http://meandmybigideas.wordpress.com/2006/10/17/echobaycom-the-pez-cand
y-dispenser/
[Snips]
A collector's heaven had been born. And a new
form of trading, accessible by all.
The perfect marketplace.

http://meandmybigideas.wordpress.com/2006/10/17/echobaycom-the-pez-ca...

EchoBay.com & The Pez Candy Dispenser
October 17, 2006 -- lemaverick

Just like You Tube so another great internet success
story didn't start with a comprehensive business plan
or any clear direction in mind. Just an obsessive
founder with a 'tinkering' mentality and a fascination
for technology. In particular a new platform - the internet.

So Echobay.com, home of the most famous online
auction site on the planet? Well not quite.

When Pierre Omidyar wanted a name for his web
consulting and freelance technology business he
thought Echo Bay Technology Group 'sounded cool'.
Unfortunately a Canadian mining company already
owned the domain name and so was born.

Not the home of online auctions. Just the home
for yet another tech consulting firm.

Already a seasoned techie with experience across
a range of IT businesses Pierre became fascinated
by a developing technology and wondered whether
'the internet' would help level the playing field
between buyers and sellers, between insiders
and joe public.

Pierre had begun to wonder whether it was
possible to create a 'perfect marketplace' that
gave everyone access to the same information &
let buyers fight it out & produce a real market price
for the transaction.

Pierre knew nothing about auctions & auction theory.
Just frustration at seeing insiders make big gains on
stock deals before the small investor got a look,
made him wonder.

Urban myth has it that Pierre wrote the code that
would become Ebay to help his fiancee Pam
Wesley, who was having difficulty finding other
collectors of PEZ dispensers to trade with since
she & Pierre had moved from Boston to The Valley.

The truth is slightly different but still as quaint, just
maybe not quite so romantic.

With Pierre's interest in the internet and perfect
marketplaces growing, it was time to test the notion.
Adding a page to his ebay.com consultancy web
site the results would soon be in.

With its block text on a dull grey background this
was true pioneering internet - the listings reflected
the standard of the day, Usenet newsgroups (the
online home of techies in the mid 1990s).

Pierre had no idea what to sell or what people
would want to buy, but computers being his
obsession, the first items seemed obvious -
computer parts.

As for marketing. A few mentions on Usenet
groups was the limit producing a startling result -
a traffic free day. It was Labor week-end and the
moderator of the all important new site
newsgroup had taken time-off.

But soon the trickle started.

An early sale on eBay was Omidyar's broken
laser pointer for $13.83.

Why would anyone buy a 'broken' laser pointer?
Pierre contacted the buyer to confirm he knew
it was broken. The e-mail response was "I'm a
collector of broken laser pointers."

A collector's heaven had been born. And a new
form of trading, accessible by all.
The perfect marketplace.
.
.
--

Now all we need is the rational consumer, and economics will start to work
just like it says it should in all the textbooks.

Yours in an exponentially-damped trend-line of increasing
heteroschedasticity,

On 2007-12-10, John D Salt wrote:
[Snips]
Yours in an exponentially-damped trend-line of increasing
heteroschedasticity,

You wrote that in a geodesic dome.

I write everything in a geodesic dome.

As does everyone else -- it's the
21st Century, after all, and architecture is like that now. Also, we have
personal VTOLs, electricity from clean fusion so cheap it's not worth
metering, permanent colonies on the Moon, Mars and the four most
fashionable Lagrangian points, and the Rainbow Unity Party has just been
re-elected to run the World Government for the fourth time running since it
did such a great job of stabilising the population, eliminating
international conflict, slashing infant mortality and sorting out that
greenhouse unpleasantness.

If things aren't as agreeable in your timeline, blame that bastard Everett.

On 2008-01-14, John D Salt wrote:

I write everything in a geodesic dome.

And we do our best reading on a Dymaxion toilet.

As does everyone else -- it's the
21st Century, after all, and architecture is like that now. Also, we
have
personal VTOLs, electricity from clean fusion so cheap it's not worth
metering, permanent colonies on the Moon, Mars and the four most
fashionable Lagrangian points, and the Rainbow Unity Party has just been
re-elected to run the World Government for the fourth time running since
it
did such a great job of stabilising the population, eliminating
international conflict, slashing infant mortality and sorting out that
greenhouse unpleasantness.

SBUSCIRBE!!1!


If things aren't as agreeable in your timeline, blame that bastard
Everett.

He'd just blame Pete and Delmar.


--
"Dictionaries are like watches. The worst is better than none, and
the best cannot be expected to go quite true." --- Samuel Johnson
"A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two
watches is never sure." --- variously attributed
Listen to BoneyM's Wild planet (on the 10,000 lightyears record). You'll be

Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote in
On 2008-04-15, Tzortzakakis Dimitrios wrote:
Listen to BoneyM's Wild planet (on the 10,000 lightyears record).
You'll be astonished at the utopia people in the 80s were expecting
from the 21st century....

Happynet?

No thanks, I've just put one out.

Listen to BoneyM's Wild planet (on the 10,000 lightyears record). You'll be
astonished at the utopia people in the 80s were expecting from the 21st
century....

On 2008-04-15, Tzortzakakis Dimitrios wrote:

Listen to BoneyM's Wild planet (on the 10,000 lightyears record).
You'll be astonished at the utopia people in the 80s were expecting
from the 21st century....

Happynet?

On 2008-04-15, Tzortzakakis Dimitrios wrote:

Listen to BoneyM's Wild planet (on the 10,000 lightyears record). You'll
be
astonished at the utopia people in the 80s were expecting from the 21st
century....

Happynet?


--
No, wild planet.(We guarantee peace, health and freedom for all eternity or

Tzortzakakis Dimitrios wrote:
Listen to BoneyM's Wild planet (on the 10,000 lightyears record).

You'll be astonished at the utopia people in the 80s were expecting
from the 21st century....

Happynet?

Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote:
Tzortzakakis Dimitrios wrote:
Listen to BoneyM's Wild planet (on the 10,000 lightyears record).

I remembered that records were larger than CDs, but I somehow don't
recall them being quite that large. I wonder what would happen if
you tried to rotate a record that size at 33 RPM.

Lol! And what stylus? An ortofon? www.ortofon.com probably the last

You'll be astonished at the utopia people in the 80s were expecting
from the 21st century....

Happynet?

Flying cars, which would navigate using slide rules. Unfortunately,
there was no place to drive them except ruins from the nuclear wars.
--
In fact, I've never seen a slide rule. ( I am just 35). When I passed in