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Technology Stocks : FreeMarkets Inc-(FMKT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stiltskin who wrote (16)	11/11/1999 10:10:00 AM
From: Rupert	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 414

You are right, although a real time bidding system where multiple suppliers bid against each other live may be more powerful at lowering the price than the Priceline (PCLN) model because each supplier can immediately see that they will lose the business unless they come up with a competing, lower bid than the last one that has been made. Plus unlike the PCLN model, the buyer in the FMKT model can choose the lowest available price rather than have to trust that the auctioneer is actually getting them the lowest price. What's always interested me about Priceline's "name-your-price" model is that because the buyer nevers finds out what Priceline actually paid the supplier to obtain the product, the company can theoretically make money by getting the product at an even lower price from the supplier than buyer proposed, and pocket the difference. Priceline's model can also accumulate bids from a large number of buyers, average them out, and then get a bulk discount from a supplier, pocketing the difference from the high bids and giving the people who placed low bids great deals. (More OT) It's amazing what Newsalert.com can sniff out about a company. "New `U-Cam' Television Ad Campaign by the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance Is All the `Rave'" newsalert.com "One of those technology workers, Daniel Abeshouse, was the first to don a helmet camera for U-Cam. A software engineer for FreeMarkets, Inc, Daniel and the company's crew team readily accepted the challenge of video taping their rowing practice for a U-Cam segment. "I moved back to Pittsburgh to work for FreeMarkets," Abeshouse says, "I quickly fell in love with the city which has changed dramatically since I was a student at CMU. The videotaping was a great opportunity to share what I see as being unique about Pittsburgh with others."