BidCal Will Help You Better Track eBay Deals in the Tough Economy

BidCal is an interesting new tool that has just been released by Calgoo Software, the company behind Calgoo, a very nice web calendaring solution that synchronizes all your calendars on all your devices, desktop and online and allows you to share calendars with your friends or family if they use a different calendaring solution.

Now Calgoo has launched a very interesting new tool that brings eBay functionality right to your calendar of choice - be it Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar.

Basically bidCal lets users monitor all the auctions relevant to them right in their calendar - and getting all the latest information and notifications when needed. This helps the user both track the best bargains for items he could be interested in and also never miss a deadline on an auction.

All you have to do as a user is create a search based on a number of parameters (keyword to search eBay for, country, area, price range) and bidCal will start tracking all the auctions on eBay meeting these criteria. In the next step you will need to add the results of the search to your calendar and it will add tasks depending on what the tool finds on eBay for you. After that you will be able to interact with eBay auctions from within your calendaring solution of choice.

Initially the tool was developed as an internal tool to demonstrate the power of Calgoo in-calendar marketing functionality but the feedback from the early beta testers was so good that the team has decided to launch bidCal as a standalone product - and I feel it is a wise move.

The in-calendar marketing itself is an interesting attempt to generate a revenue stream for a free service (Calgoo initially was based on a freemium revenue model but then switched to a completely free approach). At the time I was puzzled watching a company switch to a free mode where there seemed to be potential for a paid-for service but now I see that they were working on something completely different with their in-calendar marketing solution - something that may show how creative and efficient advertising can be to some other startups as well.

The thing is that advertisers are offered an opportunity to push their time-sensitive announcements right to the calendars of Calgoo customers. For example, you could be reminded that you only have 3 more days until the end of a sale at some local store or that you could buy a ticket to some concert or show that will take place on a certain date. Obviously, the opportunities here are almost limitless. We’ll see this revenue model in action this fall and I do hope it will not be a disappointment as in the current hard times we are in a huge need of innovative approaches to revenue generation. And if the users are not happy about some unwanted notifications from Calgoo advertisers in their calendars, I believe Calgoo will have a new reason to get back to the freemium model as there will be a new reason for people to pay for it.

It is quite understandable (and predictable) that the tougher the overall economic environment is getting, the more enthusiasm people will demonstrate in looking for better deals everywhere they can. Of course the obvious tool that enjoys the most popularity is eBay that helps millions of people around the world buy things they need often for a fraction of their price. I definitely love both the idea behind bidCal of helping users track items of interest on eBay from the comfort of their calendaring solutions and the monetization approach they are hinting on - hopefully both will work good enough both for users and marketers.