Commerce

Wipbox: eBay and Craigslist for dummies

Wipbox is a relatively new service that helps people sell things on Craigslist and eBay. Wipbox charges a small fee to help you put together a really slick-looking listing and figure out some of the subtle aspects of getting an item to sell quickly based on what category and service it's listed in. If you've ever wanted to sell something on either of the two classifieds services but have been unsure about a good starting price or the best way to convey the product information, Wipbox does the heavy lifting for you.

To get started quickly, you can do a search for your item. It's not free at $0.25 a pop, but it gives you the starting and closing costs for your item in various categories (for eBay) or locales (for Craigslist). For example, if you're here in San Francisco, your item might fetch more money in surrounding neighborhoods. Likewise, on eBay, putting it in a different category can dramatically improve the closing price. You're paying Wipbox to do the legwork.

In testing, we came across some skewed numbers for certain search items. For eBay, it was likely due to auctioneers incorrectly labeling their items or adding extra words to their titles to boost search engine presence. For Craigslist, we ran into problems with the search grouping together multiple SKUs. For example, a search for an Xbox 360 pulled in results with a difference of about a hundred dollars due to the system having two versions, each at a different price. For popular items such as iPods though, drilling down to the specific model number helped with these issues.

Wipbox bases its statistics on 30 days of eBay listings, and a full week of Craigslist sales, so whatever information you're getting is fairly current for market value. To find general price ranges for online auctions, there's also Mpire, a service that tracks auction prices on eBay to show you whether or not it's in demand--a little bit like Farecast does for airplane tickets.

The real catch to using Wipbox is its listing creator. Wipbox will pull in a description, user reviews, and specifics from Amazon.com. You can either pay $0.15 to have this information posted straight to your listing, or copy and paste the code field by field into eBay or Craigslist's listing creation box for free. … Read more

Hungry? Palore maps lots of restaurant reviews

When looking for a new spot to eat or shop, I tend to turn to Yelp (controversy aside) more than to other business rating sites. But I could be missing crucial comments made by someone outside of Yelp.

Happily, I just checked out a cool service that displays ratings from around the Web at a single glance. The browser add-on Palore aggregates business reviews from a variety of Web sites and displays them next to Google and Yahoo's local search results in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Currently Palore has data for some 2.4 million businesses in big cities … Read more

News roundup: MySpace, Yahoo, Amazon

MySpace and Photobucket make amends. The block on videos from Photobucket for MySpace users was lifted yesterday. According to a post on the Photobucket blog, "open lines of communication and procedures with MySpace" were made to make sure it doesn't happen again. The blockage affected nearly a quarter of Photobucket's 40 million registered users. Related: MySpace launched a version of its site today for Latino Americans.

Yahoo, Gracenote launch lyrics service. Yahoo Music users will now be able to pick up the lyrics to their songs after a deal was made with digital media company Gracenote. … Read more

Meez teams up with Photobucket

Photobucket members will discover a new option when logging in this morning. The company has partnered with Meez, the 3-D avatar service to give Photobucket members a place to store and host their 3-D avatars. We don't normally cover personal avatar services, but when they partner with sites with over 40 million users, it's worth noting. Meez has approximately a million users (which in and of itself is no small feat), and the service has apparently seen quite a bit of growth in the last few months.

Users can pick from a ton of options to make their … Read more

BuyYourFriendADrink update: It works!

I'd initially been skeptical about BuyYourFriendADrink.com (BYFAD), the Web site that just opened today (see previous coverage) in which you can remotely order drinks for your friends that they can redeem at participating bars by showing the bartender a code in a text message. It's available at about 40 bars in New York City and the surrounding area, and the company plans to gradually expand to other urban areas over the course of the year.

I'd been pretty confident that the site itself would work, but I hadn't been entirely positive that the bars involved … Read more

Happy hour by SMS, with BuyYourFriendADrink

How many times have you been IMing with a friend or co-worker across the country, placed a bet ("If that Sanjaya guy gets the boot tonight, you owe me a beer!"), completed said bet, but had no immediate way to fulfill it because the other person involved was miles away? Well, now there's a brand-new solution--but just for New Yorkers, for the time being.

BuyYourFriendADrink.com was launched today and announced on the New York edition of e-mail events service Thrillist. BuyYourFriendADrink, or BYFAD, is a way to purchase libations for your friends online, which they can … Read more

Web 2.0 Expo Ignite wrap-up: Session two

Ignite finished strong with presentations from Justin.tv, RobotReplay, and Omnidrive.

Justin Kan of Justin.tv talked about how easy it is to promote your site or product with the right strategy. It also doesn't hurt to have a camera hooked to a laptop, with an EV-DO connection streaming every second of your life. Our previous Justin.tv coverage here and here. Surreal moment of the talk? Checking Justin.tv and seeing him talking to us. Creepy

Andre Charland discussed the difficulty of launching his new site RobotReplay, which lets Web site owners keep track of where their visitors … Read more

Sea creature meets collaboration tool: Octopz

Octopz (pronounced 'Octopus') is a Web-based, online collaboration tool for small groups. It's one of the many companies presenting at next week's Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco, and is making its public launch on Monday.

Octopz runs in its own browser window and uses Adobe Flash to mix a whiteboard space with live text, voice, and video chat. The workspace has an area to upload and share files with other group members. Each uploaded file gets its own folder, which houses any edits made by group members. For example, if you're making notes on a digital photograph, other members can create a copy of that photo and add their own notes. Each version is neatly stacked underneath the original. All group edits are saved and stored, and can be shared and edited later for asynchronous collaboration.

Things get a little tricky with Octopz's multiuser controls. Anyone can grab control of the workspace at any time, which in testing led to some minor power struggles. There's also not a way to keep track of which group member made which edits, either with a history or differentiating colors per each user. Despite these issues, Octopz handled a four-person conference from three different geographical locations smoothly.

Where Octopz excels is its simplicity. It's incredibly easy to pick up and use. It reminds me a lot of Acrobat Connect, a product Adobe launched in January, although sans screen sharing.

Octopz comes in at $99 per month per license, which is twice the cost of the standard version of Adobe Connect. However unlike Acrobat Connect, Octopz lets businesses create an unlimited amount of rooms and users, something you don't even get with Adobe's professional level of Acrobat Connect service.

See also: Vyew, Conceptshare, and Webex for Web-based collaborative tools.

Update: Fixed pricing clarification regarding comparison to Acrobat Connect. Also, Octopz was picked as one of our Top 5 favorites from the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this month.

For more screenshots of Octopz in action, keep reading.

News roundup: Martha 2.0, Xbox does IM, Salesforce buys Koral

Martha Stewart goes 2.0. Martha Stewart's Web site has undergone a massive overhaul, combining photos, videos, and user forums to give it more of a community draw. Site creators apparently went through 15 years of archived content to re-index it for searching. Also updated are recipe pages, which now give you both the recipe for a dish and a video demonstrating how to prepare it.

Xbox Live and Windows Messenger buddies to merge. In next month's Xbox 360 system software update, Microsoft plans to add chat integration with Windows Live Messenger. It's the first real step … Read more

MySpace launches Quicktime trailers competitor, sort of

MySpace quietly launched Trailer Park this morning, a new area showcasing trailers for upcoming movies. All videos are played on the in-house MySpace player and can be embedded on member pages. Trailer Park is launching with five trailers from Lionsgate, Warner Bros., Independent, and Buena Vista Pictures.

The page is designed to feel like a member's profile, with forums, a friends list, and a comment board. The dearth of actual content about a movie (actors, ratings, and so on) can be found at the movie's marketing site, which gets its own link alongside the trailer.

Unfortunately, from the … Read more