TeleBid - the concept
TeleBid is an internet-based auction platform that is fundamentally different from comparable sites like ebay, etc.
Customers of this platform have to pay for every bid they place. This way a product is financed by many bidders, thus resulting
in extremely low prices and making top brands affordable to everybody.
Every bid for an auction restarts the corresponding countdown and increases the price for the product by 0,10€.
As long as no bids are made for an auction, its countdown ticks down each second. If an auction's time is up, the latest bidder
for that auction can buy the product for the current price.
Unregistered customers can bid on products by calling a 01378 voting call number and enter the
product number using the keys on their telephone. Registered users have several possibilities to
place a bid:
- Directly placing single bids online
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Using bidding-agents (so-called BietButler), which can be set-up to place bids within several customer-defined ranges.
Each user may employ several of those agents for any single auction. After the initial set-up by the user, each BietButler
is controlled by the TeleBid system and places a bid only several seconds before the end of the corresponding auction's countdown
cycle.
A Java Applet keeps the user up-to-date for each auction, as it constantly communicates with the
TeleBid auction server. Refreshing the auction pages becomes therefore unnecessary.
The TeleBid system can predict the winner of each auction and the final price using the states of the current bidding-agents
for that auction. Whenever this prediction becomes invalid for an auction, it is automatically recalculated by the system. TeleBid
provides its users with the maximum amount of transparency as this predictions is shown for each auction.
These are just two of the reasons why TeleBid auctions are different and a true real-time experience for its many exited users.
TeleBid - the web application
The full version of the TeleBid system started first in November 2005, after a successful prototype of the system was released in September 2005.
Weltenschmiede was responsible for the technical conception, programming, server installation and technical support of TeleBid.
By using a combination of Javascript and Java Applets to display the countdown of each auction, we were able to update the complete
dynamic content of a user's page by RMI once a second with a minimum of bandwidth usage and without the user noticing the update.
This made it possible for the Telebid auction servers to supply a multitude of users with updated values while keeping the work-load of the
webserver low.
The TeleBid software developed by Weltenschmiede Ltd. uses a custom-made caching layer for the web application and can easily be distributed
on several physical server, thus allowing an arbitrary scaling of the number of auctions and web-load. A single web-/auctionserver is able to
maintain about 5000 auctions and can update about 30000 users each second using RMI calls.
We used the following technologies for this project:
- server-side: Java-Servlets, PHP and MySQL
- client-side: Java-Applets, Javascript and HTML
In addition to the core modules, the TeleBid system is composed of the following custom-made components:
- Real-time bid purchase, made possible by interfacing with several online payment services
- Full-text search, sortable overview pages, category-navigation for all auctions
- Integration of a variety of marketing tools like votes, Google AdSense, vouchers, etc.
- Login and personalised member area
- Automatic mail system for parametrised system mails
- Content management system with modules for auction-planning, merchandise management, statistics, customer management
and for many more
TeleBid website (german website)
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TeleBid - gallery (new)
Start-page of the TeleBid website
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Overview-page for auctions
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Detail-page for a single auction (usr is logged-in)
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TeleBid - gallery (old)
Start-page of the TeleBid website
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Overview-page for auctions
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Detail-page for a single auction (usr is logged-in)
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Login-page
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Bid purchase in „My TeleBid“
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Observed auctions in „My TeleBid“
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