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After leaving Andale, I took a job with a competitor, Vendio. Not long after joining, I was asked to design an auction gallery. Not wanting to duplicate my previous Andale gallery design, I brainstormed with the team, proposed numerous ideas, and finally settled on four designs.
As of this writing, there are over 2½ million Andale and Vendio galleries on eBay auction and store listings at any given time. For more product information, please see the Vendio and Andale websites.
In mid-2006, Dealio was getting ready to enter the social shopping space by introducing a message board to its website. The decision didn't sit well with me. I actively read online deal community message boards and didn't like them for a number of reasons. First, there's no way to narrow down the laundry list of deals by type to find the kind of deals you like (or block the ones you don't). Second, deal-hunting is a dynamic art. A deal might work one day, and it might not the next day. Usually, after trying to get a deal for 20 minutes, I'll notice that there's a comment on page eight with the updated coupon code. It was clear to me that it would be a mistake to use a message board as the foundation of a powerful deal-hunting community.
Rounded corners have always been a desired design element of web design, but have also always been extremely difficult to accomplish. Most solutions required that the round-cornered box maintained either a fixed height or a fixed width, or sometimes both. The more flexible designs required at least four round corner images, usually named something like corner_top_left.gif, corner_top_right.gif, etc. Yuck.
There are already quite a few Dashboard Widgets that will list your local movie theater's showtimes, but none of them let you actually buy tickets. With the convenience of online ticketing, there's not much use in getting showtimes these days if you're unable to immediately purchase tickets. Therefore, I wrote the Ticket Widget. (Python script courtesy of Mike Markley)
I bought 2 barrels from a winery, fabricated and welded a trough around the top, skinned the trough with burlap, and "branded" the company's logo with paint onto the sides of the barrels - incorporating the barrel's "bung hole". After constructing false bottoms, the barrels were filled with ping pong balls. 1600 ping pong balls. 10% of the balls were painted gold, with 10% of those being fool's gold. By using a prospector's gold pan, the goal was to move as much gold into the trough as possible in 49 seconds. Gold nuggets were worth 5 points, white "rocks" counted 1 point against the player and fool's gold was 10 points against! The game was a hit and drew a crowd that we could easily market our services to.
As we were packing up the Gold Rush Game at the trade show in San Jose, we heard that the eBay Live trade show was to be held the following year in Las Vegas. My first thought was, "We need to build a giant, illuminated, 'Vegas style' sign".
For the launch of Vendio's Sales Manager Inventory Edition service, a grab bag handout was needed for the Professional eBay Seller's Alliance conference. I had used an illustration of a wooden crate for the online branding of the product, and wanted to extend that to the print marketing. The first idea was to print the information onto six sides of a cube. However, the piece was to be distributed in a grab bag along with collateral from other companies.
The final, 4 pane design could be folded flat (occupying the footprint of a single pane), or could be popped out into a free-standing cube. The cube could then be opened at its velcro closure to reveal more information on the inside.
In 1999, I helped to create Honesty.com, the first third-party service for sellers of the eBay marketplace. Our first tool was the auction counter, which empowered sellers with information regarding the number of buyers who had visited their listings. We also provided a single page where your current and closed listings could be viewed - the first of its kind.
That evening, I went to Orchard Supply Hardware and walked through the aisles (as I often do to get ideas) to find a nice extension pole that I could put a camera mount on. I started playing with the wringer mops and realized that I could convert the armature to pivot the camera. My girlfriend donated her mop to the project, and I returned to filming Death of an Escort the next day with my Mop Cam.
On a Thursday afternoon, I got a call from Breadshop Bob who invited me to the second annual "Uncle Bob's Pleasure Cruise" on Saturday, just before he moved to Sweden. Upon inquiring as to what food I could bring, Breadshop said that we weren't able to bring a grill on the rented pontoon boats due to the insurance. "What if I made a grill float on the lake?", I asked.
The assembly was easy. I bent the plant hangers until they properly held the grill above where the lake's surface would be and was able to screw the hangers into the openings in the grill meant for the grill's stand (making the modification fully reversible). I went back to OSH to get pipe insulation for where the metal was to meet the rubber inner tube. To keep the grill centered, I added bungy cords to the ends of the hangers that wrapped around the tube and met at a keyring below the grill.
