An auction is the process of buying and selling things by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder. In economic theory, an auction is a method for determining the value of a commodity that has an undetermined or variable price. Auctions can be with reserve or minimum, or without minimums, or absolute or no reserve. In reserve auctions, there is a minimum bid or reserve price; if the bidding does not reach the minimum, there is no sale (but the person who puts the item up for auction may still owe a fee to the auctioneer or auction company). In absolute or no reserve auctions, the sale is guaranteed, with only the price left to be determined. In the context of auctions, a bid is an offered price.

Auctions are publicly seen in several contexts and almost anything can be sold at auction. Some typical auction arenas include the following:

• the antique business, where besides being an opportunity for trade they also serve as social occasions and entertainment
• in the sale of collectibles such as stamps, coins, classic cars (by Kruse International for example), fine art, and luxury real estate
• in the sale of all types of real property including residential and commercial real estate, farms, vacant lots and land
• for the sale of second-hand goods of all kinds, particularly house clearances and online auctions
• in commodities auctions, like the fish wholesale auctions
• in thoroughbred horseracing, where yearling horses are commonly auctioned off; and
• in legal contexts where forced auctions occur, as when one's farm or house is sold at auction on the courthouse steps.

Although less publicly visible, the most economically important auctions are the commodities auctions in which the bidders are businesses even up to corporation level. Examples of this type of auction include:

• sales of businesses
• spectrum auctions, in which companies purchase licenses to use portions of the electromagnetic spectrum for communications (for cell phone networks, for example)
• timber auctions, in which companies purchase licenses to log on government land
• electricity auctions, in which large-scale generators and consumers of electricity bid on generating contracts
• environmental auctions, in which companies bid for licenses to avoid being required to decrease their environmental impact
• debt auctions, in which governments sell debt instruments, such as bonds, to investors. The auction is usually sealed and the uniform price paid by the investors is typically the best non-winning bid. In most cases, investors can also place so called non-competitive bids which indicates an interest to purchase the debt instrument at the resulting price, whatever it may be.

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TechCrunch

Sportgenic Gets A $10 Million Bump In Funding
Don Reisinger Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:00:18 -0000
Sportgenic on Monday announced that it has secured $10 million in Series B funding from Adams Street Partners, Louie Partners, KPG Ventures, and Greycroft Partners. Originally launched in 2005, Sportgenic competes in the highly targeted world of sports advertising. The company is a sports ad network that aims at connecting some of its major clients [...]
Official TechCrunch50 Program (PDF)
Erick Schonfeld Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:10:35 -0000
Below is the program guide that is being given out to attendees this morning at TechCrunch50. It includes the full schedule, along with all the panels and keynotes, as well as fuller descriptions of the companies presenting.
Announcing The TechCrunch50 Finalists
Erick Schonfeld Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:30:30 -0000
We've gone through more than 1,000 companies to get down to the final 50 (okay, 52) that will present on stage at TechCrunch50 starting later this morning. We will be covering all of the companies as they present onstage or shortly after. But for now, here's a list of all the companies that made it (except the last one, which will be picked from the DemoPit by the audience at the event). Learn more about these companies on CrunchBase by clicking "CB". You can also visit the official TechCrunch50 website to watch their presentations live, or stay tuned right here for coverage throughout the week.
Three DEMO Companies To Keep An Eye On
Jason Kincaid Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:00:11 -0000
This week we're going to see dozens of companies launch new products. Here are a few of the companies presenting this week at DEMO that are showing some strong potential: In most cases, choice is a good thing. But when it comes to online video, the abundance of content available on the web can be overwhelming. ffwd (pronounced fast-foward) deals with this by picking your videos for you. The site uses video meta data as well as user behaviors to create virtual "channels" of video, which are essentially dynamically updated playlists. Rudder shares a lot in common with Mint, a personal finance site that debuted last year at TechCrunch40 (and won the conference's top prize). Both sites present financial data in attractive, intuitive graphs. But Rudder is taking a slightly different approach: while Mint analyzes your past spending habits to help you adjust in the future, Rudder is concerned with telling you how much you have available to spend on a given day. Photrade With image piracy rampant on the web these days, a number of startups have sprung up to help users easily obtain legal pictures. Photrade has a similar goal, but it also manages to help casual photographers make some cash in the process.
All The TC50 Diggs, Feeds, Tweets, and Blog Posts You Can Handle
Erick Schonfeld Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:57:00 -0000
I know where I am going to be checking to see what people are saying about TechCrunch50 this week. The TechCrunch50 Aggregator. It is a site developed by Sean Percival to collect all the Twitters, FreindFeed comments, blog posts, news stories, photos, videos, Diggs,and Techmeme headlines that are tagged "techcrunch50"or "tc50." Even right now, in the middle of the night before the show starts, you can see a picture of the team still unloading boxes, read Robert Scoble lamenting via Twitter that nobody has yet leaked the list of TC50 finalists (ha!), and other various opinions.
RealNetworks Lets You Copy DVDs to Your Hard Drive — And Keep the DRM
Don Reisinger Mon, 08 Sep 2008 07:00:37 -0000
As anyone with a lick of tech knowledge knows, ripping a DVD onto your hard drive is, well, frowned upon by the "Powers that be" in the motion picture industry. Realizing that, RealNetworks has launched a new solution called RealDVD, which lets users copy DVDs onto their hard drives without facing legal troubles. Even better, it only takes about 20 minutes to do so. Sounds great, right? There's only one catch: it keeps the DRM. After copying the DVD onto your hard drive, you can't transfer the movie to a friend's computer, so you'll be stuck using your own. Much like iTunes, though, RealDVD lets you authorize five computers to play the movies on the hard drive.

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