Swoopo is an online discount auction (a.k.a. penny auction) where individuals purchase bids to place towards an item that’s up for sale. The cost of the bids are usually $0.75 and once placed they raise the price of the item by either $0.15 or $0.01 depending on the product. A 20-second countdown timer is reset by each time a new bid is placed and when the timer reaches zero, the last bidder wins. The winning bidder pays the final price of the auction which is usually at a great discount of the manufacturer’s retail price (MRP) for the item. Read more »

Keith Rabois posted an interesting article on TechCrunch today which suggested that the root of all eBay’s problems over the past years was primarily due to its lack of fun. He attributes the rising use of sites like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube as the culprits for eBay’s loss of users. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Keith, he’s currently the vice president of strategy and business development for Slide. Read more »

TechCrunch recently took on the challenge to build CrunchPad; a dead simple internet tablet for browsing the web, emailing, and video chatting. Their goal is to deliver a product to market under $200 to $300 that would be primarily targeted for home use. As I previously mentioned, I believe the CrunchPad will fail to be picked up by mainstream consumers in the U.S. in its current form and here’s the reasoning: Read more »

As a college student I have always been frustrated by the way our campus bookstore sticks it to us when it comes to buying and selling textbooks. They don’t consistently offer the cheaper used versions nor do they offer the older, less expensive editions of the required text. Furthermore, they get you again at the end of the semester when you try to sell back your book at a whopping 1/3 of the cost, ouch!

Thank goodness for Read more »