Here’s some spec (copied from ShoppingSquare’s website):

DataTraveler 100 was built with simplicity in mind, allowing you to focus on your data. The USB connector is safely housed inside the sleek case, so you don.t have to worry about losing a cap. DataTraveler 100 is available in capacities up to 8GB to give you plenty of room to hold just about any document, from term papers and theses to digital images, spreadsheets or other important documents.

• Dimensions: 2.35″ x 0.88″ x 0.37″ (59.7mm x 22.3mm x 9.5mm)
• Capacities: 8GB
• Operating Temperatures: 32F to 140F (0C to 60C)
• Storage Temperatures: -4F to 185F (-20C to 85C)
• Weight: 0.48 oz (12g)

Valued at $24.70 on ShoppingSquare’s website (+free delivery that’s worth $9.99).

What you need to do is also having a registered account at ShoppingSquare so the crew at ShoppingSquare can post the item to the winners.

Again, big thanks to our sponsor — and don’t forget to submit your offers to win our weekly prize!

Because Swoopo is, at its heart, thinly veiled gambling. The companies backing Swoopo and other Penny Auction sites are hoping unsophisticated regulatory agencies will buy the “It’s not a game of chance” argument if it’s wrapped in a lot of technical intarweb mumbo-jumbo they can’t fully comprehend.

Reminds me of many unique bid auction sites that surfaced online 2 years ago, where some of them have actually been covered here on the OzBargain blog. I actually went to the Swoopo site and it does feel like gambling — and it’s addictive. I can just sit there and watch the clock counts down to 0, or bounds back to 15 second again with more bidding action.

It’s actually worse than gambling because not only you need to pay for entrance, win the auction purely by chance (and risk loosing your money not winning the auction), addictive in nature which you ended up spending more than you should because you don’t want to lose out — you still need to pay for than damn thing when you win.

But somehow it has gained a lot of popularity according to Alexa. I guess the old saying is right. Every second on Swoopo, “a fool and his money is soon parted”.

On the 27th of May we’ll be running a little members only promotion. We’ll be selling a lot of stuff that people love and want, at prices they could only dream about.

• This is a members only special event. Not a member? Click here to register. Its important to register in advance, as registration will be closing at 11am on the day, one hour before the event goes live.
• Its all happening to get people talking about CatchOfTheDay
• Quantities are very limited, and listed below
• We can’t predict how big the response will be, have mercy on our servers

We definitely fell on point 2 there by talking about it on this blog and this post on OzBargain. Although many still felt hurt from last year’s birthday bash fiasco (more details on the OzBargain wiki), it certainly did not stop them trying to run it again this year.

Well. At least they are trying to be honest this time and admit that there’s still possibily that their web servers cannot cope with load. They have also clearly listed out the quantity this time to avoid speculations like last time on exactly how many Nintendo Wii’s they have in their warehouse.

I had a quick glance on the items listed and unfortunately nothing interests me this time so I won’t queue up with you guys :)

Update: Just had a look at Rackspace’s managed configuration (I believe CoTD uses Rackspace for hosting), and the “cheapest” server has a quad core AMD, 2GB memory and runs RedHat Linux — at the price that’s around 10x our monthly hosting cost here at OzBargain (i.e. expensive).

Here are some simple suggestions for handing traffic surge (might not be possible as Rackspace is managing the system):

• Replace Apache/mod_php with Nginx/PHP-FastCGI (running 2 Nginx worker + ~10 PHP slaves) and enable xcache for op-code and variable caching.
• Replace your front page with a static HTML file which Nginx will serve in no time. Just re-generate it every few minutes for updates.
• Cache all the pages in xcache (using variable cache), and serve them to guests/visitors.

Even a quad core AMD Opteron will go a long way :)

September 2007. OzBargain released its Facebook application to let you see the latest deals posted on OzBargain from inside Facebook. In August 2008 I created the OzBargain page on Facebook and ran our birthday competition pretty much on Facebook…

May 3^rd 2009. We have finally reached 500 fans! Yes it took a while, but thank you for all the supports! And congratulations to Stacey Miller in Melbourne who became our 500^th fan!

June 2007, OzBargain started sending out new deal notifications to Twitter. Yes I know it was less than a year since Twitter was launched. It was way before Obama and McCain were on Twitter. It was way before Ashton Kutcher and CNN’s competition to reach 1 million followers. Way before Jason Scott’s cat. And of course OzBargain was here before Oprah.

Sadly OzBargain did not have the massive number of Twitter followers like the celebrities. In fact we have just reached 500 followers last week on the May 14^th 2009. Congratulations to @tdm911 for becoming our 500^th followers on Twitter!

Small milestones — but significant number nevertheless. It’s difficult to predict that what will be the hottest social network next year, but I’ll make sure OzBargain is there :)

I am currently with OptusNet and every-time I type in your website OzBargain, it goes to eBay…

Have you done something?

Yes I know sometimes I uploaded half-baked scripts onto OzBargain which caused all kinds of mess, but seriously I have not been able to work on the website for a few weeks due to general busyness. Moreover, why am I sending visitors to eBay? No way! So, maybe Optus stuffed something up? Or maybe OzBargain got hacked and the intruder now redirects everyone to eBay instead (which does have bargains every now and then). I quickly log back onto the site. Check the logs. Nope. Works for me, and I can’t seem to be able to reproduce the issue (always happen at work anyway so I am used to false alarms). Maybe if there is indeed some issues with the network, I’ll be flooded with the emails anyway so I would just wait and see…

An hour later Vikas wrote back and apologised his mistakes.

Scott — Found the problem

Click on this link and see for yourself: <OzBargain with one of ‘a’ missing>.com.au and it goes to eBay.

It must be an honor for ebay to try and get your traffic.

Huh? I know lots of people hate eBay but I do not think they will go this low to typo-squat OzBargain’s domain to get visitors. So I trace the link, and the first hop it brought me to rover.ebay.com/…. For those who are not familiar with it, it is eBay’s partner/affiliate link. So basically if you missed an “a” in the domain name, instead of coming to OzBargain to share the best deals in Australia, you’ll end up on eBay.com.au. Moreover, everything you have purchased on eBay will send a piece of seller fee to the guy who typo-squatted our domain.

Yes. Did I say a “guy”? A bit of googling reveals all the details I need — name, address, phone number, photo + a few other domains as well. While it is permissible to typo-squat domains on gTLD (and people will hate you for it), I do not think it is actually allowed on .au domain — at least auDA has published a policy against it.

Well. Complain has been sent to auDA. Let’s see how fast can they react. By the way, cheers to Vikas for spotting this.

’nuff said. I guess it might remind many about Acer and their rebate practice here.

Except it’s from Dell. According to the comments posted on OzBargain, looks like it’s going to be a repeat of last year’s pricing error, which only occured 4-5 months ago with promise that it will not happen again.

D’oh.

Congratulations to those who managed to get OfficeWorks to price match it for them, whom seem to be the biggest winner here.

Update: Here is an image of the Dell Giant Easter Deals (PNG, 912kb), just in case they have pulled the media page.