Bob Browning's blog

About a year ago I blogged about Telebid, the on-line bidding site with a difference. The difference is that you need to be a chump to fall for the proposition.  I just checked to see if they had been closed down now, but I see they are now called Swoopo.    (www.swoopo.co.uk)

It looks like a very cool auction site with some real bargains. There is an upmarket Viaio laptop going for £44.80p  What is the catch?

The catch is that it costs money to bid. They state very clearly that bidding starts at 10p and it costs 50p for each bid. And each bid ups the price by 2p or 10p.  Do some math.  The Sony was a 2p auction, so a price of £44.80  means that there must have been 2240 bids.  At 50p per bid that means they have made well over a grand in bidding fees with five minutes to go.

In a bizarre twist, they are auctioning packs of 300 bids (worth £150). One pack was sold for £28.32 on a 2p auction so they have made an amazing £708.

Is this a scam? Not at all.  They are not cheating and are very clear about how the site works.  You just have to be dumb to fall for it.

This was started by a very clever German guy  with presumably no conscience  at all.  There is an interview with the Manager of Sucker Development  – sorry Business development here.

I overheard a guy talking on his mobile phone on the train yesterday.  I heard the term ‘Project Governance’ for the first time.  What a useful phrase.  And how out of date I must be – it even has a Wikipedia entry.

I got a call the other day from www.meettheboss.com  a business social network.  I had been recommended by the CEO of HSBC or some such nonsense and I could participate in some sort of program and get in front of the creme de la creme of decision makers yada yada  I kept on asking ‘how much’  then there was yada yada ‘how much’.  £9,000.  I put the phone down.

I have signed up as a punter and checked the launch press release.  Apparently it is a business social network aimed at the finance industry launched last summer.  It looks very nice (expensive – allegedly $50million – HOW MUCH!!!). 

There is no evidence that  the members are finance industry people, so I guess that objective fell by the wayside fairly quickly.  The USP is that there is a two-tier system with ‘C’ level executives in a different class from us punters.  From the press release:

 “These executives are protected and this is what is missing from any other business networks out there – they don’t have the safety and security of being in a safe environment with peers and the top 10 global financial services organisations in the world don’t have the ability to network within the C level, and we’ve created a safe platform for them to do this.”

Now I don’t see the CEO of anyone significant spending time at his computer networking with other CEOs via some social networking site.  I just don’t see it.  These are important busy people, if they want to network with someone they get their secretary to fix lunch. 

The discussion forum got six posts/comments in the last 4 business days so it is not eactly a hive of activity. 

Compared to a really useful facility like Linkedin I somehow don’t see this one making it.  But we will see in due course.