Ubid Shareholder Speaks Out (and mentions Bidville)

[mandy]

Lastly what this company spends in advertising a quarter if they cut that level to zero for one quarter, they could run a Superbowl ad, which will generate awareness and users. The success of such ads from GoDaddy.com shows the potential there, again I think the ad would be best to fire a direct salvo at eBay over their fraud concerns. I don’t understand the Company’s plan for the Bidville asset as well. I’d think that if the company’s employees devoted even 5-10% of their time to working on sprucing up/improving Bidville, the UBid.com site would not suffer, but it would do wonders at Bidville and further build up that asset than allowing it to wither on the vine. Again that’s a site that can benefit from the huge base of users disenfranchised with #1 eBbay and will help chip away at their market share. Engaging in strategic alternatives, should also be explored. Although at this time I not advocating a sale of the company, there are a few groups where I believe the Company operating the #2 and #3 online auction sites would fit nicely.

First is with Overstock.com Inc (OSTK). Although Overstock has issues of their own, they also run auctions and operate in the surplus/close-out merchandise market. Strategic synergies could be achieved between the two companies and I’m sure Overstock shareholders would welcome uBid’s massive user base as well as giving them an alternative auction outlet for auctioning some of their fixed price merchandise.

The second fit would be Liquidity Services Inc. (LQDT), which also operates online auction formats for government and surplus assets. They could benefit from the integration of uBid’s user base and also by integrating the end consumer to bid up bulk lot quantities by splitting up the lots such as sellers do off the Company’s "Mega Auctions"...

full letter and comments: http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/45270

[bargainbloodhound]

I don’t understand the Company’s plan for the Bidville asset as well.

Since they didn't even bother to mention it in their Q2 earnings report (and their last announcement to Bidville members was September 2006) it's probably safe to say that the only plan they had when they bought the site was to acquire a large mailing list for their main Ubid site.