Our team leader followed up with me from India after reading the updated blog post last Monday and should be back around November 10th; we are going to finalize the McBidz site soon thereafter. We will be discussing the rollout plan and the launch date once we run a couple more test on McBidz and transfer the site to its dedicated server.

After talking to several “VC” venture capitalist and other parties we may be looking at franchising the mobile charging subsidiary starting late 09/early 2010. While our partners are working with us to construct a “fast charger” for (EV) electric vehicles we will be filing the necessary paper work to start franchising on a national basis once we have a working model. We will have a banner ad on the business section of the McBidz site which will link out to the www.mobilecharging.com website with more information.

The Team leader for McBidz based out of Virginia has been out for the last couple weeks getting married in India so you might have noticed little progress on the McBidz site. He has been with McBidz since the beginning, for more than two years so he plays quite a big part in development.  There is only minor tweaking at this stage anyway so no big deal. We can wrap up the little bit that needs to be corrected in a matter of hours when he returns. Of course the big work needed to progress to launch is getting the advertising in place and setting up the rollout plan. Mobile charging continues to progress as well, but that will be more of an information site for the future plans and developments of our new company.

Recently I have had questions regarding why don’t we just launch McBidz so our users can get back using the site now. While the main site is basically finished our subsidiary site www.Mobilecharging.com is currently under construction and our advertising isn’t in place as of yet. Our mascot “Chuckster” hasn’t been completed as well as finding a suitable representative to fill the mascot’s role.

I look at the rollout of McBidz as even more important than the hundreds of hours of programming and testing which have been completed to this date. Why have a supersite where only a couple thousand people know of its existence? For the benefit of our current McBidzers we want the site to be noticed by millions if possible before the first day of launch. There are several ways we are going about fulfilling this goal which heavily involves the buildup for the opening day launch. As mentioned before this will involve the timing of advertising (ground level) in both NY, LA, and our home state of SC.

While the new site Mobilecharging is taking up some of our time the main focus is still McBidz and getting the site up and advertised for you as quickly as we can get everything completed in an orderly fashion.

All of the work performed on the McBidz websites will now be done here in the USA. Previously we have outsourced our graphics work for the new McBidz to India, but the work was not precise and I didn’t have the control I was looking for to get it finished on time when it should be. To this extent McBidz has brought onboard a local programming /graphics company to do out Photoshop work design for both the McBidz main website and Mobile Charging. While most of the design work is finished now we will no doubt be using our new team of graphics support with the expansion of the Mobile Charging site.

Several corrections to the outlines were made this week to the Auto mall & Real Estate sections of McBidz as well as ongoing development on the Mobile Charging site we are working to get up and running.

As mentioned before in previous post the new subsidiary “Mobile Charging” is now moving forward after the Incorporation papers were filed.  After a week of pitching the idea to VC “venture Capital”, Angel investors, and government entities we are getting feedback. Most of it from VC interest who want a more complete executive summary to look into which I am preparing now. By way of Mark Sanford’s office (Governor S.C.), the South Carolina Department of Commerce contacted me for an interview on the Mobile Charging concept as well as Volkswagen of Germany who may be interested in forming a partnership to bring this to market. As you can see from this tidbit from Volkswagens e-mail, “At this time, Volkswagen’s electric car is still in the concept stages.  The Space Up! Blue concept vehicle is designed to run on an electric motor that when driven exclusively by battery will have a range of 65 miles.  While this vehicle is still in its infancy, we are determining manufacturing and production concerns.  I appreciate your desire to create a partnership with our company in developing a series of charging stations across the nation.  Your interest has been documented for Volkswagen’s review, and should this partnership be determined as something our company would be interested in, you will be contacted.  Thank you again for taking the time to share this innovative endeavor with us.“ electrical cars are still going through the development stages. Even suppliers that we are working with for electric “fast chargers” don’t have workable models yet and when they do have one price tags are estimated to be around 100k+. As we get more feedback and developments on Mobile Charging, Inc. I will try to post them here.

This afternoon we are going to be wrapping up the Help and FAQ sections on McBidz as well as redefining the picture size width on the auction details to configure within our borders. This will leave us only minor adjustments to the site to make it launch ready. I have been deluged with messages pushing us to get the site up by many of our McBidzers wanting to get back into the site and use all of our new features (we had over 3,600 members) when the site went down for reprogramming and many of you are finding your way back after staying current with our blog. We hear you and are aligning the advertising, getting our mascot into production, and designing our new subsidiary site as quickly as we can to make this happen.

Although it’s very important to us to get the site back up for you there are factors which are fundamentally important for me to decide to wait until the company is ready to do so. Our new subsidiary (Mobile Charging Inc.) website needs to be finished, advertising in place along with numerous other factors (testing, economy, position) all which unfortunately require “time”. The wait will be well worth it when the new McBidz does launch it will come with a bang. What we don’t want to happen is launch unprepared and have a site which isn’t fully functional, tested, and advertised. Once the site is launched you will be confident you will be a part of a site that is well planned to meet all your current and future buying/selling needs.

For our McBidzers who haven’t used the links on the left to visit the new site here is a direct link in http://www.mcbidz.com/auctions/index.php just use the header links to navigate and check out the new digs. Only minor changes will be done to the site you see now along with updated FAQ and Help pages, but otherwise you are looking at the finished product.

We have pushed the planned advertising and thus launch date back a month or two to work on our new subsidiary project which you can find the beginnings of here http://www.mobilecharging.com . Our new company Mobile Charging, Inc., which will operate under the McBidz Corporation, has recently been formed and we are working to get a site up with information about the new company. This is an aggressive approach to meet the needs of the next generation of electrical vehicles which will be manufactured within the next several years such as the new line from Chrysler. I will be very busy over the next several months contacting government, corporate, and organizations which may want to come aboard for our new project. The feedback from organizations heavily involved with electric vehicles has been very positive on the idea we have; although the technology we need is currently under development by several companies it hasn’t been used in the field yet. Look for much more on this new idea in later post.