Soluto wins TechCrunch Disrupt, aims to solve computer frustrations

Posted on 9 June 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | Leave a comment
Image representing Soluto as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

The TechCrunch Disrupt conference, held May 24 through May 26 in New York City, is the successor to last year’s TechCrunch 50. This competitive conference brings technology luminaries and startups together for education and startup launches.

This year’s winner is a company called Soluto. Soluto claims to be “anti-frustration software” and is aimed at helping users mitigate everything that isn’t working quite right. Immediately after installation, it lists all your startup programs, telling you which should be removed, which can be removed, and which programs shouldn’t be removed. It makes it easy for you to pause or delay those items you wish to exclude from your immediate startup.

We’ve been following Soluto on Twitter and have been seeing reports from users claiming startup times decreasing by more than five minutes. Our experience with it has allowed us to shave about 30 seconds off the machines we’ve tested, though we’re pretty good about running lean startup processes in the first place.

Soluto does more than startup diagnostics. It runs in the background,  gathering data about the ways the programs interact with one another. It uses this data, along with data gathered by others and aggregated in its PC Genome, and suggests changes and improvements to the user.

We’ve just started using it, and while we’re extremely selective about the processes we allow to run in the background, Soluto looks like a solid addition that will actually improve the way our machines run.

Soluto is currently in beta. Find out more and give it a spin at soluto.com.

CrunchBase Information on Soluto
Soluto
Information provided by CrunchBase

Posted in software | Tagged , , |

gimmeauctions.com enters Internet auction calendar fray

Posted on 21 May 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | Leave a comment

gimmeauctions.com

We received a press release yesterday regarding www.gimmeauctions.com, a new Internet auction calendar. We immediately followed up with a couple of questions for Mr. Roberts, and the questions and responses are posted below. Here’s the release.

Jordan Roberts, Manager of GimmeAuctions.com announces the launching of a new website serving auction attendees of all ages. The site is designed for those who attend auctions of any kind — estate, antique, equipment, household, real estate, farm and more.

Salem, OH – May 20, 2010 — Those looking to attend auctions can quickly view upcoming auctions, search for specific items, visit photo galleries and receive maps and directions to area auctions. “With these features and more, GimmeAuctions.com is doing things no other auction website does,” states Roberts.

“We constructed this site with the idea of bringing auctioneers and auction attendees together through more than just traditional online advertising means. GimmeAuctions.com reveals itself as a community for auction attendees — a social network that allows people to interact with each other and keep tabs on their favorite auctioneers.” Users of the site can comment on pending auctions and even ask questions directly to auctioneers. Additionally, they can follow their favorite auctioneers and receive notification of newly created auction postings.

The site is free to auctioneers who post advertisements and to those wishing to view them. No registration is necessary to view auctions online, but users who do register will have more enhanced features at their disposal.

Here are our questions and the responses.

AuctioneerTech: Posting auction inventories on websites is a lot of work. What benefit does gimmeauctions.com offer an auctioneer over the other established auction calendar systems like Global Auction Guide and AuctionZIP? Do you support any of the auction calendar syndication APIs?

Jordan Roberts: GimmeAuctions.com was built knowing the ever increasing marketing workload of auctioneers.  With that in mind we made submitting auctions on our site is as easy as possible, but along with ease of use we wanted to offer more.  We designed a one-page auction submission with features unlike other auction website.  Two features on submission that come to mind are:

Multi-day auction support. If an auctioneer has a weekly auction every Wednesday for 6 months, they only have to submit a listing for the sale once and set it to repeat weekly on Wednesdays. It’s that easy.

Quick Image Handling.  Our system scans the filenames of the uploaded images and titles the uploaded images accordingly.  If the filenames are not correct the auctioneer may also use our image details editor to quickly add a title and description to each of their uploaded images.

Take a look at our guide How to List Auctions on GimmeAuctions.com for more details on submitting auctions.

We also realized that not only is it important to have solid features for auctioneers, it is equally as important to cater to the auction attendees. Some other auction websites don’t provide, or in some cases charge the auction attendees a fee for, basic features like a Personal Auction Listing, Notifications of New Auctions, and Saved Searches.  GimmeAuctions.com has those features and more, but we provide them for free to the user.  Making the auction attendee’s features an equal priority to the auctioneers is a win-win.

Our staff is currently looking to into some APIs of auction calendar sites, but none have been implemented yet.  We will keep you posted.

AT: Your press release describes gimmeauctions.com as “a social network that allows people to interact with each other and keep tabs on their favorite auctioneers.” We all suffer from social fatigue. How can you justify the extra effort involved in maintaining a presence on yet another social network when most auctioneers already have a presence on Facebook?

JR: Sites like facebook and twitter are great means to promote auction listings posted elsewhere, but they don’t do much to display them. Where GimmeAuctions.com really stands apart from the mainstream social networks is we are based primarily around auction listings. We have a niche audience interested in auctions, those who enjoy attending auctions, those who make their living attending auctions and the auctioneers themselves. With that in mind, we made many social features available to our users.  Commenting on Auctions, Following Auctioneers, Sharing Auction Listings on Mainstream Social Networks, and Emailing Listings are some of those features we currently have.

Does the world need another Internet auction calendar or social network? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Posted in announcements, services | Tagged , , , , |

DNSCog reports on your website’s domain name servers

Posted on 20 May 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | Leave a comment

DNSCog tells you everything about your DNS

We wrote back in March about how subdomains are a powerful tool to manage a single website across multiple servers and even multiple web hosting providers. We’ve discussed DNS before, and it was even the co-subject of the Auction Podcast episode 8, but in a nutshell DNS is the index that tells a browser where the server is for a given name like www.auctioneertech.com. Sometimes we want to know everything we can about how our DNS is configured, including sudbomains, nameservers and mail records. A new service, currently in beta, called DNSCog aims to tell us these things and more.

DNSCog is a profuct from Dynamic Network Services, Inc., makers of the popular DynDNS which offers free DNS resolution. This company knows DNS, and they’ve made an easy to use, front end interface for common diagnostic tools. This interface couldn’t be simpler. Simply enter the domain name and click submit. The report you get back lists all relevant tests for a given domain name, the result of the test – pass, fail, info – and what it means and what you should do about it. You can even view the raw logs for each specific test if you want to see the exact responses returned from the servers tested.

In addition to the default DNSCog test, DNSCog also offers standard traceroute, whois and DNS lookup, as well as a DNSSEC verification tool to test for the new security protocol for domain names.

Head on over to dnscog.com and give it a spin. Even if you don’t understand everything about DNS or even why you would want to know these things about your domain names, the simple test results it returns may save you from serious problems and heartache later.

Have a better solution for DNS reporting? Let us know in the comments.

CrunchBase Information on Dyn
Dyn
Information provided by CrunchBase

Posted in websites, services | Tagged , , , , , |

Google I/O day 1 – WebM, Wave and Chrome Web Store

Posted on 19 May 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | 3 comments
IMG_2067
Image by erikeldridge via Flickr

The Google IO conference began today, and several announcements were made this morning.

  • Google has open-sourced VP8 video codec and rolled it into a projected called WebM. This change will help browsers finally standardize on an open video format to replace Flash video on the web.
  • Google Wave is now available to everyone, including Google Apps users. Remember Google Wave? Our latest thinking is that it pretty much sucks. Hopefully opening it up to everyone will give them enough feedback to make it useful.
  • Google Chrome Web Store is a place for marketing and obtaining standards-based web applications. Now there is a centralized location to access some cutting-edge web apps that show off the new and excited features of modern web standards.

It’s clear that Google is fully behind an open web. Google promised more announcements for tomorrow’s keynote, beginning at 8:30am PDT, which will be streamed at youtube.com/GoogleDevelopers. Tune in!

Posted in websites, software, announcements | Tagged , , , , , , , |

eBay’s Internet auction patent

Posted on 25 April 2010 | by Aaron Traffas, CAI, ATS, CES | 1 comment

The blogs lit up last week with the news that eBay was granted US Patent 7,702,540 regarding “computer-implement method and system for conducting auctions on the internet”. Here’s the abstract.

Methods and apparatus for a system for facilitating electronic commerce transactions with a first data storage location for holding information about an item for auction from a first participant in a data packet network, a verification process that verifies the user identification of the first participant in said data packet network, the verification process confirming a user identification before allowing the participant in said data packet network access to place information about an item for auction in the system, a display process for displaying information of the item for auction to a plurality of data packet network users, the display process displaying an advertisement with the item for auction to the plurality of data packet users, an auction process for receiving bids on the item for auction from at least one of said plurality of data packet network users, the auction process also verifying a user identification from said at least one of a plurality of data packet network users before allowing receipt of the bid and a notification process for notifying the plurality of data packet network participants that said bid was accepted by said system.

eBay's Internet auction patent

It’s unclear if eBay will actually protect this patent, first filed in 1999. Speculation exists on both sides, with one camp saying that eBay will use licensing as an additional revenue source and another camp saying that eBay’s continued deemphasis of its auction model in favor of fixed prices means that they likely won’t be interested in using this patent.

How are you betting? Let us know in the comments.

Posted in announcements, theory | Tagged , , |