bidding

Open up Quick and you'll see two paths you can take: Sell or Search & Buy. Selling an item using Quick is totally straightforward. Just hit List an Item and input all of the vital info, like Title, Price, Category, Description, Payment Options, Delivery Options, and Photos. You can snap a few new pics or import existing ones from your Gallery. If you're selling a fairly common item, there's a nice feature that lets you use Quick to search for it (either by keyword or scanned bar code), in order to autopopulate the item fields. Lastly, at … Read more

Web sites are increasingly targeting ads at visitors based on behavioral data collected via cookies and other tracking techniques behind the scenes. This riles privacy advocates and many consumers, but there's no question it will become even more widespread.

Since November 2010, behavioral tracking has increased 400 percent, according to a new study from Krux, a firm that helps Web sites manage customer data. The average visit to a Web site in December triggered 56 instances of data collection, up from 10 instances in Nov. 2010, the company found after crawling pages on the 50 most-visited sites measured by … Read more

The only e-reader fit enough to meet the U.S. State Department's needs is the Kindle Touch. The iPad and Nook simply won't do. The government has asked Amazon to negotiate a no-bid contract of up to $16.5 million to pass out Kindles to the country's embassies overseas. This was first reported by Nextgov.

If Amazon proposes a contract based on the State Department's needs, it would theoretically provide at least 2,500 Kindle Touches preloaded with 50 titles each to the State Department; but this number could grow because the government is looking to … Read more

A Yahoo shareholder has launched a class action lawsuit against the online giant, alleging that a ban on cross talk for firms interested in acquiring the company is anticompetitive and harms shareholders.

"The No Cross Talk Provision constitutes an unreasonable anti-takeover device, designed to entrench and favor [Yahoo co-founder Jerry] Yang and the current Board," M&C Partners III, the case's plaintiff, wrote in a suit obtained by CNET and filed with the Delaware Chancery Court last week. "It tilts the playing field unreasonably in favor of Yang, who is working to attract investors who … Read more

Small businesses and start-ups need all the help they can get. Fortunately, there's a wide range of free tools that can help entrepreneurs, contractors, and tradespeople take care of business. Bid-n-Invoice Basic Invoice is an easy-to-use application for creating and printing professional-looking invoices and estimates. Best of all, it's free for both personal and commercial use.

Basic Invoice opened with an extremely basic interface, just a blank field and a toolbar with icons labeled New Invoice, Manual Invoice, and Help. We clicked New Invoice, which opened the program's template in a separate window. A drop-down list let … Read more

Nortel Networks said it is putting off the auction for its 6,000 patents and applications due to "significant level of interest."

The Nortel auction was moved from June 20 to June 27 to accommodate the increased interest. In other words, Google got the go-ahead from regulators to bid on Nortel's patents, but may wind up paying a lot more than $900 million if it wants the portfolio.

So what companies are likely bidders for Nortel's patents?

Look no further than the companies that filed objections to Google's effort to bid on Nortel's patents: … Read more

Medici is the iOS adaptation of Reiner Knizia's classic bidding game, a board-game simulation of a dockside auction over the course of three days, in which three to six merchants bid to fill the cargo holds of their ships.

As with adaptations of similarly complex, European-style board games, existing fans of this popular game will have a much easier time with this app--but thankfully, comprehensive rules (perhaps overly so) along with nine different AI choices (each with varying skill levels and tendencies) help to make the learning curve a little less steep. Gameplay is actually very simple once you'… Read more

Reiner Knizia's Ra is the universal iOS adaptation of the popular European-style board game Ra (by German game-design legend Reiner Knizia), a fast-paced game of bidding and building that's nominally about achieving fame in ancient Egypt.

Ra is a pure auction game, with simple rules and a shallow learning curve once you get its basic flow. It's always easier to learn a board game from somebody who knows how to play it, but the app does include complete rules and a good bit of in-game help for novices.

Ra is divided--and scored--in three separate stages ("epochs&… Read more

Hewlett-Packard on Thursday officially won storage vendor 3Par after Dell declined to match a $33 a share, or $2.4 billion, bid.

Dell's statement on the matter ended a wild bidding war that started at $18 a share for 3Par. Dell said in a statement that it will get a $72 million breakup fee. The company added that its final offer was for $32 a share.

The 3Par bidding war reflected the animosity between two fierce rivals, Dell and HP, and the fact that there aren't many enterprise storage players to buy.

Update 8:31 a.m. PDT: … Read more