Mike, what happened to you?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:07:00 -0000

Yes, I know it's always the same story. Busy busy amd busy and no blog posts for months and all of a sudden I get the urge to blog again. Nothing different this time although I have a lot of catching up to do on what happend the last few months.

Goldrush Auction Platform 2.0

First of all the second version of the Goldrush Auction platform was released in fall 2009. Even though it wasn't finished for the full 100%, it was ready enough to get press the start button and start auctioning again after a period of downtime. We changed from the penny auction concept to a better and more fair for everyone free to bid concept. We did get a lot of negative publicity during the start with the first (penny auction) version. People were saying were discussing about us on national tv that the concept was gambling instead of a auction. After running the first version for a couple of months we gathered a lot of information about how online auctions in general run and how people react to certain products and offers.

The funny part of the story is that we were contacted by the justice department that we had to close down our operation because the concept was alegitly gambling. And getting a gambling license in The Netherlands is just impossible (you have to be a government runned company more or less to get that, fair trade huh??)

So then what?

So basicly we had 3 options.

1: Shut down the operation. Take our loses without compensation and get a new job
2: Continue the company in The Netherlands and get bullied by the government and hope to make a little money in the end after dozens of lawsuits
3: Rethink the concept, move to another country and use the knowledge we gained the last months for a better concept.

Yes, you guessed right, we went for option 3. We moved, rethought the concept to be more transparent and the result is now still running on https://goudkoortsveiling.com. The concept works much better for us and is more transparent for the user.

But if you don't innovate, you'll get killed by the competition.

So what's going on now?

I'm making the final preperations and choices for a new version of the auction system. Currently we run on Coldfusion 8, Wowza media server and Flex. The choices I'm making now are about going pure javascript or Flash (Flex). Depending on that choice, the type of push software will be chosen for all the real-time auction data (wowza flex, APE or CometD for javascript). Also, am I going to stick with Coldfusion? Is it going to be Adobe CF 9 or is it going to be Railo.

So a lot of technical choices need to be made in the next week or so. Hopefully I can have the beta version up and running at the end of the month as I created a lot of general purpose CFC's which would speed up the process.

Speaking about the beta

There is a signup form for companies that sell consumer goods, courier companies and also e-fullfilment companies. As soon as the beta is up and running, the signed up (and reviewed) companies will have a go with the new system to see the benefits of our auction platform as a extra sales channel or even get more brand awareness.

More details on the platform will follow as decisions are made final.

And besides work?

Enjoying life as it comes. Love the fact that I'm not living in The Netherlands anymore.

Feedburner/RSS mistake

Fri, 22 May 2009 09:49:00 -0000

Sorry to everyone who is following my FeedBurner/RSS feed! I accidentally enabled the link splicer in my feed for an old delicious.com account I had. So you might see some weird and unrelated posts in my feed.

It's turned off now and hopefully the unrelated links in my feed are gone!

Michael van Leest - General

Mike, what happened to you?

Feedburner/RSS mistake