The Skypephone, vzaar and eBay

16/11/2007 at 21:22

I love technology, especially when it works, so tonight I sat down to make video work with a mobile phone, a 3G network and an eBay listing…. and it not only worked but it was easy!

I used my Skypephone to make a video, and to be honest I was pleasantly surprised at the quality.

The next job was to upload the video to vzaar who would host it for me. That was easy, if you log into vzaar you can set a PIN number, then you simply open the browser on your Skypephone and navigate to m.vzaar.com. You’ll be asked for your user name and PIN and then you can upload your video. It’s so much easier than using a PC to get the video onto the Internet.

From then on I created a listing in TurboLister as per normal, but inserted a small piece of code that vzaar provide into my listing. What that code does is to tell vzaar exactly where I’d like the video to appear. Once the auction is created upload from TurboLister to eBay, alternatively you could use the eBay Sell Your Item form, or a third party listing tool.

The final step was to log onto the vzaar website, go to the video I’d sent vzaar from my Skypephone, and tell vzaar which auction I’d like it inserted into. vzaar then do the clever bit and insert the video and my listing is finished!

I guess I could have achieved the same with a normal camera or of course any mobile phone with a camera but it seems a shame not to make use of the Skypephone seeing as I have it. What will be really interesting is to see if anyone Skypes me from the listing. It would be rather neat for the listing to be partially created on the Skypephone and then close the sale with the same device.