TheBaldOne said:
Keith, your a great bloke and all, but it just seems to get worse with the auctions. No offence meant to you but isn't it about time Tim Schumacher as CEO of Sedo showed his face on this one? Trey Harving (CEO of mTLD) in his blog has responded and asked for comments that are being published, what about Sedo showing the same kind of respect to us?
Please bring this matter to the attention of Tim Schumacher, Ulrich Essmann, Mathew Bentley, or whoever at Sedo can actually answer questions about the auctions and whose replies can be taken as a policy statement by Sedo.
...
For once I agree with the TheBaldOne: there seems to be a need for Sedo to
explain publicly these technical and other issues that keep arising in their fledgling marketplace -
IMHO in at least as much detail as the response from mTLD did (shown here with my emphasis):
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Open Letter to the dotMobi Community from Trey Harvin, dotMobi CEO
Dear Members of the dotMobi Community:
We have been following the discussions surrounding the dotMobi online auction, hosted by Sedo, that was scheduled to end on 5 December 2007. We think that there are several key misperceptions in the community, and I would like to clear them up so that we can continue having constructive dialogue and move forward.
We have noticed that some people seem to believe that the auction participants who received notifications and invoices before the extension of the auction were the highest bidders at the close of the original auction period.
Sedo, however, tells us that:
a) this is clearly not true in some cases,
b) this is unlikely to be true for the names generating the most activity, and
c) this is possibly not true for any of the auctions.
To those points, Sedo has told us the following:
* As the scheduled auction end approached,
bidding activity increased dramatically, creating significantly higher-than-expected traffic.
* Although the web interface slowed down for some participants, the
auction interface and bid page remained available for many or all users, and the web servers continued to log incoming bids.
* Once the
bid processing server stopped functioning properly, however, many of those bids --
both standard and proxy -- did not get posted to the bid history page.
* As a result of the
server crash, another system automatically generated email notices at 5 p.m. GMT to the
highest bidder listed on the bid history page, despite Sedo’s attempts to stop that process.
* Because the
bid history page did not reflect all of the valid bids, notices were sent to some participants who were not, in fact, the highest bidders.
Under the circumstances,
even if there were no disagreement about the point at which the auction should have ended, we
can’t be confident of identifying the highest bidder at that point with any reliability. To avoid prolonged disputes about rights to the domain names in the auction, we decided that the fairest course of action was to void the auction results altogether.
...
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The letter continues with details about future plans, but IMHO the part above is clearly helpful insofar as it reduces the need for speculation - at least for some of us.
Happy Holidays!
