Victoria, BC, Canada

Launching in the UK with Orange on July 10, 2009, the new TG01 will be the world’s first smartphone to be using the new Quantum processor with the dizzying processing speed of 1GHz. Will it succeed in the market? eBay is a common venue for early technology developers, so analysts like Brian Russo from CIBC World Markets use it to predict global consumer trends. Our own experience with eBay data leads us to believe that the level of success in the overall market will be able to be determined by the levels of early online auction activity.

So far, there has been trading activity on the eBay Germany platform for Toshiba TG01 items and accessories. Over half of the shipments of these items have been within Germany itself. None so far have been to the UK or the United States. Have their smartphone markets become saturated while Germany’s still has room for growth?

At this stage it is still too early to tell. In the US leg of the smartphone race we’ve seen Apple’s iPhone leading in sales revenues but RIM maintaining the highest volumes in the USA market- check out our iphone index at http://www.terapeak.com/widgets/indexes/iphone/#graph.

Stay tuned to this blog for future updates on the states of ecommerce sales for the TG01 and its competitors in the smart phone market. For further inquiries or information email us at info@researchadvanced.com.

VICTORIA – AERS founder Anthony Sukow was on hand to receive the University of Victoria’s annual Craigdarroch Research Award on behalf of himself and his brother and co-founder Andrew Sukow last week.  As graduates of the University, both founders were gratified to receive the University of Victoria Innovation and Development Corporation Entrepreneurship Award.

This recognizes the company’s excellence in providing data analytics and research tools in decision support, and AERS’ longstanding vision to deliver practical research based on transactional data.  “We were grateful to have been selected for this honour among such a fine group of peers,” said Anthony Sukow, “and this further underscores the strength of our longstanding partnership with UVic.“

The Craigdarroch Research Awards were established by the University of Victoria to recognize excellence in research, and were awarded for the first time in October 2003. The awards are named for Craigdarroch Castle, which served as home to the University of Victoria’s predecessor institution, Victoria College, from 1921 to 1946. Anthony and Andrew Sukow received one of six awards handed out to seven recipients.

AERS was conceived when both Andrew and Anthony Sukow were students at the University of Victoria, and operated out of the University until September 2005.  During its earliest stages, the first-time entrepreneurs benefited from significant mentorship, investment, and other support from the University, among other individuals and organizations.

Advanced E-commerce Research Systems Inc. specializes in delivering e-commerce-based analytics and insight to support the investment, product management, marketing, and advertising decisions of its thousands of clients. AERS does this based on its core competencies in storing and mining large e-commerce datasets. AERS is comprised of two main divisions: Terapeak supplies auction analysis to eBay sellers and buyers through an on-line web interface, while Advanced delivers data and custom research to the business sector. The company was founded in 2004, and monitors over ten million consumer transactions daily.

Media contacts:

AERS – Anthony Sukow
250-483-3270
anthony [at] aers.ca

UVic Communications – Valerie Shore
250-721-7641
vshore [at] uvic.ca

Victoria, BC, Canada

January sales figures released by Avian Research revealed a decline in iPhone sales while Blackberry experienced an increase. Online trends in eBay could eventually reflect this offline trend with recent figures released from Terapeak on smart phone sales. Despite being currently outnumber by iPhones in the ecommerce market, the Blackberry is demonstrating astonishing growth that could turn the tables on its major competitors.

The percentage change of Blackberries over iPhone sales have been 75% since February 17th where the inflection point occurred. The newest Blackberry release of the Curve 8900 occurred right around that time. Coupled with the recent opening of the Blackberry application, the smart phone consumer has more model and price options than Apple currently provides.

This astonishing speed of eBay sales doesn’t show signs of slowing down as eBay users begin to look for less expensive alternative to the iPhone. Furthermore, the iPhone hasn’t had any new releases since the summer of 2008-will Apple pick up the pace?

Recently, blogger Paul Kedrosky commented on the sharp increase in the American savings rate. This level of national savings has not been seen since 1997. Given this information, it is easy to see how when compared to the more expensive iPhone, auctioned Blackberries present a more attractive offer to the budget conscious consumer.

Yesterday, Apple revealed a smaller and simpler iPod Shuffle amid great hoopla.  The new product features more storage, a much smaller form factor, and a feature called “VoiceOver” which rather usefully, given the lack of a screen, tells you what song is playing and who the artist is.  Priced to move at $79 USD, this is a clear reinvestment in a market that has paid off handsomely for Apple.  This chart covering 26 months (to Feb 2009) of sales on eBay reveals that the smaller iPod models have grown to address a broader market than their older, larger siblings, despite the multi-year market lead of earlier iPods:

It also reveals a sharp gender bias — with women favouring smaller, more lightweight and inexpensive iPods to their larger, more feature-rich and large-screened bretheren.  These numbers show that there is a clear and specific market for women in the portable MP3 player marketplace, and Apple has it:  the company is virtually untouched in this segment among its competitors, except for a smattering of far less-hyped offerings like the Samsung Pebble.

Analysis after Apple’s numbers were announced last year revealed that Apple’s iPod growth numbers were beginning to flatten.  The Nano seems to a clear killer, cutting through the middle with both a small size and a screen, but iPod Shuffle sales reveal a most compelling gender bias: the gap between the Shuffle (47% female) and the original iPod (28%) is eye-opening.

So should competitors be eyeing the ladies’ market for portable music players?  Will we be seeing more pink iPods at the low end of the range in our near future?  We will let you know.

As the US savings rate increases to an all time high since 1997, it seems that eBay is increasingly becoming a safe haven for various products including Dell technology.

For the fourth quarter, Dell has reported a profit of $351 million USD. This is a 48% decrease from their Q3 2008 profit of $727 million USD. Despite this offline decline in demand for Dell products and services, there has been a bright spot in eBay where it’s traded laptops and desktops have had a combined increase in net revenue and volume.

When compared to the third quarter of 2008, Dell experienced a 6% increase in revenue and a 13% increase in volume traded in eBay USA for combined laptops and desktops alone. Dell’s eBay revenue rose 9.4% of the total global net revenue for this quarter.

It would also appear that in 2008 eBay users have indicated an increasing preference for refurbished Dell items over new and used ones. In a Q4 08/07 comparison there is a 1.82% reduction in revenue and an 18% increase in volume on eBay for Dell laptops and computers. For refurbished Dell laptops and desktops, the volume rose dramatically by 36% and the revenue increased 18% to $14.1 million USD from $11.9 million USD.

Sometimes described as a venue for early technology adopters, it will be interesting to see how many more chose alternative venues such as eBay as the American consumption rate slows.

Fred Speckeen, CEO of AERS, anticipates great innovation and insight from the partnership with Calexus. “This is very exciting,” he says. “What our teams are working towards are truly next generation market and consumer insights. Calexus technology discovers facts and relationships hidden in the literally billions of e-commerce transactions Advanced collects from across 30 product categories in each of six countries – USA, UK, Germany, France, Australia and Canada. For example, Calexus is working with AERS to investigate complex relationships between eBay auction prices and the general demand for a manufacturer’s products as reported in quarterly results.”

Doug Newell, Calexus Solutions LLC’s Managing Director, remarks, “We are delighted to be working with AERS. Together, by data-mining and text-mining terabytes of e-commerce transaction data, we will create a new genre of business information – one that includes some of the earliest indicators of changes in consumer purchasing patterns, price sensitivities and geographic pockets of demand. AERS’s unique eBay relationship and our powerful data mining technologies make a perfect match. This affiliation will unlock a whole spectrum of business opportunities.”

About AERS:

AERS specializes in delivering e-commerce-based analytics and insight to support the investment, product management, marketing, and advertising decisions of its thousands of clients. AERS does this based on its core competencies in storing and mining large e-commerce datasets.

AERS is comprised of two main divisions: Terapeak supplies auction analysis to eBay sellers and buyers through an on-line web interface, while Advanced delivers data and custom research to the business sector. The company was founded in 2004.

About Calexus:

Calexus improves business decision quality by quickly and efficiently discovering new facts and relationships. Calexus uses machine learning in the form of genetic algorithms to dynamically search masses of structured and unstructured data. The results are superior decisions and higher profitability for Calexus clients.

Calexus was founded by Doug Newell, a five-time serial entrepreneur and a recognized expert and innovator in the world of advanced analytics.

Contact information:

Fred Speckeen, President and CEO
Advanced E-commerce Research Solutions
www.AERS.ca
1-250-483-3252 (direct)

Calexus Solutions LLC
www.calexussolutions.com
1-603-432-6673

In her article, Holmen features AERS data to explain the recent Barbie trends:

“In the last 90 days, 312,000 Barbie related items sold on ebay.com for $7 million USD, according to data from AERS. There are 2,800 sellers per day with an average price per purchase of $22.60.”

Be sure to check out the full article at this link:

http://www.bclocalnews.com/vancouver_island_south/victorianews/lifestyles/40387023.html

How is this going to affect future demand and will there be supply shortages? Or does today’s price represent gold entering into a zone of resistances that precedes the decline in demand?

It is possible that the eBay gold bullion trading community will be facing a large increase. In the past week, gold bullion trading on the eBay USA platform alone peaked at an all time weekly high of $3.26 million USD in two years. This represents a 95% increase from the same time a year ago.

As the gold trend unfolds, it will be interesting to see how the online gold trading community will respond.

“The new name reflects the value proposition of what we offer our clients – we provide our customers with competitive intelligence that’s based on real-time e-commerce data.” says Fred Speckeen, Advanced President and CEO. “This goes beyond simply counting the number of a certain company’s mobile phones sold on a given day to illuminating the fact that that consumers are ready to pay 20% more for an unlocked version of that company’s phone than they will for a locked one, and which consumer demographic is most likely to buy, and in what regions of a country you’ll find the most buyers, and so-on. We take in data on millions of transactions daily from the world’s largest e-commerce platform, process it using proprietary techniques, host it, mine it, and provide e-commerce analytics that span over 30 consumer product categories and that illuminate the behaviour of literally millions of consumers in the USA, UK, Germany, France, Australia and Canada.”

“In further sharpening of our focus, AERS is also retiring the Dataunison brand. Now, all of our corporate-focused e-commerce analytics services will be found directly under the ‘Advanced’ umbrella. This leaves the company with a simplified brand structure and even clearer market message (www.researchadvanced.com). Our well-established and rapidly growing Terapeak brand (www.terapeak.com) will continue to be our eBay seller-facing service. ”

Along with the new name, Advanced sports a new logo and a new website www.researchadvanced.com. DataUnison.com links will continue to live on the researchadvanced.com website and will redirect seamlessly.

About Advanced E-Commerce Research Systems Inc.
Advanced is a fast growing e-commerce analytics company. Privately held, the company is headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The company delivers e-commerce data and analytics based on the world’s largest e-commerce platform, eBay. Today, Advanced is eBay’s only market data reseller and has established itself as the pre-eminent provider of the most up-to-date, thorough, and relevant e-commerce marketplace reporting available. Currently, Advanced websites receive over 1,000,000 page views per month. For more information: www.researchadvanced.com

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For further information,
Fred Speckeen, CEO
Phone: 250.483.3267
Fax: 250.483.3271
Email: fred [a] aers.ca

Commenting on the appointment, Ian H. Stewart, Q.C. and AERS Chair says, “Thrifty Foods is a Vancouver Island success story and one of Canada’s most respected providers of high-quality products. Alex Campbell is widely respected and will bring to the company his unrivalled experience in adapting business processes to facilitate continued growth and success.”

Prior to joining the board, Campbell built Vancouver Island’s single largest private sector company into a small empire of 4,100 employees. In 2007, he sold his company to Sobeys Inc. and continues to be involved in an advisory capacity.

“Given its past achievements and its energetic pursuit of new technological horizons, AERS exhibits tremendous growth potential,” says Campbell. “I know that long-term relationships require and thrive on integrity, honesty and clarity of communications, loyalty, respect and service. AERS and its employees share these values and are committed to upholding them in all aspects of AERS business affairs. I am honored and delighted to join this team.”

Other board members include: Rhys T. Eyton; Robin H. French; David H. McMillan; James H. Reed; Fred Speckeen, President and CEO; Brent Sternig;
Andrew E.R. Sukow, Chief Technical Officer; and Anthony E. R. Sukow, Executive Vice President and Board Secretary. For a full biography of the AERS Board of Directors, please use the following link: http://www.aers.ca/board.php

“Our board directors enjoy a strong collaborative relationship. The members bring a wealth of diverse knowledge and experience to the company. Collectively the board has more than 250 years of combined business expertise spanning such diverse sectors as telecommunications, entertainment, grocery, media, and transportation. We welcome Mr. Campbell and look forward to working with him,” adds President and CEO Fred Speckeen.

About Advanced Economic Research Systems Inc.

Advanced Economic Research Systems is a fast growing e-commerce data and analytics company. Privately held, the company is headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The company has two strategic business units – Terapeak and Data Unison, which deliver data and analytics based on the world’s largest e-commerce platform, eBay.

Today, AERS is eBay’s only market data reseller and has established itself as the pre-eminent provider of the most up-to-date, thorough, and relevant e-commerce marketplace reporting available. Currently, AERS websites receive over 1,000,000 page views per month.  For more information: www.aers.ca

For further information: Moira King, Moira King Communications, Mobile:
(250) 217-0659, Email: moiraking [a] shaw.ca, Fax: (250) 658-3493