AGLOCO

August Update

August 3, 2007 at 9:05 am · Filed under News & Updates

Revenue – We are near completion with one of two improved revenue agreements. These should be implemented in August. They should greatly enhance September’s revenue in search and North American ad revenue. We are also in negotiations with one European network, to improve revenue there. We are in need of better networks in China, Brazil, India, Korea and Japan. We also need a network in the Middle East. If any Member has any leads on those, please post your ideas in the comment section.

Tech Update The tech team reported that the fix to the August hours will be occurring on Thursday the 9th. Until that time the display will not show correct August hours. The last three weeks have consumed our tech team with server improvements – this did not go as the team had anticipated with load balancing problems at the ISP. This should be resolved shortly and they can get back to the other pressing needs of AGLOCO. As we change to improved servers the AGLOCO website will be down for a period of time (the amount of time will depend on where in the world the Member is that is trying to reach the site). People will see a notice page saying we are doing maintenance. Projects like updating the website and emails to all Members will then be attended to.

Media – As reported earlier, Brian recently gave a recorded interview. In it, he talked about the AGLOCO Vision and he answered some questions about the company’s current progress and trajectory. Click here to listen to the interview. Click here for written transcript

Member distributions – If you missed the post on this, you can read it at Member distributions

Thanks for your continued efforts for AGLOCO.

The AGLOCO Development Team

Comments or questions for Brian please send to bgreenwald@agloco.com

>Join AGLOCO now<

Past Articles on AGLOCO:
Thursday, July 19, 2007 Latest News From AGLOCO

Tuesday, June 12, 2007 AGLOCO Viewbar Update

Thursday, May 24, 2007 AGLOCO Viewbar Update

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 AGLOCO: Own the Internet

Latest News From AGLOCO

July Update
July 18, 2007 at 11:14 pm · Filed under News & Updates

As Brian mentioned in his recorded interview last week (described below), he is spending more time on the revenue team and will be focusing more on getting money for the community and less on this blog. So to pick up the slack, various members of the AGLOCO Development Team will write some of the posts going forward. The blog will still be Brian’s so if you have comments or questions about it, please continue to address them with him at bgreenwald@agloco.com.

Updating the website - We let this slide (too far) as we worked first on the Viewbar and then on revenue. We are currently moving and upgrading the site servers and this should be done in a week. After this is complete the tech team will change the website.

Another update email to Members – This is ready to go out and should also be done when the new servers are finished.

Media – As some Members have noted, Brian recently gave a recorded interview. In it, he talked about the AGLOCO Vision and he answered some questions about the company’s current progress and trajectory. Click here to listen to the interview. Also, the French newspaper “Le Monde” wrote about us, and you can read the article by clicking here.

Windows 98 – We are investigating some quick workarounds for Viewbar compatibility with older versions of Windows. If they work we will report this to all Members.

Viewbar Update and Member distributions – If you missed the previous post on this, you can read it at http://blog.agloco.com/index.php/post68/

Thanks for your continued efforts for AGLOCO.
The AGLOCO Development Team

>Join AGLOCO now<

Past Articles on AGLOCO:

Tuesday, June 12, 2007 AGLOCO Viewbar Update

Thursday, May 24, 2007 AGLOCO Viewbar Update

Tuesday, May 15, 2007 AGLOCO: Own the Internet

What You Need to Know BEFORE You Get Started on eBay

So you've decided that you want to get started as a seller on eBay. There are a few things that you really need to know before you go and throw yourself in at the deep end.


What to Sell.

First off, you need to know what it is you're going to sell: what's your speciality? You'll do far better on eBay if you become a great source for certain kind of products, as people who are interested in those products will come back to you again and again. You won't get any loyalty or real reputation if you just sell rubbish at random.

When you think about what to sell, there are a few things to consider. The most important of these is to always sell what you know. If you try to sell something that you just don't know anything about then you'll never write a good description and sell it for a good price.

You might think you're not especially interested in anything, but if you think about what kind of things you usually buy and which websites you go to most often, I'm sure you'll discover some kind of interest. If all else fails mention it to your friends and family: they'll almost certainly say "Oh, well why don't you sell…", and you'll slap your forehead.

Out of the things you know enough about, you should then consider which things you could actually get for a good enough price to resell, and how suitable they would be for posting. If you can think of something of that you're knowledgeable about and it's small and light enough for postage to be relatively cheap, then that's great!

Don't worry if you think the thing you're selling is too obscure - it isn't. There's a market for almost everything on eBay, even things that wouldn't sell once in a year if you stocked them in a shop. You'll probably do even better if you fill a niche than if you sell something common.

Tax and Legal Matters.

If you earn enough money, you should be aware that you're going to have to start paying tax - this won't be done for you. If you decide to sell on eBay on a full-time basis, you should probably register as a business.

Prepare Yourself.

There are going to be ups and downs when you sell on eBay. Don't pack it in if something goes a little wrong in your first few sales: the sellers who are successful on eBay are the ones who enjoy it, and stick at it whatever happens.

Anyone can sell on eBay, if they believe in themselves - and if you do decide it's not for you, then the start-up costs are so low that you won't really have lost anything.

If you're ready to start selling, then the next thing you need to know is the different auction types, so you can decide which ones you will use to sell your items. Our next post about eBay will give you a guide.


Past Articles on eBay:
Monday, June 18, 2007 eBay Income Possibilities
Sunday, June 10, 2007 eBay: The First 12 Years

eBay Income Possibilities

If you've ever read an article about eBay, you will have seen the kinds of incomes people make - it isn't unusual to hear of people making thousands of dollars per month on eBay.

Next time you're on eBay, take a look at how many PowerSellers there are: you'll find quite a few. Now consider that every single one of one of them must be making at least $1,000 per month, as that's eBay's requirement for becoming a PowerSeller. Silver PowerSellers make at least $3,000 each month, while Gold PowerSellers make more than $10,000, and the Platinum level is $25,000. The top ranking is Titanium PowerSeller, and to qualify you must make at least $150,000 in sales every month!

The fact that these people exist gives you come idea of the income possibilities here. Most of them never set out to even set up a business on eBay - they simply started selling a few things, and then kept going. There are plenty of people whose full-time job is selling things on eBay, and some of them have been doing it for years now. Can you imagine that? Once they've bought the stock, everything else is pretty much pure profit for these people - they don't need to pay for any business premises, staff, or anything else. There are multi-million pound businesses making less in actual profit than eBay PowerSellers do.

Even if you don't want to quit your job and really go for it, you can still use eBay to make a significant second income. You can pack up orders during the week and take them down to the post office for delivery each Saturday. There are few other things you could be doing with your spare time that have anywhere near that kind of earning potential.

What's more, eBay doesn't care who you are, where you live, or what you look like: some PowerSellers are very old, or very young. Some live out in the middle of nowhere where selling on eBay is one of the few alternatives to farming or being very poor. eBay tears down the barriers to earning that the real world constantly puts up. There's no job interview and no commuting involved - if you can post things, you can do it.

Put it this way: if you know where to get something reasonably cheaply that you could sell, then you can sell it on eBay - and since you can always get discounts for bulk at wholesale, that's not exactly difficult. Buy a job lot of something in-demand cheaply, sell it on eBay, and you're making money already, with no set-up costs.

If you want to dip your toe in the water before you commit to actually buying anything, then you can just sell things that you've got lying around in the house. Search through that cupboard of stuff you never use, and you'll probably find you've got a few hundred dollars' worth of stuff lying around in there! This is the power of eBay: there is always someone who wants what you're selling, whatever it might be, and since they've come looking for you, you don't even need to do anything to get them to buy it.

So you want to get started on eBay? Well, that's great! There are only a few little things you need to learn to get started. Our next post will give you the lowdown.

>Become An eBay PowerSeller<

Past Articles on eBay:

Sunday, June 10, 2007 eBay: The First 12 Years

AGLOCO Viewbar Update

Ad rotation, Viewbar and Website stability...the following are addressed on the AGLOCO Company Blog. >

Walk Before Running

Now that AGLOCO has launched the Viewbar (we released it on June 4th so we are 8 days “old”), we should start to make steady progress. Here’s a big picture view of where we’re going over the next few months. I see things in three major phases, with some overlap between them.

The first order of business is to get the Viewbar (and our website) stable – with rotating ads.

*Viewbar Stability: We will be releasing an updated version of the Viewbar software within a week that will take care of some of the remaining ‘bugs’, and we will continue to stabilize the software. If you already have the Viewbar, you do not need to do anything to get this new version, as your Viewbar should automatically self-update with it. For the most part it seems these remaining ‘bugs’ appear minor and only affect a very limited number of members. This is good. This means we can put our primary emphasis on the next phase of the Viewbar while leaving a small team to work on the minor bugs.

*Website Stability: We will be making the Viewbar software available on one trusted alternate download site (we are picking it now and it will be all set up before we send a Viewbar download “reminder” email to the Membership). This should help our servers balance the website traffic with the stress of the download process. We will continue to make adjustments and improvements to our servers in order to improve performance for those browsing (so there are no disruptions to the sign-up process for new Members in the future).

*Ad rotation: We are working with the ad server people to optimize this process. The way they initially rotated the ads was crashing their servers with all the Viewbars asking for ads, so they have needed to improvise. Now it seems that some Members are getting rotating ads and others aren’t, depending on browser settings and computer environment. They are working on solutions so their ads show up on all Viewbars, regardless of computer environment or settings. I do not know how long this will take, but we have seen a steady improvement in the number of users who get rotating ads, so it seems progress is being made.

The next phase for AGLOCO is the maximizing of Viewbar revenue. This is an important goal, as we have fairly fixed costs so the more revenue we generate (especially more revenue per Viewbar), the more each Member will receive. There are lots of steps that will need to be taken in the coming months to improve AGLOCO’s revenue including:

1. Improving our search and ad revenue sources and sharing agreements. As more Members use the Viewbar, our bargaining power grows.
2. Start the Viewbar targeting system. One part of this system will focus ads based on your searches and surfing. Another part of this system will focus ads based on where you live (of course, AGLOCO will need to have a contract with ad networks in each of these countries to provide local ads in local countries).
3. Better inform Members of the revenue generating opportunities on the Viewbar.
4. Continue to work with existing Members who have not yet activated their Viewbars. We expect that after the initial spike of downloads this process will be one of gradual adoption. New Members signing up will have access to the Viewbar right away.
5. Continue to make improvements to encourage continued viral growth of the AGLOCO Membership. This includes website improvements, increased Viewbar functionality, and an opt-in Member-to-Member communication system.

Maximizing revenue is extremely important to AGLOCO, since cash distributions will come from AGLOCO’s positive earnings (revenue exceeding expenses). There is some information available on the AGLOCO website and in previous posts to this blog, but I will talk more about this important stage of AGLOCO’s future in my next post. I won’t be giving exact payment dates nor a fixed hourly rate prediction (as AGLOCO cannot predict future revenues per Member), but I will talk more about how the distributions will work.

Brian Greenwald
AGLOCO Development Team

>Join AGLOCO now<

Past Articles on AGLOCO:
Thursday, May 24, 2007 AGLOCO Viewbar Update
Tuesday, May 15, 2007 AGLOCO: Own the Internet

eBay: The First 12 Years

Yes, you read that correctly: twelve years. eBay was created in September 1995, by a man called Pierre Omidyar, who was living in San Jose. He wanted his site - then called 'AuctionWeb' - to be an online marketplace, and wrote the first code for it in one weekend. It was one of the first websites of its kind in the world. The name 'eBay' comes from the domain Omidyar used for his site. His company's name was Echo Bay, and the 'eBay AuctionWeb' was originally just one part of Echo Bay's website at ebay.com. The first thing ever sold on the site was Omidyar's broken laser pointer, which he got $14 for.

The site quickly became massively popular, as sellers came to list all sorts of odd things and buyers actually bought them. Relying on trust seemed to work remarkably well, and meant that the site could almost be left alone to run itself. The site had been designed from the start to collect a small fee on each sale, and it was this money that Omidyar used to pay for AuctionWeb's expansion. The fees quickly added up to more than his current salary, and so he decided to quit his job and work on the site full-time. It was at this point, in 1996, that he added the feedback facilities, to let buyers and sellers rate each other and make buying and selling safer.

In 1997, Omidyar changed AuctionWeb's - and his company's - name to 'eBay', which is what people had been calling the site for a long time. He began to spend a lot of money on advertising, and had the eBay logo designed. It was in this year that the one-millionth item was sold (it was a toy version of Big Bird from Sesame Street).

Then, in 1998 - the peak of the dotcom boom - eBay became big business, and the investment in Internet businesses at the time allowed it to bring in senior managers and business strategists, who took in public on the stock market. It started to encourage people to sell more than just collectibles, and quickly became a massive site where you could sell anything, large or small. Unlike other sites, though, eBay survived the end of the boom, and is still going strong today.

1999 saw eBay go worldwide, launching sites in the UK, Australia and Germany. eBay bought half.com, an Amazon-like online retailer, in the year 2000 - the same year it introduced Buy it Now - and bought PayPal, an online payment service, in 2002.

Pierre Omidyar has now earned an estimated $3 billion from eBay, and still serves as Chairman of the Board. Oddly enough, he keeps a personal weblog at http://pierre.typepad.com/. There are now literally millions of items bought and sold every day on eBay, all over the world. For every $100 spent online worldwide, it is estimated that $14 is spent on eBay - that's a lot of laser pointers.

Now that you know the history of eBay, perhaps you'd like to know how it could work for you? Our next post will give you an idea of the possibilities.