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A woman who earlier tried to sell her baby on eBay was reunited with the infant after being investigated by German authorities. The police were alerted after several people called to complain about the eBay auction offering the 8 month old because he “cries too much,” the opening bid was for just 1 Euro. eBay, as expected, removed the auction as soon as they were made aware of it, and there were no bidders. The ad read “near new, rather loud, portable using pram or sash.”

The mother was quoted in Bild newspaper after her arrest saying: “It was only a joke. I just wanted to see if someone would make an offer. They’ve taken my son to hospital and I’ve got to take psychiatric tests next week.”

Mom and child were reunited on Saturday after she completed a week of psychiatric testing. She and her partner are now taking parenting classes and remain under the supervision of a social worker. The still unidentified mom now says she wishes she’d never even thought about the “joke.”

Via [Earthtimes.org]

A truly one of a kind XO Laptop is currently up for auction with all the proceeds going back to OLPC. The XO Laptop was signed by a collection of geeks and internet celebrities as they wandered around the recent ROFLCon event. The XO has been dubbed the “One ROFLaptop Per Child.” Some of the highlights include Kyle the One Red Paperclip guy, the Tron Guy, Firefox, the JibJab guys, iJustine, the Average Homeboy, Scott Beale from Laughing Squid and many, many more. As of this writing the XO currently has just about 2 days left and is sitting at just over $500. Keep reading to check out another image along with a video showing off some of the signatures.

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If you envied Chris Clark while reading our previous post on the profit he made from selling his pizza.com for $2.6 million after keeping it alive for 14 years, well here comes another domain name up for bid at eBay, 1-pizza.com. There are many reason why 1-pizza.com would be a viable domain name even if the keyword rich domains pizza.com and pizza.net are already up. And Numbers That Work, has listed several of these reasons.

Based on an appraisal and marketing analysis of 1-pizza.com, the domain can ride hot on the heels of the buzz created by the recent sale of pizza.com and pizza.net which were sold for $2.6 million and $1.1 million respectively. Other reasons cited by the market analysis on why 1-pizza.com is worth more than the two pizza domains, include; 1-pizza bears the TLD “.com”, contains a hyphen, it has the “pizza” keyword and it’s a short domain name having only 7 characters.

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Ian Usher, a 44-year old resident of Perth, Australia who’s originally from Darlington, England, is doing a big spring cleaning. For one week on eBay starting on June 22, he will auction off every part of his current life, from his house and all of its contents, even going as far as introducing the winner to his friends and to his job where he works for a rug importer. Although he loves his life in Perth and has the support of his employer and friends, everything sadly reminds him of his five-year marriage that broke up a year ago. After the auction, Usher wants to start all over in life with nothing but his wallet and his passport in his pockets, and do some traveling.

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We have been on the edge of our seats waiting for the winners announcement and the FCC has finally released the details. With little surprise the top two US carriers Verizon and AT&T have taken top honors.

Verizon had scooped the top position, but AT&T also has some pretty decent winnings. Verizon, who was actually partnered up with Vodafone has taken the biggest nationwide block of the spectrum, also known as the “C” block with a $4.74 billion bid, which overtook Google’s bid of $4.71 billion by just a little bit. In addition to the nationwide block of the spectrum, Verizon has also taken 25 regional licenses. AT&T, who is currently the number 1 carrier in the US managed to win 227 “B” block regional licenses across the US. Overall about $6.64 billion was spent by AT&T and a total of about $9.63 billion from Verizon.

This means that between Verizon and AT&T they have won a combined total of just about $16 billion of licenses, which means that the two biggest US carriers now have plenty of room to get even bigger.

Read [Reuters]

Remember that Optimus Maximus keyboard auction we showed you a little while back, well the auction has ended, keyboard has sold and we can only imagine the seller was very pleased.

With a final bid of $2,750 it has sold for quite a bit over the regular retail price of $1,564.72. Wonder if the buyer will follow through with the purchase or if this will have to be re-listed for another attempted sale.

Read [eBay] Via [Engadget]

Hoping to recover from its sluggish growth and support low-cost sellers, online auction giant eBay will implement a new pricing structure and tighter seller standards effective February 20, 2008 in the U.S.

One of the notable changes is the cutback on the cost of listing new items by 25% for auction bidding and 50% for fixed price markets. Moreover, the company will also award sales incentives and priority search ranking for “sellers that describe items accurately, ship on time, and ship at a fair price”. Some business analysts believe this scheme could aid in winning back sellers of items valued below $25.

Together with this new pricing scheme is a stricter selling standard to ward off any mediocre and abusive selling practices such as higher shipping fees and inaccurate product descriptions. In effect, sellers with low satisfaction ratings will not get any preferential treatment in terms of search ranking.

Although the U.S. sellers will test the waters, eBay will in time cascade these changes worldwide.

Read [Reuters]