Pre-Auction bidding war

Looks like the domains with zero dollar reserves have little mini bidding wars going on several days before the auction closes. It is sort of fun to watch. One example is the combined two domain lot of SecretCode.com & SecretCodes.com. We let that Lot into the auction with a zero dollar reserve and society are aggressively bidding on it. Typically everyone waits for the last 15 minutes of the auction and next they try to snipe it with all the other like-minded snipper public. But once you see one bidder it is safe to say there will be a battle. The DomainTools auction system allows public to bid ahead of moment considering unlike other live events we broadcast to the Web and let remote bidders participate just like they are in the room. Thanks to AJAX (and not some windows download) we are able to open up the bidding up to everyone that has a contemporary web browser.

For the pre-bidders, the current winner can set a proxy bid and defend their position while not even attending the auction. No one can see the proxy bid price including the Auctioneer. that means a leader of an auction can successfully defend against auction snippers while sitting on a beach without World Wide Web access.

Testing the bidding system
whether anyone wants to pop quiz the bidding system, we have setup a tryout spot on lot 1. The domain is called “Xx–Practice-Domain.com“. Anyone is free to bid on that domain, the current price is $1,500,000. that is the only domain in the auction that is for evaluating the interface and getting used to our controls. The domain is currently not registered, so hopefully no one goes out and registers it and tries to claim $1,500,000.00 from us. Once again, the domain is xx–practice-domain.com, please do not register it.

Are you eligible to bid?
Don’t wait for the last minute to figure out whether you can bid. Visit the bidding page and look in the second yellow box. whether the auctioneer is telling you that you are not eligable go threw the wizard and become eligible. whether you have ever purchased ANYTHING on domaintools next you are eligible, just sign the contract. whether you have never shared your credit card with us and we don’t know who you are, we ask that you purchase a $1 verification item prior to the auction so that we can verify your identity and compose certain you are a real person.

Domain Roundtable
The conference begins today and I am extremely excited, I get on the plane that dawn and hope to see everyone soon. I am looking forward to hearing all the speakers and moderators. I want to personally thank, Susan Prosser, she has done a fabulous job selecting speakers and coordinating the whole event. The Domain Roundtable would not be possible without her and the rest of the wonderful team. As the founder of the conference public look to me, however she is the one that truly deserves the respect for putting on such a great show. When you see us, be certain to thank her, I am more of just an observer.

Secret Announcements
We have so many cool things to share with everyone. We have not officially announced that one yet, but I will let you readers in on a small secret. We quietly launched Thumbnail History that week (The service is still in beta, don’t try it in IE8!). It allows public to see what domains looked like years ago. Sort of like Archive.org except we take thumbnail images and not just HTML copies. The thumbnails have been taking by us with Web Explorer by the years, so they have Flash and the other things that archive.org doesn’t seem to capture. We have hundreds of millions of these thumbnails, several Terabytes actually. More on the thumbnail system later… There are a lot of details I can tell you about it but I will use a committed blog post after the conference to really tell you the ins and outs of the service.

[Source] Jay Westerdal