Freaking Brilliant

http://www.swoopo.com/

This is an auction site, but with a twist. You buy bids for $1/bid, and have a stock of bids available in your account. Any time you click to bid on an item, it only increases the price by $0.15, but it also extends the time on the auction.

I’ve been watching an auction on a Playstation 3 for a few minutes now, and it has consistently sit between 5 second left and 2 minutes left, and I’ve watched the price go from around $95 to around $105. People keep bidding as the time gets down to 20 seconds or so (because you’re always willing to bid another 15 freaking cents on a PS3 for around 100 bucks), which then ups the time left by a few seconds.

So think about that – the current price on this PS3 is only $123.15, but since every auction starts at $0.15, and every bid only raises that by $0.15, the site has already made $821 on this auction! If it ended right now they’d make another $123.15 + the shipping fees they charge. They’re selling a PS3 for around $1,000, but making visitors think it’s an amazing deal because someone got it for $100.

I am stunned by how brilliant, and sort of evil, this is.

Blogging?? Must be something good.

If there was ever something worth blogging about, it's this. At about 6:45pm Last Saturday, I asked Maria to marry me and she said yes. Pretty bragable, I know. We've both grown up a lot together over the past couple of years, going through some good times and some bad. And, though as those bad times were, I'm glad we had them because they've basically smelted us into one person. And we like that a lot. Don't worry, this won't deteriorate into a mush-fest; I just wanted to say that it feels really good to be so certain about making such a huge decision. Maria takes the cake.