My name is Graham Heath. I’m one of the two co-founders of Rbloc.com.

I just wanted to mention that, though we fell into Mike’s “Classifieds” article, we do far more than just that. Rbloc.com was developed around the idea that each and every individual should have their own personal market floor for everything that they offer or require and we wanted to give them a slick, organized, easy interface from which to do it. Beyond that, we wanted to let people trade by whatever mechanism they feel most comfortable with, whether that is by auction or by classified…all from the same site (our auction functionality is where the largest strengths of our service lie).

rMarket, which is the only section of our site that is currently released, is where our users come together to buy and sell goods and services. Without a doubt there are many sites, some with extremely large user bases that also address this task. While developing rMarket, we noted the functionality of all of these sites. We then stepped away from what currently exists with the intent of creating a far better way to facilitate the connections that individuals and businesses require every day. What we came up with does just that. In a world where the number of hours in a day seems to be shrinking rapidly, we wanted to create a system that would begin saving individuals’ time and money, while doing the same for businesses within these
individual’s geographic areas. rMarket allows individuals and businesses to offer or request any product or service through either an auction or a classified. We then use something called
a Notified to drive these offers and requests to parties who have expressed prior interest.

An example of how it works might be when a person wants their house painted. The homeowner can post their request, perhaps through an auction. They’ll fill in all of the necessary details
about how they’d like their house painted, attach pictures, and even list available viewing times and so on. This request is then pushed out via email to all house painters within their
local geographic area. Interested painters can then bid for the homeowner’s business. The site allows the painters to respond with the full description of the service to be performed,
references, pictures of past jobs, and even their portfolio. The homeowner then weighs all of the bids, and based on the criteria that they deem to be most important, they pick a winner. The winning party is notified and they complete the transaction. So, the homeowner only had to put in a single request instead of sitting on the phone for hours trying to get quotes from different painters. Further, the house painter didn’t have to spend a penny on advertising costs or doing the leg work walking door-to-door to drop off pamphlets.

We have had a large technical success in creating a personal market floor where you can, for example, sell your iPod to the highest bidder, offer a copywriting service from your home
office, request a specific part for your Land Rover, and have people compete for a position in your new company, all from the convenience of your own PC. It’s like having your own personal
market where you can sell your wares to the masses, or have them offer up goods and services at your request.

There are a large number of sites moving into the classifieds realm, and also into the auctions realm. Rbloc.com has attempted to bring all of the different types of functionality out there under one umbrella and then improve the ease with which we allow our users to interact around the offering and requesting of products and services. It really is different than what currently exists.

If you want to just take the site for a test drive, you can do so at www.rbloc.com/dev

I can be emailed at graham.heath@rbloc.com and would love any feedback and criticism. Thanks!