August 2007 Archives

We're on the pulse at vzaar, and you'll notice that the video player now has a heart beat.

At vzaar we listen to our users and our community. Several people mentioned that some of the buyers had said they didn't realise the video was a video, and weren't sure how to play it.

We care a lot about the user experience both for our sellers and their buyers. So a very subtle change to the player, without cluttering the page with extraneous text, nor having a paper clip pop up and ask "It looks like you're thinking of playing a video ..." we feel does the job.

As always let us know what you think and also what your buyers and bidders thing.

A nice small change for the long weekend, have a good one everyone filled with lots of sunshine. Insert your own comments about getting "pulses" racing.

So last night Will from Arena Flowers Arena Flowers kindly popped round to share his extensive knowledge of Google Adwords with me. Firstly I’d like to say an enormous thank you for your help Will, I really appreciated it. You are indeed a Google Adwords guru. I knew it was a rather complex topic and of fundamental importance to the majority of businesses, but I had NO idea...

Needless to say I will endeavour to make vzaar’s mark on Google without accidentally blowing £100,000 on our credit card from clicking the wrong keyword. I will keep you updated with my experience and let you know of any disasters/successes I have. However, if you don’t hear from me in the next week it’s only because my brain has exploded. Have a good weekend All.

Uploading video from your mobile phone is here! vzaar has developed an easy way for you to upload your videos directly from your mobile phone. This is particularly exciting as lots of people have difficulty uploading simple pictures from their mobiles to their eBay listings and now vzaar has made it possible for video.

I’ve just tried it and it IS actually really easy. I’m pretty terrible with my mobile – my priorities for my mobile being a telephone first and alarm clock second. Sometimes I text. I wasn’t given any instructions and my video from my mobile was up on the site in about 3 minutes.

We think that this is going to be a really exciting part of vzaar. Chief Geek says that mobile phones will soon have all the camera/video/memory quality that you’d expect from equipment made solely for those individual purposes. He says that soon camera phones will see an end to digital cameras. So you heard it here first! (...unless you read it somewhere else.)

Not even 24 hours since my last blog and I’m already at it again.

Auctioning4u is one of the eBay UK’s largest businesses. Moritz Voltz has donated a Fulham Football Shirt signed by him and his fellow team mates to Auctioning4u -the proceeds from this sale will go to the charities, Kick for Life and The Princes Trust.

They have used our video in their eBay listings, but have also cleverly taken advantage of how easy it is to embed out vzaar videos elsewhere, by promoting it on some Fulham FC blogs, like here.

We wish them the best of luck in raising as much as they can for these fine charities.

There’s only one F in Fulham!

Hello! Thank you for that kind welcome Chief!...Crikey - nowhere to go but down

It's a pleasure to be a part of the vzaar team - well when I say team, it turns out that I am actually the first official vzaar employee! I'm getting a plaque made.

My role here is that of Online Herald (as my new vzaar speech bubble will testify) which means that I will, among other things, be shouting from the rooftops about how wonderful video is at selling things and how vzaar is the way forward. So I am chomping at the bit and loosening my vocal cords as we speak for vzaar's offical launch - vDay.

Other important things to know about me are: Sagittarius, national average height, a highly competitive tennis player lacking in any natural talent and the best cocktail I ever had was a Porn Star Martini from the LAB Bar.

More intersting facts to follow I'm sure you'll all be pleased to hear!

Mashable caught my eye this morning. At vzaar we're passionate about helping eBay sellers succeed by making it easy to add videos to their listings. And Mashable have published a list of services that help eBay sellers just like vzaar does.

It's a comprehensive list and some of these services are better than others. You can't beat a recommendation and I talk to a lot of eBay sellers. Here are some services from the list that we've heard good things about.

Toolhaus - For those nosey parkers who like looking at other people's feedback.

Zoovy - A service that takes the strain and pain out of inventory management, shipping and billing.

ChannelAdvisor - An eBay and ecommerce consultancy who help sellers expand.