Loewe TVs with our eBay channel
Loewe, the German high-end electronics manufacturer, will be shipping new internet enabled TVs with access to our Jaast-eBay TV channel. We are very excited to see our channel on the Loewe systems.
Articles tagged with ‘ebay’
PamConsult acquires AuctionFlunky
PamConsult has completed the acquisition of the AuctionFlunky platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The new service is to be added to the eBay channel available today on Philips Net TV.
Ever looked on eBay for something, could not find anything and then thinking why is there no option to save your search and to automatically receive a notification when the article becomes available? Well, AuctionFlunky does just that. AuctionFlunky is a web based service which enables a user to save a search item for eBay and once the item becomes available on eBay, a notification will be sent to the user so that the user can start to bid for it. This functionality provides an improved customer experience and ensures that a user never misses a new article.
“We are extremely excited about this technology acquisition and will soon enhance our TV based eBay experience with this new service” says Dick Schiferli, CEO of PamConsult.
PamConsult plan to include this function as part of the Jaast “eBay on TV” offering, currently available on Philips Net TV enabled TV sets. When using eBay on a TV, the normal PC environment is not available (it is not so easy to switch back and forth between the eBay channel on the TV and the programs to search for items). Thus the new functionality will make searching on eBay much more pleasant, simpler and effective.
During the transition, the AuctionFlunky website and internet service will not be available to new customers.
Performance improvements on Jaast eBay channel
Work has finished on performance improvement for our online eBay channel available on all Philips Net.TV devices.
By now over 1.3 million sets are active in the market and all of them can access our eBay channel and enjoy a rich eBay experience by Jaast.
Usage has grown fast. Philips and us have monitored where to do improvements. We’re happy to announce these are now completed. The results are very impressive.
On the older TVs the improvement is 42% faster loading and with the newer TVs (which have a higher performance Net.TV module) the improvement is a whopping 68%.
As a result the Philips user will enjoy significant shorter application loading time and an increased responsiveness of the application overall.
No Skype Extras System anymore
Skype has just announced today that the Skype Extras System will not continue. This means no more third-party applications for Skype will be certified and no new extras will be added to the “Tools” -> “Extras” menu in the Skype client. All existing entries will not be removed until the certification period expires. This does not include the Skype Public API which allows third party software to connect to Skype and control some functions and do things like call recording etc. Skype says this API will be maintained in future.
But this shut-down also includes the Skype Credit payment, which will be switched off shortly. No third-party software will then be able to accept Skype Credit payments.
So how does this affect Scendix/PamConsult products? The simple answer is: not very much.
eBay powered by Jaast available on Philips NetTV
From today on, our online service Jaast is available on Philips Net TV enabled tvs (8000 and 9000 series). That means that you can browse through the eBay items of your eBay in your country (28 countries available like ebay.de, ebay.com, ebay.co.uk, …) and even place bids and buy items just with your remote control. You log in to this service with your existing eBay username and password so that you have your existing watchlist, “My eBay”, etc. also available on your tv. All the “after sales” handling will be done like you are used to it via email after the auction has ended.
And the best: all this without any additional hardware, setup, installation, …
Philips Net TV – Ebay on your sofa powered by Jaast
On February 19, 2009 Philips announced their new 2009 line of LCD TVs. The 8000, 9000 and Cinema 21:9 products will be shipped with a Net TV module built in. This provides easy, configuration and PC-free internet access with your remote control.
Internet with remote control on TV/Media Center/Wii are things we have been working on for years and thus we are proud to say that Ebay and Philips have selected us to provide an Ebay channel on the new sets.
Based on our mceAuction technology we have adapted the Ebay content to work seamlessly on the new Philips systems.We will provide the channel via our Jaast brand.
We will be providing the Ebay channel on all new Philips Net TV enabled devices!
Ebay navigation on the TV is very simple, the same intiutive way of browsing Ebay as with mceAuction on Microsoft Media Center and Jaast on Wii.
The 8000 series are connected via wire compared to the 9000 series/Cinema 21:9 which are connected via WiFi.
Picture of initial Net TV launch at IFA 2008 (note the Ebay logo is missing).
You can download the Philips Net TV – Feature Press Release.
Testing Windows Home Server
On our search for a good file server and centralized backup solution, I stumbled across Windows Home Server. The description sounds very good and seemed to be the perfect solution for our office: this server system automatically backs up Windows clients over night and has a unique data-storage system, which makes it possible to add and remove different harddrives to the storage, making it larger without the hassle of moving files from one drive to the other. It’s a kind of software raid (stripe).
It also comes with a handy administration console, which can be accessed from every client machine. This console can be extended easily with addins by third party software developers. As some TapiRex customers already asked about a Windows Home Server console addin for TapiRex, it was a good point to get started trying this new Windows Server operating system.
So I tried to find it in the MSDN Subscriber downloads, as we have several subscriptions to MSDN Universal, which theoretically includes all Microsoft operating systems and all other software. As I was unable to find a download there, I googled the web and found out that Microsoft decided not to make Windows Home Server available in MSDN Subscriber downloads. Urgh. So we pay lots of money to not be able to get access to a Windows operating system to develop new addons for it. What a decision…
So I just ordered a Windows Home Server license from eBay, which was delivered quickly and did only cost around 90 Euros.
Installation
When installing the Windows Home Server incl. Power Pack 1 (which is based on Windows 2003 Server) on one of our servers in our server rack, it stumbled upon our 3Ware RAID controller, which is installed with 2 x 160GB harddrives as system drives in a mirrored array to speed up the operating system. I was able to load additional drivers for that controller from an USB stick, but when the system rebooted after the first installation step, it has forgotten about the driver.
Googling for this issue, I had to find out that this is a bug in the Windows Home Server installation 
. As the text-based setup does not have access to a USB stick to reload the drivers, I had to go out to buy an external 3.5″ USB disk drive, as the setup only accepts additional drivers from the A: drive. Do you remember 3.5″ disks? It was not that easy to find a disk to store the driver to get past this installation step. These disks have gone so rare here in the office 
. Previous installations of Windows 2003 did not have this problem…
But after that, setup was pretty easy. I was able to install all hardware components and to setup the Drive Extender. After setup, you have to install a small client connector software on every client machine that should backup to that Windows Home Server, which was pretty easy as well.
In-day-usage
The good thing is that the backups worked pretty well. Also, some of the available plugins from third-party developers are very useful.
But there also were some problems:
Delays in accessing shared folders: we experienced some delays in accessing shared folders on the server. Every employee in the office has some drives mapped to shared folders on the file server. This includes a personal folder and some general folders for everyone. While browsing in these subfolders on these drives, there was sometimes a lag of several seconds that makes it impossible to work with it fluently. For example, we store our downloads company-wide in a folder on the file-server. But the “save file” dialog in the webbrowser sometimes hung up for up to 20 seconds before it was able to show the folder and save the file. Once the data transfer starts, it’s fast and reliable.
Bug in drive’s size-calculation: When you map shared folders on the Windows Home Server as local drives, Windows XP and Vista are unable to show the correct drive size. After searching the web and asking some experts in Windows Home Server forums, I found out that this a known bug in Windows Home Server and that you can’t do anything about it:
Popups on all client machines: when you have the client connector software installed, all warnings from the Windows Home Server or one of it’s clients is shown on every client machine. So every user gets popup messages like “Computer X does not have virus protection installed”, “Backup on machine Y was not sucessful”, and many more. I was not able to find a way to customize these popups so that there are not shown to our apprentices for example.
So, after nearly 2 weeks in production, I am currently installing Windows 2008 Datacenter on that server machine, as the problems shown above disturbed our daily workflow that much that it was not worth it. We will install Windows Home Server as a VMWare virtual machine instead to do some software development on it. A PamFax addon is also an idea for it. What do you think?
I will report back how this all worked with Windows 2008. Does anyone have a different suggestion for a solid and fast file server operating system + client backup possibilities?
Best wishes for the holiday season
Dear customers, partners, affiliates and fans, we at PamConsult all wish you a great festive season, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
2008 has been a fanstastic year for us. Some of the highlights…
- Increased revenue by more then 100%
- Completed company consolidation, all software products are now sold via Scendix Software GmbH and all consulting is concentrated in PamConsult GmbH
- Expanded our staff
- Improved our IT infrastructure for future growth
- Major PamFax infrastructure update done in January 2008
- PamFax reached 130.000 users
- In Q2 2009 we plan to release PamFax 2.0 with fax-in and Macintosh support (yeah!)
- Our Pamela for Skype products have seen great user growth with a total of over 5 million downloads
- Pamela for Skype version 4.5 is almost ready to go with exciting new functions and improvements
- Implemented a new and professional shopping platform on PamFax, Pamela and Scendix websites
- mcePhone, the Skype integration tool for Media Center, made it to version 3.0 and will be out of beta soon
- In June we received the Ebay Innovation Award for our Jaast for Wii solution which provides you with Ebay access from your Wii
- With our annual charity BBQ we raised €400 which we double to €800 and give half/half to the “Tafel” in Ebstorf and Freising. These are voluntary projects which provide food supply for poor(er) people.
It has been a fun year. We want to thank you for your continued support and are looking forward to an exciting and successful 2009.
Dick Schiferli & Christoph Bünger
The Skype’s the Limit
I read this very interesting article on Skype on seekingalpha.com. It puts into perspective the real value of Skype within Ebay and the growth potential. I enjoyed it and want to share the link with you. Click here to read the article.
Talking to PamBot
We’ve done posts before about PamBot but yesterday I was talking to a future client and demo-ed PamBot. It was a cool experience seeing that PamBot, powered by the Alice AI engine and a funny AIML character, just chatted away with us. It was fun being in a Skype multichat and having the bot in it to ask questions and search the internet (I created a Skype multichat with PamBot). I also did a demo of searching Ebay, the results came back instantly. A very easy and quick way to fetch and share (live) data.
The project has been a bit dormant but this is mainly due to the fact that it is operating perfectly. The backed is extremely scalable and can handle literally millions of simultaneous chat sessions. Btw – the same platform we also use in PamFax for sending Skype chat status notifications.
So, if you’re up for some fun just lookup the Skype user “pam_bot” in your Skype and add her to your contact list. Open a chat window and type “help” (without the quotes). Then you can just type away and PamBot will answer based on what you type.
There is also a website with further details. The site is www.pambot.com.
Note that the download is not required when you just want to experience artificial intelligence in a Skype chat.
