Auction Video Podcast Episode 8 – LuJohns Enterprises

John Economou from Bidder Central talks with Aaron Traffas from AuctioneerTech about LuJohns Enterprises and Bidder Central. Video recorded in July, 2009, at the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show in Overland Park, Kansas.

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Auction Video Podcast Episode 7 – TASS

Kurt from TASS Software talks about the TASS auction software platform. Video recorded in July, 2009, at the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show in Overland Park, Kansas.

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MaxaNet users’ meeting at NAA Conference and Show in Greensboro, NC

Update: the meeting time has been moved to 1 p.m. on Thursday.

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of the MaxaNet content management system and Internet bidding system for auctioneers. We’re excited that our friend Will McLemore is organizing a users group meeting to coincide with NAA Conference and Show in Greensboro this Thursday.

GREENSBORO, NC (July 12, 2010) – Users of Maxanet, the online bidding platform operated by JBS Software, will have an opportunity to speak with Steve VanEerden, JBS’ chief executive, at the National Auctioneers Association Conference and Show in Greensboro, NC this year. The meeting will take place at 10:00 AM ET on Thursday, July 15 at Area 52 of the Joseph S. Koury Convention Center.

Will McLemore, CAI, President of McLemore Auction Co. of Nashville, TN, organized the meeting to provide an opportunity for Maxanet users not only to engage with VanEerden, but also to meet each other to share tips and techniques for running the program. McLemore said, “Many auctioneers have had great success in carrying out Internet-only auctions using Maxanet. I know that we have based our business strategy around its capabilities. I’m sure we’ve solved a few problems others are working on now and I know there are problems we haven’t yet solved that others have sorted out. I thought it would be a good idea to schedule a time for Maxanet users to get together with each other and with Steve (VanEerden) during the Conference and Show.”

Topics of discussion are likely to include plans for the further development of the software, best practices for increased sales and how to integrate data from Maxanet into other business systems. McLemore anticipates that the meeting will last for between one and two hours and will provide ample time for topics and questions to be presented from anyone who chooses to attend.

Individuals interested in contributing an item to the meeting’s agenda may contact McLemore at [email protected] or call 615-543-6281.

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NewsRob makes Google Reader better on Android

Our last post summarized Google Reader and explained how it’s the killer service for aggregating and delivering content from all our favorite websites into a unified, chronologically-ordered stream that’s easy to consume. We also mentioned how we use Google Reader on multiple devices.

In this, the first of our Android apps series, we’re going to look at the best way to use Google Reader on Android devices.

NewsRob is Google Reader for Android

NewsRob is a free app, available in the Android Market, that synchronizes with Google Reader. It is offered in both a free version and an ad-free, paid version that also includes some additional functionality.

Google Reader has a solid mobile version, and it’s not apparent how much is missing until you actually experience NewsRob. The offline synchronization is certainly worth the switch, but the usability enhancements make it a no-brainer. NewsRob can actually take over the volume rocker on the Droid and turn the up and down buttons into forward and backwards buttons for the news feed.

We reach for NewsRob whenever there’s a free minute during the day. NewsRob is a fast and convenient way to stay current with Google Reader when you’re away from a computer.

Do you have a better Google Reader application for Android? Is there an iPhone app that offers similar functionality? Let us know in the comments.

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Google Reader aggregates news and blogs for fast consumption

Image representing Google Reader as depicted i...
Image via CrunchBase

Sometimes we take for granted some of the time-saving tools that make our lives better every day. Google Reader is one of those tools.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a file format that makes it easy to share content. Pretty much every blog and even many non-blog websites use RSS as a distribution feed that is an alternative to the standard website.

While it’s possible to use some browsers to view individual RSS feeds, most RSS content is consumed by subscribing. Most websites will show an RSS icon in the browser, alerting the user that a feed is available for subscription. RSS is a popular delivery mechanism for podcasts, and we publish the Auction Podcast by RSS in addition to iTunes.

Google Reader screenshot, as of March 16, 2009
Image via Wikipedia

Programs or services that allow you to subscribe to multiple feeds are called RSS aggregators. Google Reader is one of these aggregators.

Reader uses your standard Gmail account and allows a user to subscribe to multiple RSS feeds. It then sorts the articles in all of these feeds in chronological order and presents them in a single, unified feed.

Reader allows sorting the feeds into categories. For example, we have separate categories for technology news, science and skepticism articles, and for auction news.

Google Reader is a social application. When you have friends configured with Reader, you can flag interesting articles that you read and your friends can see these articles in their feed. Reader can also be used with other services to automatically push selected stories to Twitter or Facebook.

This article sharing feature is very powerful. You can actually create an RSS feed from these shared items, creating essentially a personal news filter of the articles that interest you. We use this feature to generate the AuctioneerTech news page, which is simply an RSS feed of our shared items embedded on a web page.

Google Reader keeps track of the articles you’ve read so it doesn’t present them to you again. By publishing an API, Reader allows other news aggregators to synchronize their content with Google Reader.

Consuming content with Google Reader is a great experience. Keyboard shortcuts – J for next article and K for previous article – make it super fast to burn through a ton of articles in no time. There are browser extensions to improve the Google Reader experience. Plugins like Better Greader – included in our AuctioneerTech Firefox add-on collection published last December – and Reader Plus for Google Chrome allow users to apply different themes or fonts and even to remove the header and footer, leaving only the raw content.

We use Google Reader every day on multiple computers and devices. If you’ve found a better RSS feed reader, let us know in the comments. If you’re a Google Reader user, leave us feedback at auctioneertech.com/feedback so we can add you to our friends.

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