auction

eBay is playing virtual Santa this holiday season with a free "Deals" app for the iPhone that leads consumers to the better buys on the auction site.

Launched Tuesday, eBay Deals is designed to deliver a stream of the best deals on the site from across hundreds of millions of listings. Like eBay Mobile, the company's regular iPhone app, Deals lets you search, shop, and pay for your items from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

All featured deals spotlight items with no bids, no reserve price, free or fixed-rate shipping, and less than four hours remaining to … Read more

eBay on Sunday confirmed that a "technical issue" had caused search queries on the auction site to be messed up over the weekend, resulting in limited or no search results. The company says that it's being cautious, though, and is holding back on some advanced search features until the issue is fully solved.

"We are happy to report that critical search functionality was restored overnight on Saturday and we are seeing normal activity levels today," a post on the company's eBay Ink blog read Sunday. "As part of our effort to restore critical … Read more

Sold!

Auction site eBay has, as long anticipated, sold off the Skype telephony service to a group of investors that includes Marc Andreessen's new Andreessen Horowitz group, Silver Lake, and the Skype co-founders' Joltid Ltd. The investor group now holds about 70 percent of the company; eBay retains the rest in a minority stake. Joltid was brought into the investor group as part of the settlement of a copyright suit that the Skype co-founders, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, filed against eBay over Skype's technology. At one point, that dispute was looking so ugly that eBay was reportedly considering rebuilding Skype's technology altogether.… Read more

Drew Olanoff has drawn a short straw. But he wants to make it into a long one.

He started raising money by launching Blame Drew's Cancer, which lets you accuse his pesky Hodgkin's Lymphoma of being the cause of everything that is wrong in your life.

His latest charitable poke in the eye to life's vicissitudes is to auction his Twitter name. You see, Olanoff was clever enough to declare himself to be @drew in the microblogging macroworld.

And there can be few places in the world more replete with munificent egos than Twitter.

So it is … Read more

Updated 2.14pm PST with a correction from Profiles in History

There could be some high-pitched squealing and ethereally egregious excitement afoot when serial number F4200NUM0001 goes up for auction on October 8 and 9.

For this serial number represents the bidding war that is sure to ensue when a certain Apple Macintosh Plus is offered to the public's paddles.

This is no ordinary Macintosh. This was thought to be the first Macintosh Plus ever made. (See correction below) And its owner was Gene Roddenberry. Yes, he whose fingers went where no man had ever gone before.

According to Reuters, … Read more

After Amazon experienced some difficulties last week with its selling options in the Amazon Marketplace, it made me wonder if anyone decided to start selling some of their merchandise on eBay. If so, they would join thousands of others who are using the online auction site to make a few extra bucks. If that's your goal, check out some of these services for eBay sellers.

Auctiva Auctiva is a full-featured product that allows you to use a variety of templates and modules to help you sell products more effectively on eBay.

Auctiva is quite powerful. You can create side-scrolling galleries with pictures you upload to the site (you're allowed 1GB of storage), change the color of your listing page, and issue invoices. It won't help you determine if you're selling products that eBay users want, but it will help you easily manage your auctions. Admittedly, Auctiva is for active sellers, but at $9.95 per month for so many nice features, it's an affordable offering.

eBay Market Researcher Terapeek's eBay Market Researcher tool is a fine way to determine how to get the most out of your listing.

After you sign up for the site and choose a membership (it costs $24.95 per month or $197.95 per year), you can immediately start searching through the app's listings of eBay products. When you find the product you're looking to sell, it provides you with information on the item's average bid, how much the average listing makes, and how page design affected profits. The app even provides you with information on which day is best to list the product and end your auction. It's a powerful tool.… Read more

eBay wants to spin off telephony service Skype into a separate publicly traded company, but something's standing in the way: Skype's founders are threatening to take back some of the technology in the midst of a licensing dispute.

The auction giant's solution, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday: Build a new one.

This was revealed in a 10-Q regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; eBay is not commenting beyond the filing. You can decide whether "Frankenskype" or "Skypenstein" is a better name for the hypothetical creation.

Here's what has … Read more

Ericsson cast the $1.13 billion winning bid in an auction for the wireless assets of bankrupt Nortel Networks, the companies said Saturday.

The Swedish telecommunications giant picked up Nortel's CDMA and next-generation LTE wireless technologies. As part of the agreement, at least 2,500 Nortel workers supporting CDMA and LTE will be offered jobs at Ericsson.

CDMA, or code division multiple access, is one of two major networks operating in the U.S. and is used by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel. LTE, or Long Term Evolution, is 4G wireless technology that will potentially replace today's mobile … Read more

AlienFiles wants to help users improve the image of their eBay auctions. With a simple set of tools, users can make their pages look more professional.

This program lets users make a new listing with a simple white and gray page that is lined with tabs for all of the customization options your eBay auction needs. All you do is enter the auction description and standard information into a traditional word processing screen. Images are then easily added with a simple screen that uses a file tree to help download photos. AlienFiles really comes together with its tab for creating … Read more