for us. Tweetdeck isn’t as pretty, but it supports Facebook, Twitscoop, StockTwits and 12Seconds. Seesmic’s picture capabilities are much more robust than Tweetdeck’s singular support for Twitpic. For now, Tweetdeck is the reigning champion unless you need to manage multiple Twitter accounts.

Web clients
There are several web clients that are superior to the original twitter.com. Our two favorites are Tweetree and Twitterfall. One of the difficulties with a standard timeline view in Twitter is that it’s difficult to understand the @replies. Tweetree turns a timeline into threaded conversations like a forum or bulletin board so you can see the original messages that sparked the replies. Twitterfall, on the other hand, displays a timeline view in real time. New tweets fall from the top of the screen to the bottom. You can control the rate at which they fall and which tweets are included in the timeline. It makes it very easy to search tweets from all Twitter users in real time by entering a search word or phrase and having all tweets matching that phrase show as they’re created. Want to monitor Twitter for all references to the Palm Pre? Twitterfall makes it easy.

Mobile clients
A big component to Twitter is mobile integration. The most basic form is interacting with Twitter using simple text messages. Just as Twitter itself isn’t the greatest web client, using Twitter by text message isn’t the greatest way to use it on the go. For the iPhone, Tweetie easily bests runner-up Twitterific, supporting multiple accounts and search while Twitterific is strictly a basic client. For Windows Mobile, Pocketwit is the prettiest application and supports the most features, though Tiny Twitter is easier to use for basic functions. We still acutally use ceTwit to upload pictures directly to TwitPic since neither Pocketwit nor Tiny Twitter is very easy when it comes to pictures.

Other services
Two other services deserve mention. Each has the ability to be embedded on a website in the form of a widget. We mentioned TwitPic above, which can be embedded to show the most recent image uploaded. That image links to your TwitPic timeline so users can click to see all the other pictures you’ve posted. For an example, visit www.aarontraffas.com and look at the TwitPic widget in the right sidebar. The other service worth noting is TwitterCounter which charts your followers over time, predicts what they will be based on previous rates of increase or decrease and allows you to embed a badge on a website showing your number of followers. You can see an example of TwitterCounter’s badge at the top of the Social widget in the right sidebar on AuctioneerTech.

Remember, realizing Twitter’s value is difficult until you use it. Hopefully, using one or more of these clients we’ve listed will make it easier to use or give you an idea for using Twitter in a different way. Don’t forget about AuctioneerTweet. Follow us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/traffas.

Related posts:

1. Twitter keeps friends and followers up to date
2. AuctioneerTech launches AuctioneerTweet, gets scooped
3. Skybook Facebook client for Windows Mobile

The National Auctioneers Association announced yesterday that Senate resolution 86 was passed on Tuesday. This resolution officially designates April 18, 2009, as National Auctioneers Day. Here’s the text of the bill from govtrack.us.

SRES 86 ATS

111th CONGRESS

1st Session

S. RES. 86

Designating April 18, 2009, as ‘National Auctioneers Day’.

March 31, 2009

Committee discharged; considered and agreed to

RESOLUTION

Designating April 18, 2009, as ‘National Auctioneers Day’.

Whereas auctions have played an important role in the sale and exchange of goods for nearly 2,000 years;

Whereas auctions have been an integral part of the marketplace in the United States and around the world;

Whereas auctioneers sold nearly $268,400,000,000 in goods and assets in 2008;

Whereas the National Auctioneers Association has 5,000 members and has its headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas;

Whereas, in 2008, members of the National Auctioneers Association raised $16,000,000,000 for charity through benefit auctions;

Whereas auctions are growing in popularity and are used with increasing frequency in the marketplace;

Whereas, through competitive bidding, auctions demonstrate how the free enterprise system establishes fair market value;

Whereas trained professional auctioneers ensure that auctions are conducted in a manner that is fair to both buyers and sellers;

Whereas, in the past, Federal, State, and local governments have designated days and weeks to celebrate auctioneers; and

Whereas the designation by the Senate of April 18, 2009, as ‘National Auctioneers Day’ will heighten awareness of the contributions made by auctions and auctioneers to the economy, culture, and way of life of the people of the United States: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the Senate designates April 18, 2009, as ‘National Auctioneers Day’.

Kansas auctioneer and NAA member Dave Webb was helpful in passage of this resolution, as was Chris Longly from NAA staff. Thanks, guys, for working to raise awareness about auctions and auctioneers.

Related posts:

1. Traffas and Fine named national institute trustees
2. Auctioneers report zero growth in 2008
3. AuctioneerTech featured in Auctioneer magazine

AuctioneerTool logo

Riding high on the recent success of its AuctioneerTweet sister-site, today AuctioneerTech released an open-source Internet-based clerking software and bidding system for auctioneers called AuctioneerTool.

Based on common, open source web technologies PHP and MySQL, the client installs on any server with access to a database. The platform currently supports pre-auction bidding and Internet only events, with support for real-time bidding coming soon.

“It’s something I’ve been working on in my spare time,” said Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES of Manhattan, Kansas-based AuctioneerTech. “I finally have all the pieces in place to release the code under the GPL. Releasing the code under the GPL – GNU General Public License – means that anyone can use the software free of charge and improve it. There will be some hosting costs we’ll incur, but with the recent success of the advertising sponsors on AuctioneerTweet and the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast, those expenses should be easily covered.”

All sensitive data is encrypted and stored on AuctioneerTech servers. The data is encrypted before it leaves the AuctioneerTool client so AuctioneerTech never has access to the client information, but the user can be sure that the data is stored on secure servers in a PCI-compliant manner. Because the client software is open source, anyone with a programming background can inspect the encryption mechanism to verify that it’s being encrypted properly and that nobody but the auctioneer has access to the user list or sensitive data.

The client is completely integrated into an auctioneer’s website with no logos or branding. The auction inventories are automatically uploaded to the NAA auction calendar using the NAA’s open AuctionXML format where it can be syndicated to other auction calendars.

For more information about AuctioneerTool, or to download the easy-to-use installation scripts, visit www.auctioneertool.com.

Related posts:

1. Types of Internet bidding and classes of providers
2. Auction Podcast Episode 6 – Internet bidding primer
3. AuctioneerTech launches AuctioneerTweet, gets scooped

One of the hats that many auctioneers wear is that of an appraiser. Appraisals can be court-ordered or requested by sellers wanting to know what their assets are worth. Many auctioneers, masters of the secondary market, serve as experts on the value of property.

We caught up with our friend Jack Christy, Sr., CAI, BAS, CES, MPPA, of Christys of Indiana, and asked him why appraisals were necessary. “Everything needs to be reappraised,” said Christy. “Antiques are down 70% in our market.”

Proper appraisals aren’t easy, and not all appraisals are the same. An appraiser must know before beginning work on a project if the appraisal is for replacement value, fair market value or liquidation value. These values are usually very different and serve different purposes. Because of the differences in appraisal types and qualities, it’s important to know that the person doing the appraisal is going to do it correctly and in a standards-compliant way.

Dr. Harlan Rimmerman, Director of Education for the NAA, says that new IRS regulations will require that the IRS look for credentials of appraisers. “They now want the appraiser to have credentials as well as experience. The credentials must come from an approved provider such as NAA. The GPPA course teachers those new IRS regs,” said Rimmerman.

The GPPA and MPPA designations from the National Auctioneers Association lend credibility to an auctioneer’s appraisals. The NAA’s GPPA program is a member of the Appraisal Foundation, the Congressionally-authorized entity in charge of regulating certified appraisers. The Appraisal Foundation publishes a set of standards known as the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP). Here’s the course description for GPPA from the NAA website.

GPPA designation from NAA

The GPPA class examines the responsibilities of the appraiser and discusses the factors affecting the value of appraised items. Experts and classmates will discuss industry trends, the function of the appraiser, identification, valuation and methodology of appraisals, as well as the responsibility the appraiser has to the client.

The GPPA course also provides basic information about appraisal work including teaching you how to search for comps, what to look for as far as condition, identifying marks and other conditions.

You will learn about personal property, antiques, machinery, equipment, farm, and construction equipment. The instructors will provide examples as well as materials to help you start your appraisal business. You will also learn about the GPPA appraisal template and practice preparing an appraisal report using the template.

You will be able to customize a standardized appraisal format, market your appraisal services, enhance your research skills and improve your appraisals. An examination is given at the end of this course.

On the final day of GPPA you will participate in the Appraiser as Expert Witness program.

Christy, Education Institute Trustee and Chairperson of the GPPA Committee, said that the NAA is currently working with the International Society of Appraisers on an alliance that will work to augment the offerings and designations of each with those of the other. In addition to the standard five-day GPPA course, the NAA currently offers optional specialization courses in the following categories.

• Construction and agricultural equipment
• Manufacturing and process equipment
• Small business valuation
• Antiques and residential contents

Each of these optional courses is a two day course, offering 14 credit hours towards the 24 hours of continuing education mandated by the GPPA designation every three years. The alliance with the ISA will allow other specialization options in addition to those currently offered by NAA.

“It adds value to the invoice I send,” said Travis Hamele of Hamele Auctions. It also ads legitimacy with the courts. Judges who notice the designation are far more likely to accept the word of the auctioneer as expert testimony.

Once an auctioneer has years of experience conducting appraisals as GPPA, he or she may apply to receive MPPA. This is a peer-reviewed application and confirmation process that doesn’t require additional coursework outside of the yearly continuing education requirements for GPPA and all NAA designations. Once the committee reviews the application and judges that the auctioneer has demonstrated experience and professionalism in conducting appraisals, he or she may be designated Master Personal Property Appraiser or MPPA. If you’d like to learn more about GPPA or MPPA, visit the course webpage.

Related posts:

1. Auctioneers should promote NAA Education Institute designations
2. AARE designation – Accredited Auctioneer Real Estate
3. NAA’s Hannes Combest launches blog

As an effort to build and grow the community of auctioneers using Twitter, we launched a new website yesterday called AuctioneerTweet at – where else – www.auctioneertweet.com.

The concept is simple. Any auctioneer with a Twitter account can join and have his or her tweets included in the AuctioneerTweet timeline. A member list on the right side shows the member’s name, follower count and a direct link to the auctioneer’s website. Members are listed by full name and NAA designations, if any, are prominantly featured with each user.

The catch is that members must be auctioneers. Company Twitter accounts don’t count. Social networking is about connecting people with people, not people with companies.

While we’re excited about the launch, we’re a little embarrassed. We planned on making the announcement about the launch today, but while we were putting the finishing touches on the new, home-grown Wordpress plugin that powers the site, a story popped up on the Examiner noting the launch of AuctioneerTweet by our friend AuctionWally. Thanks, Wally, for scooping us on our own site!

Look for AuctionWally in a future episode of the Auction Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter, follow us on Twitter or proceed to the AuctioneerTweet website.

If you’re an auctioneer and you’d like to be listed on the AuctioneerTweet site, send a direct message to @traffas on Twitter with your full name and NAA designations, if you have any.

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You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast. Today is Thursday, 26 March, 2008. auctioneertech.com – Technology, auctions and auctioneers – auction tech for the auction industry

Hello and welcome to the seventeenth episode of the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast, my name is Aaron Traffas. In this episode, we’re going to discuss starting bids for Internet bidding and why you shouldn’t ever start the bid above your lowest acceptable bid at a live auction. This is a common practice, so I encourage your feedback and discussion of this possibly controversial issue.

Most bid callers in the act of selling an item begin by asking the crowd for a bid at a price that is higher than or equal to the projected sales price. When they don’t receive a bid, and they rarely do at this initially requested price, they reduce the price until someone makes an initial bid. The price goes up from that point until nobody else bids, at which time the auctioneer declares the item to be sold.

Most bid callers have a low bid below which they won’t ask for another bid. This price is usually between $1 and $25 for personal property, depending on the auctioneer and the type of property in the auction. It’s in noone’s best interests to cry for bids below such a threshold, and in the case of items without pre-auction bids, the auctioneer has the option to put an item without bids together with another item without bids in an effort to sell the items.

Most, if not all, Internet bidding platforms allow the auctioneer to specify a starting bid price. When the item is first listed, no bids below this starting price are allowed.

In the case of a successful Internet bidding system, few, if any, items in an event should start without pre-auction bids. The only way to achieve such a system is to ensure that the starting bid is equal to the lowest bid the bid caller will take at the live auction. Why would an auctioneer want to set a start price that was anything other than the lowest bid he would accept?

In the case of an auction with reserves, I understand the logic behind setting this starting or minimum bid price equal to the reserve. In the case of an auction without reserve, however, this practice makes no sense.

If your minimum bid at a live auction is $10, set the minimum bid for the Internet bidding to be $10. For every item. For every category from coins to real estate. For every auction. Every time.

Low starting bids encourage participation. They encourage speculation. Bids are placed by bidders who realize that an item is well under-valued and who have no intention of purchasing an item, only to perhaps do further research and maybe bid again when they get the email hours or days later that they’ve been outbid.

What does setting consistent and low initial starting bids hurt? Absolutely nothing. The auctioneer gets more bids, and if those bids aren’t significant in relation to the value of an item, the crowd will initiate the bidding just as if there were no Internet bids and nothing is lost. Bidders who started bidding at $10 on the John Deere combine may bid again at $100 and $1000 and tell the story to their neighbors who may bid at $10,000 and then again at $50,000. All of a sudden the $100,000 combine finally sells after 30 different bidders have placed bids. The huge increase in speculative bidding means more participants who get outbid notifications and come back to the website. Website traffic goes up and as the visibility increases, excitement about the event goes up.

What do arbitrary or varying initial starting bids hurt? They look like reserves, even if they aren’t. It’s much harder to convince a seller to sell an item absolute – which means with no minimum or reserve – if items without any bids require certain prices in existing listings. Fewer bids are received and the chances increase that an item won’t have a starting Internet bid when it is sold at the auction. The lack of consistency lends further credence to some customers’ mistrust of auctioneers. The combine with 30 different bidders in the above example only receives bids from five people willing to bid from $50,000 to the selling price of $100,000. Fewer stories are told and less excitement is created.

Take another example of an item with an expected sales price of $100. An auctioneer with a rule of thumb to set the starting bids to 60% of expected sales price sets the start bid to $60. A prospective bidder who would have bid up to $50 sees the item but can’t bid on it. No bids are received and at the live crowd the item sells for $40. While an argument can be made that the auctioneer should have made a better prediction, we say that the auctioneer should be in the business of finding value and not predicting it.

Auctioneers with varying starting Internet bids in an event are trying to add complexity where there should be simplicity. Why spend time figuring a starting bid of a percentage of the expected selling price when it’s advantageous to set every item at $10 and encourage more participation from more bidders? Even if bidders aren’t serious, it hurts nothing to enlist their help spreading word of an event to others who may be serious.

Remember, we’re not advocating setting the start bids lower than the price at which you would rather pass on items than ask for lower amounts at the risk of letting the crowd set the pace and tempo of an event. If your base bid is $5, set the starting bids there. If you pass on items at the auction when you can’t get a $25 bid, set the starting bid there.

That’s it for episode 17. Do you set arbitrary or varying starting bids? Why? Let us know in the comments. We have some exciting guests coming up over the next couple of months before Conference and Show, including Tom Clark from Proxibid; Walt Kolenda, also known as AuctionWally; Steve VanEerden from JBS Software; and NAA President Randy Wells.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the auction podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening, now go sell something.

Related posts:

1. Auction Podcast Episode 6 – Internet bidding primer
2. Auction Podcast Episode 13 – Dual agency, Internet and absentee bids
3. Acceptance of real-time Internet bids

Arguably the most varied section of the auction industry with regards to training and professionalism is that of benefit auctions. There are many professionals who have been auctioneers for many years who specialize in charity and fundraising evens. Yet there are still many organizations who still hire DJs and hobbyist bid callers to perform their auctions. These uninformed organizations thus miss out on many of the more advanced money-making components and techniques brought to the table by professional benefit auctioneers.

What sets the professionals apart from the hobbyists? For what credential in an auctioneer’s resume can an organization look to assure them that the auctioneer can handle their event with education-induced professionalism?

The National Auctioneers Association offers the Benefit Auctioneer Specialist (BAS) designation course. It’s a three-day course that teaches the components, techniques and possible pitfalls of charity events from large-scale galas to smaller fundraisers. Here’s the description from the NAA website.

Benefit auctions are one of the fasting growing segments of the auction business.

This course is designed to teach the planning techniques that create successful benefit auctions. Learn to specialize your marketing skills and create a business strategy to build your clientèle and profits.

In addition to classroom instruction, students will usually attend a benefit auction to observe the process from start to finish.

Benefit Auctioneer Specialist, BAS

Course topics include:

• Fundraising components of benefit auctions
• Item acquisition
• Audience development
• Additional revenue items
• Contractual agreements
• Solicitation of benefit auction clients
• Public relations and self-promotion

Before receiving the designation, an auctioneer must submit a benefit auction summary report. As with all NAA designation courses, there is the yearly designation fee and continuing education requirement.

We caught up with Dee McKee, BAS, and asked her about her experience with the course.

The BAS designation can be earned by individuals who are not trained in bid calling, but who work in concert with professional auctioneers. Having a BAS designation brings an auction professional with both technical and legal expertise to benefit fundraising events. The use of contract is emphasized as it focuses and assigns responsibilities on details such as sound system, ringing, settlement amounts, and access to addresses. This along with BAS knowledge in how to generate the maximum dollars through timing and introduction of diverse marketing, bidding and staging methods can make significant differences in the dollar results of any benefit event.

If you’re an auctioneer looking to expand into the charity and benefit sectors, taking the BAS course is a must. If you’re an organization looking to increase your bottom line from your fundraising, look for an auctioneer with the BAS designation.

Related posts:

1. CES designation – Certified Estate Specialist
2. AARE designation – Accredited Auctioneer Real Estate
3. ATS designation – Auction Technology Specialist for auctioneers

One of the faux pas that plagued these old sites – and unfortunately many current sites on the web – is the use of improper anchor text. Anchors are the links that are fundamental to HTML. HTML stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language and text that is linked to another page is a hyperlink. While the nomenclature has gone away for the most part, the concept is still fundamental to the workings of the modern web. Unfortunately, one of the bad practices regarding the creation of hyperlinks still remains.

The goal of a designer should be to link the words that describe the destination of the link. Think of this goal as linking the nouns and not the verbs. For example, if you’re linking to the AuctioneerTech website, the link should be as follows.

Visit AuctioneerTech for information about auctions and technology.

Unfortunately, we still see some designers electing to link verbs or, worse, adding extra and unnecessary text to create a hyperlink out of nothing as in the following examples.

Visit AuctioneerTech for information about auctions and technology.

To get information about auctions and technology from AuctioneerTech, click here.

Both of these examples are wrong. While there is little debate that they are more confusing and not congruent with the workings of the modern web, there is no debate that they are absolutely worse for search engines which must now try to ascertain from the surrounding text the meaning of the link rather than having the contents of the linked text to use in making the association between the target and the target’s description. Read more from the W3C regarding proper link creation.

Another common mistake designers make when constructing links is making the links open in a new window or tab. This practice sometimes comes at the behest of the boss, be it the owner or CEO or marketing department, who mistakenly believes that if the links are opened in a new window that it keeps the user on the site.

The modern web makes use of the back button. Navigational history is a fundamental component to browsing, and users know it. When a user follows a link and wants to return to the page from whence he came, he simply clicks the back button or, now more frequently, clicks the back button now included on many mice.

When links are set to open new windows or tabs, this back button functionality is broken, confusing the user and often causing him to close the browser and start anew. Other reasons to never launch new windows with links include problems with pop-up blockers and the fact that modern web standards have actually prohibited the target=”_parent” function that allowed this bad practice in the first place. The only way to launch new windows without breaking modern web standards is to use JavaScript, which is a security risk that more and more users are electing to not enable in their browsers, which means that the links won’t work at all for them, confusing them even more. Read more about the importance of avoiding opening links in new windows from Smashing Magazine.

Don’t make it hard for users to come back to your site by opening links in new windows. Remember to link the target names when you’re building links and never, ever use “click here” as the content of a link. With your help, we can all make the web a better place.

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NAA CEO Hannes Combest, CAE - image via GCM Blog

Hannes Combest, CAE, is the Chief Executive officer of the National Auctioneers Association. Yesterday, she launched a blog over at Blogspot with a series of articles about the Certified Auctioneers Institute, currently underway in Bloomington, Indiana. We’ll be covering CAI next week as the conclusion of our series on NAA designations, but head over to Hannes’s blog now for some great play-by-play accountings of the most educational and exciting offering from the NAA Education Institute.

To our knowledge, Hannes’s blog is the first and only blog from a member of NAA staff. We hope Hannes continues to post and that blogging might become part of the official duties of several members of NAA staff, perhaps officially making it into the new NAA website which is currently in the works.

You’ll find a permanent link to her blog in the blogroll of auction support sites in the lower right column of this website. If you know of any other non-vendor, non-auctioneer weblogs or websites, please let us know in the comments.

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Microsoft officially released Internet Explorer 8 yesterday.The first Internet Explorer to pass the Acid 2 test, a test to verify that a browser renders web pages correctly, it boasts improved speed, better security and a few new features.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, pre-release versions of Opera and Safari are already bragging a perfect score on the Acid 3 test, IE8 ranks dead last among the most recent generation of browsers when speed is concerned, and a hacker going by the name Nils hacked IE8 on the day it was released (yesterday – though, to be fair, Firefox and Safari were also hacked yesterday).

Microsoft has an uphill battle for adoption. While greater than 70% of Internet users use Internet Explorer, there is still a significant amount of users of Internet Explorer 6. AuctioneerTech has under 6% of its traffic from Internet Explorer 6, but auctioneer Purple Wave has nearly 20% of its traffic viewed with Internet Explorer 6. While most technology sites have much higher numbers for newer and alternative browsers, the rest of the web still has to contend with legacy versions. Now, developers have three versions of Internet Explorer against which to test their websites. This issue is made even more difficult now that IE8 defaults to a web-standards mode that will actually render websites differently, albeit more correctly, than either IE7 or IE6. Users at least have the option of hitting the panic button when pages appear broken in IE8, causing it to fall back to the broken way IE7 rendered pages that most designers accounted for when building the pages in the first place.

New features included in Internet Explorer 8 are accelerators, web slices and developer tools. Accelerators are mashups of sorts that allow direct integration with services like email and mapping. Web slices allow you to monitor updates to a portion of a website without actually going to it. The developer tools, our favorite new feature, are similar to the ever-so-popular Firebug extension for Firefox that allow you to view the HTML, CSS and scripts behind the page and see how they interact by watching changes effect the page in real time.

It’s true that IE8 may be more standards-compliant, faster and more secure than IE7, and that web slices and accelerators are neat new features, but without the plugin community of Firefox or the raw speed of Chrome or Safari or the all-in-one nature of Opera, it’s both something for everyone and everything for noone.

Even if you’re a user of alternative broswsers, it’s important to upgrade your version of Internet Explorer. Get IE8 from the download links on the Microsoft Internet Explorer website before its released as an automatic update in the next month or two.

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We mentioned how easy it was to create web forms with Google Docs back in November. Now, technology blog TechCrunch is running a story about a very interesting do-it-yourself project combining the ease of Google Doc form creation with the enormous prospective bidder pool of Craigslist to form a rudamentary Internet bidding system.

Craigslist doesn’t natively support auctions. It does, however, have a ton of regular visitors, most of whom are looking to buy something. Those of us auctioneers who realize this fact about Craigslist frequently advertise our auctions there. The subject of the Techcrunch story had a Macintosh G5 to sell. He created a Google Docs form that posted name, email address and price to a read-only spreadsheet that hid the email addresses from everyone but him. He said that the highest bid received by noon Pacific time would be the winner and linked to the form and the spreadsheet from his Craigslist ad listing the auction.

What do you think of consumers directly leveraging the Craigslist buyer base using the auction method of marketing? To read the whole story, complete with screen shots of the bidding form and the spreadsheet, visit techcrunch.com.

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There is much more to properly handling the entirety of someone’s worldly possessions than dragging it all out on the lawn on auction day – or worse, windrowing it on the lawn and tagging each piece with a price. An auctioneer with the CES designation knows what to do, how to do it and who should be involved.

Here’s the official description from the NAA CES website.

A Certified Estate Specialist has advanced education in exactly how to deal with the settling of estates, from working with family members to dealing with lawyers and accountants.

Certified Estate Specialists are accustomed to dealing with other professionals, such as CPAs, tax attorney’s, financial planners and family lawyers. They are familiar with the legal requirements and restrictions on their geographic areas, and will use their knowledge to bring the greatest return to those involved in the sale.

Learn to market your services to professionals (CPAs, trustees, tax attorneys, financial planners, etc) who deal with estates.

Certified Estate Specialist

This course covers:

• Legal and financial aspects
• Duties
• The relationship of parties involved in an estate
• The role of the auctioneer
• How to position your firm to take advantage of this opportunity

This recently-overhauled, three-day course is taught by one of several, excellent instructors. It teaches auctioneers both how to professionally and profitably manage estate liquidations as well as better market auction services to other professionals who may be executors and decision makers for estates.

As with any NAA course, the benefits of the solid course materials are greatly augmented by the interaction with the instructor and the other auctioneers in the class. Your next opportunity to take CES is July 11 through 13, just before this year’s NAA 60th Annual International Auctioneers Conference and Show in Kansas City.

Related posts:

1. BAS designation – Benefit Auctioneer Specialist
2. CAI – Certified Auctioneers Institute designation
3. AARE designation – Accredited Auctioneer Real Estate

Skybook screenshot, image from magnifoca.com

We’re still sulking around with Windows Mobile while we count down the days until the release of the Pre, due out sometime in the next few months. A few days ago, we stumbled upon the Skybook Facebook client.

Skybook is similar to other social networking apps for mobile devices. It allows you to update your status and view the status of your friends. You can interact with most of the normal functions of Facebook better than the m.facebook.com mobile interface available by using Facebook simply in a mobile browser.

The real value of Skybook is the ability to upload mobile photos and synchronize contacts. Synchronizing Facebook contacts to a Windows Mobile device means that those contacts can then be synchronized to Outlook or, better yet, Microsoft Exchange. The contacts carry with them the current profile picture of each of your friends, so when they call from the number listed the phone will show picture caller ID.

The sync process takes a while the first time, prompting you if you want to create new contacts for those Facebook friends who don’t already exist in your contact list. It did an impressive job guessing – and asking to be sure – that the Christine listed on Facebook was the Chris that was listed on the phone.

The reviews on the Skybook page are very mixed, with some users reporting difficulties. While it locked up a couple times in our use so far, the benefits of having the up-to-date contact information for all our friends on Facebook greatly outweigh the occasional annoyance of having to re-launch the application.

If you’re on Facebook or Twitter, friend us up. Twitter address is twitter.com/traffas.

Aaron Traffas’s Profile | Create Your Badge

Have you used Skybook? Do you know of or prefer a different Windows Mobile Facebook client? Let us know in the comments.

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The sale of real estate at auction has become an increasing trend in the United States. Having long been the default method of liquidation for distressed properties, real estate auctions are becoming mainstream. More and more buyers and sellers of real estate are realizing that the auction method of marketing can many times be superior to traditional real estate listings.

The National Association of Realtors claim that “[all] types of property can be sold at auction. For sellers, auctions mean immediate cash and no long-term carrying costs. For buyers, auctions can save time and money.” The National Auctioneers Association claims that over $58 billion in real estate was sold at auction in 2007. Real estate auction volume has increased each year since the NAA started tracking it in 2003.

Having long recognized the importance of real estate as a component of the auction industry, the NAA offers a professional designation called AARE – Accredited Auctioneer Real Estate. AARE is a  prestigious designation, held only by several hundred auctioneers worldwide.

Here’s the official description from the NAA website.

An auctioneer with the AARE designation has gone the ‘extra mile’ to ensure they offer the highest level of professionalism and the most up-to-date information when it comes to selling properties. Whether selling residential, agricultural, commercial or industrial properties, AARE auctioneers have enhanced knowledge in all pertinent areas, such as:

Accredited Auctioneer Real Estate

• Marketing techniques
• Financial/investment calculations
• Evaluating cash flow
• Holding-period analysis
• Tax consequences of buying and selling properties
• Multi-parcel real estate auctions

We asked AuctioneerTech friend Tom Jordan, CAI, AARE, CES, MPPA, why an auctioneer should take the AARE courses. Tom is a member of the AARE committee and a candidate for NAA Education Institute Trustee. He posted his reply on his blog. Here’s what he said.

Most real estate brokers are taught how to sell real estate the traditional way by listing the property and putting it in MLS. They either learned this through going to a state approved real estate school or the real estate agency they work for or both. The auction method is not taught in real estate schools, though there is nothing wrong with selling real estate the traditional way – not all properties are good for auction and, on the flip side, some properties will do better at auction. The NAA Education Institute designed the AARE designation to fill the knowledge void both for Realtors(R) and auctioneers and real estate brokers of the auction method of how to sell real estate at auction.

Tom also noted that the second of the three courses was recently rewritten to make it flow better. The course now requires a working knowledge of using a calculator for financial functions so the class time can be spent on learning real estate- and auction-related equations.

The AARE course is offered is three classes. Each AARE class is two days in length.

• 100 Emphasizes how to market residential, agricultural, commercial and industrial properties
• 200 Learn the techniques for evaluating cash flow, holding period analysis, tax consequences of auctions and the challenges associated with each
• 300 Working in groups, students evaluate properties, design a proposal to get the sale, and plan, conduct and prepare a post-auction report

The NAA requires that each auctioneer with the AARE designation successfully complete all three classes as well as submit documentation of ten auctions, an auction summary report and an application to gain the designation. In addition to the initial requirements, there is the standard yearly designation fee and requirement for continuing education.

Realtor(R) Dave Sommers, AARE, recently received the designation. “The instructors were excellent,” he said, “especially Manson Slik. The course makes what you’ve been doing seem fresh. As with all NAA courses, the additive benefit of the camaraderie with others adds so much to the course materials. Knowing that there are other auctioneers who have dealt with the same problems you’ve had and can walk you through solving them is an invaluable benefit.”

Your next opportunity to take the AARE courses is in Chicago in April. For a list of upcoming courses from the NAA, see the NAAEI Events List.

Related posts:

1. BAS designation – Benefit Auctioneer Specialist
2. CES designation – Certified Estate Specialist
3. Auctioneers should promote NAA Education Institute designations

Newer, faster browser rendering engines are all the rage. Google released Chrome based on Webkit and V8; Firefox uses Gecko and is going to be using TraceMonkey for JavaScript. Apple made some noise a few weeks ago by releasing a beta of its Webkit-based Safari 4, now using Apple’s new Nitro engine for JavaScript. The improvements Microsoft has made to Trident and JScript are going to be a generation behind by the time Internet Explorer 8 finally officially drops in the next week or so.

All browsers have problems. Google Chrome is fast, but it completely botches the back button. Hitting the back button to return to a dynamic page – search results, for instance – and the browser asks you if you want to resubmit the page. It’s a recognized bug in Chrome that renders the browser useless for most daily browsing. The new Safari is the prettiest browser, and it’s fast, but it copied the Chrome bug and is unusable for that reason. Neither Chrome nor Safari runs on Linux. Internet Explorer is a good browser, when completely patched, but is usually the slowest. Firefox runs slowly on Linux, and its bookmark synchronization component is in beta and doesn’t work on 64 bit Linux, forcing users to rely on a plugin called Foxmarks.

One of the most exciting browsers that hasn’t been getting much press lately is Opera. Opera claims its Presto 2.2 rendering engine presents web pages 30% faster than the last version. Its Futhark is admittedly dated, but the Opera team is working on a new version called Carakan that will be much faster. Many of the most popular add-ons to Firefox are built into Opera, including web developer tools, the ability to block JavaScript and Flash, and bookmark synchronization. The new Opera is completely cross platform and supports synchronization and socialization through the My Opera community.

We’ve been using the new Opera 10 alpha for months now, and it’s performance is markedly better than Firefox 3. The only difficulties we’ve noticed is that when using Opera on Linux in conjunction with Synergy, some Flash objects viewed in Opera can cause Synergy to stop responding. If you’re a frequent user of apps that rely on heavy JavaScript rendering like Gmail, Opera may not be quite as fast as other options. If, however, you subscribe to our belief that JavaScript and Flash should be turned off unless needed, Opera will be much faster than anything else.

Try the latest development version of Opera, available at www.opera.com/next, and let us know what you think in the comments.

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