New English version to be launched this week

The English version of Flipz.be has been around for about a year now. But it has been translated by yours truly, and I am not a native speaker. The text is full of types and other mistakes and some translations are a bit too liberal.

But that will change... A proper English translation is ready! It will be launched this week! It is currently scheduled for Saturday, which is low-traffic day for the site.

(The "Rules"-page has always been a professional translation. It will stay the way it is, don't worry)

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Did you know that German is the most widely spoken language in Europe?

It is the official language of Germany and Austria. But also one of the official languages in Belgium, our home country. And then there are all the surrounding countries with big German minorities: Italy, Denmark, The Netherlands,... Switzerland has a German majority, but it is currently still excluded from participating Flip.be because we have a hard time finding distributors.

Reasons enough to add a German version of the site to Flipz.be. A professional translation of the Dutch version is nearly completed, and will be launched shortly.

We welcome all Germans, Austrians and other German speaking Europeans!

Coming soon, to www.flipz.be !

New games are coming...

Good news for all you gamers out there. Starting this Monday, we will be adding 5 new video games to our product list:

Crysis 2

Your choice of:

. Playstation 3

. XBOX 360

. PC (Windows)

Mortal Kombat

Your choice of:

. Playstation 3

. XBOX 360

Duke Nukem Forever

Your choice of:

. Playstation 3

. XBOX 360

Lego Star Wars III

Your choice of:

. Playstation 3

. XBOX 360

. Nintendo Wii

. Nintendo DS

. Nintendo 3DS

FIFA 11

Your choice of:

. Playstation 3

. XBOX 360

. Nintendo Wii

. Nintendo DS

. Sony PSP

. PC (Windows)

Coming soon, on Flipz.be ....

Flipz.be launches iPad 2 at € 0 !

Apple launches the iPad 2 tonight. And we will be right there from the start!

Tonight, we will sell our first iPad 2 in an auction, starting at €0, and WITHOUT RESERVE PRICE! This means it will definitely be sold. Possibly for only a few cents.

But it gets better! Because we have also limited this auction to people who have not won more than 10 times. This excludes quite a lot of people. The big winners have easily won more than 20 times, some of which have gone over 30 or more!

With them out of picture, along with the lack of a reserve price. Who knows where it will end. Who will be hard-headed enough? Who will take the risk? Who will take home that first European iPad 2?

We'll find out tonight!

Many ways to write "Hotmail.com" :)

Today we went through are growing database in order to improve its quality. We had discovered that a lot of the e-mails we sent were being bounced because of non-existing addresses. That is not a good thing; mailing to non-existing receivers can be seen as an act of spamming. And that's something we want to avoid by all cost.

So we were looking at the giant log files of the mails we sent out over the last few days, as well as the warnings/errors they had generated. We found out that a lot of the e-mail addresses of our members were misspelled because of typos. Many of these people probably never even received their activation link after subscribing!

The obvious typos we corrected by hand. And what we noticed raised one big question: How many ways are there to misspell "hotmail.com"?! We will give you some of the ones we encountered:

• hotmail.com.be
• hotmail.co
• hotmeil.com
• htmail.com
• hottmail.com
• hotmaill.com
• hotamail.com
• otmail.com
• hotmaikl.com
• hptmail.com
• ...

No kidding, we actually found each and every one of the examples above!

Now, that may appear normal. After all, typos are only human. And these mistakes can easily be overlooked by anyone. But our question is: How come GMail addresses are being written correctly?! Sure, there are 7300 Hotmail users for only 2700 GMail users. But still. We corrected dozens of badly written Hotmail addresses, and only two (2!) badly written GMail addresses!

What explains this odd phenomenon? Well, we are still scratching our heads. We still have no clue. We are just guessing that "hotmail" is in fact a difficult word to write, where "gmail" clearly is not.

Any better explanation is by all means welcome!

Internet Explorer down to 16%

When Internet Explorer 4 came out, somewhere in the late nineties, it was a revolution. It completely trashed the competition in superiority. Up until that point Netscape had had a monopoly on decent web browsers to such a level that they could even charge quite a lot of money for it. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4 was not only free, it also had a much better support for the then-new HTML 4 and CSS. For years to come, Internet Explorer would win users from Netscape. More than 80% of all WWW traffic, would be surfed with Microsoft's browser.

Those days are finally over *. Today, we are experiencing a new era in the evolution of the WWW, and Microsoft is too late, too slow and too weak. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari,... they are all faster, more stable, and a lot more secure. And they too are all free!

Also, for some reason Microsoft stopped producing Unix and Mac versions of Internet Explorer (yes, we has those for a while). So while other operating systems are slowly replacing Windows on our computers, especially Mac OS X and GNU/Linux, so are those alternative browsers.

Today we ran a scan through our log files to find out which web browser our visitors prefer. And this is what we've come up with: *

1. Firefox at 46%
2. Google Chrome at 18%
3. MS Internet Explorer at 16%
4. Apple Safari at 16%
5. Opera at 1%

And YES, we like this! Why? Well, maybe because we notice that Internet Explorer is not responding well to www.flipz.be. That is, of course, a very personal reason. But a correct one, nonetheless. The reason why it is not liking our site, is because Microsoft seems to keep on ignoring the standards in CSS and JavaScript, pushing their own flavours.

Will Internet Explorer 9 be better? Well, let's hope so! But I am guessing they are too stubborn to comply to the Internet's open standards. Even when they're already down to 16%, coming from 80%. I have tried IE9 on Flipz.be, and there is already one big improvement: the images on the bid-buttons are finally drawn the way they should've been all along.

* One very important notice: these are the numbers from our site. Every site will have different numbers since every site has a different audience. But still, it is nice to know that our visitors have been enlightened.

Facebook "I Like" integration

You will now find an "I Like" button on our Flipz.be website. This way you can recommend our system to others.

And there is also a big advantage for you! Whenever you send people to Flipz.be (in the hopes they will sign up as your referral so you get free flipz out of them), they will now see you actually like the site! Also, they may find other friends liking it as well. This should persuade them to follow your example.

That will keep the free flipz coming...

Better English

We are reworking the English version of the website. The current version has been around for a while, but was translated by a programmer.

As English is slowly becoming a more important language, we decided to have it properly done by an actual translator :)

Coming soon to www.flipz.be/en

Alternatives to PayPal

Ever since we started in 2009, we have supported PayPal as the only way to buy more flipz.

We are currently looking into other means of payment, especially for the Belgian market. People may prefer to buy flipz using their home banking system such as the ones by KBC or ING. We think we may reach more people that way.

Other countries will follow. But the problem is that we are not really that aquatinted with the local banks in every country. There are also a lot of cultural differences. In some countries people send cheques to companies. In some countries banks are working together to create a single online platform, in others, every bank has got its own...

But one thing is for sure. You will soon be able to buy flipz without PayPal.

New BONUS System launched

From now on, the new BONUS System is in place.

So for auctions that didn't reach their reserve price, all flipz will still be returned along with a bonus of 5% extra flipz.

The last bidder of that auction, however, will now receive 20% extra flipz instead of 5%.

Let's say you have spent 60 flipz on such an auction. Well then, you'll get at least 60+5% = 63 flipz back onto your account. But if you were the last one to bid, you'd get 60+20% = 72 flipz back! That's a huge difference!

We think this will make our game more exciting from the very start until the end. Whatever the outcome may be.