MyPadz Official Blog

Happy New Year everybody!

I have just some minor news. The Facebook Application is back online and ready to be used.

I’ve also added a search field on the front page. Also this is an interesting offer for an 8 GB IPhone for $300. Sounds good to me.

As promised I rolled out a new version of MP.

In this update: Negotiation Rooms with Video Support. For every offer/request you send MP will automatically create a chat room for it. Buyers and Sellers can join and ask more information, negotiate and view the products in real time via Video.

There are also some improvements in the background, MP is now running on Rails 2.0. Unfortunately due to some incompatibilities Facebook support is currently disabled. I hope for just a couple of days.

Video support is provided by the guys at Tokbox. It’s a pleasure to work with them, and I am sure we are going to continue improving the MP Video integration.

Here is a short video of a couple of things MyPadz can do. Fullscreen for full effect.

The song in the background is ‘She Believes’ from Remix NIN.

I haven’t been writing any updates and I’m sorry for that. I’ve been working on a new feature this last two weeks.

Last week I presented MyPadz at a Romanian Start-Up conference. There were 20 projects out of which 5 were selected to go to a final round.

Unfortunately MyPadz was not amongst those five. I was pretty sad not to see MP selected, and for a while pondered giving up on the project… about 10 seconds.

I hope this week I can finish everything and roll out a big update, which contains lots of fixes, a really nice new feature, Rails 2.0 compatibility and others.

Stay tuned.

Widgets is a new addition to MyPadz. It allows users to add their sent buying and selling requests on any webpage.

The whole things works like all widgets online. The system creates some code for you that you paste on your site. The links point to the offer’s public page where other users can see it and do the regular stuff.

On the right menu on this blog we added a widget showing the last deals found by the Automated Deals script.

Since today MyPadz also has a new front page design, hope you like it.

I’ve been quiet for a while, and that’s because I was working on adding a new improvement

With todays update we added Facebook support to MyPadz. That means you can do basic MyPadz stuff like: view received offers, view sent offers, buy and sell from inside Facebook. As a FB bonus you can also see what your friends are buying and selling if they’ve added the application.

We tried to make the application unobtrusive. By default it doesn’t show anything in your profile. Once you start sending offers from inside FB, the system will add a profile box that shows to everybody what you are interested in. And add a message to the mini-feed that sounds like ‘John is buying RFQ_TITLE’ or ‘John is seling PAD_TITLE’.

MP on FB:

Add the application here. It needs 5 users so we can add it to the Facebook directory.

Once you created your MyPadz account you noticed how offers are delivered. You filter what you want to get, either keywords or users(vendors), and the next time an offer matching what you are looking for is sent you are notified.

But what if you are looking for more than one thing? What if you were monitoring for an “IPod” and are in fact interested just for an Ipod Touch?

Today we rolled out an update which adds another layer of filtering in your already received offers. You can filter by keywords, users and status.

Here is a snapshot:

Today we made some cosmetic changes to MyPadz. We removed the old Directory page and switched with two new ones, one for Buyers and one for Sellers.

Here are some pictures of the MyPadz interface:

Received Offers:

Send Offer:

Geo Settings:

Public Pages:

Once we’ve implemented Geo it would have been a shame not to tweak Automated Deals so it would take advantage of this feature.

So today we rolled up an update which makes automatic deals send offers only from stores who can serve your area. We’ve added 3 stores from the US, and two from the UK. Make sure you enable Geo if you want to receive these updates.

The updated list of stores can be found here. If your favorite vendor is not there let us know so we can add it.

Today we’ve rolled out a new feature that we wanted to implement from the moment we started MyPadz. It’s called Geo.

What is Geo?

Using Geo you will receive only the pads and rfqs that can be served in your area. When you send a RFQ we will match it against the area coverages of all sellers. When you send out a PAD we will make sure to send it only to buyers from your area coverage.

This feature needs to be enabled separately since it requires some more information. Visit Front Desk => My Profile => Geo Settings to set it up.

Users who don’t activate this feature will only be able to send pads/rfqs to users who have also not activated it.

In the last week we updated MyPadz with a new front page design, a couple important bugfixes and a new feature called Automated Deals.

What are automated Deals?

Beginning is hard with every project, and MyPadz having been officially public for two weeks is suffering from lack of offers. So, to help it along we wrote a small improvement that gets “Hot Deals” from RSS feeds and injects them in our system. For now we added Newegg.com and Buy.com If you have any suggestions for other cool places with deals send them to our email address.

I’m not sure how much ‘noise’ the user sending these offers will do, if he annoys block it in the Trading Pit, or even better filter the results coming to the Automated Deals category for what you are looking for.