The Priceonomics Web site, which officially launched on Dec. 21, is aimed at helping sellers and buyers determine the best price for used bikes, cars, phones, TVs and other items, so no one gets ripped off.

But rather than explaining what it does in a press release, Priceonomics wrote an entertaining blog post, entitled “Adventures in Aeron Chair Arbitrage,” detailing its experiments with selling the expensive Herman Miller office furniture in San Francisco.

Trials included finding buyers among its start-up incubator classmates, finding the chairs on Craigslist, borrowing a girlfriend’s car to get them, negotiating a lower price, lugging the chairs back to the office, and then almost losing the sale in the end, when the seller’s $1,800 check didn’t go through.

Priceonomics concludes that a business based on hauling used furniture around won’t scale but that there is a need for a centralized location for pricing information.

From its blog post:

“It’s unlikely Priceonomics could build a massively successful business arbitraging used goods if we have to take possession of them. However, it was clear that having our price guides were really helpful for identifying what were the good deals on Craigslist and how much to pay for them. So for now, we’ll just stick to building better price guides to help other people buy things on Craiglist, eBay, and other emerging marketplaces like Zaarly and TaskRabbit.”

Priceonomics may be on to something here.

Not too long ago, one way to determine the fair value of an item on the Internet was through an online auction. EBay became wildly popular as an easy way for total strangers to agree on a price for an item. More recently, auctions have become less relevant, and even eBay is decreasing the alliance of used items on its site.

That’s due in large part to today’s free flow of information on the Internet, which makes pricing more transparent. After all, you can just Google it.

Still, determining the price of an item can be time-consuming. To get a good sense of the fair value, you have to cross-check prices on a handful of sites — if not a dozen.

Priceonomics’ price guide promises to help users easily find out if they are getting a good deal, by comparing items across eBay, Craigslist and even full-priced retailers that might be offering a deal.

So, how much is a second-hand Aeron chair worth?

In the end, Priceonomics says, the chairs resell for $400 to $600 in San Francisco. The company was able to acquire four, for $375 each; it then turned around and unloaded them for $1,800, representing a $300 profit.

In July, the Salt Lake City-based company, which is also known as Overstock, discontinued the year-old Eziba, a boutique site that mimicked flash sales sites like Gilt Groupe, Rue La La and One Kings Lane.

Meanwhile, on its homepage, the company has also been cutting back. After six years, it shut down its auctions category, which was similar to eBay; earlier this year, it shuttered real estate, which allowed people to browse homes for sale and receive discounts on real estate services.

And finally, one of its newest ventures is also on hold.

In March, O.co launched a vacations tab, which offered discounted hotel rooms. It is expected to relaunch later next month with a new partner.

In an interview, O.co President Jonathan Johnson explained the cutbacks.

He said that auctions and real estate in particular didn’t seem to fit its model. The two categories weren’t things you could easily add to the shopping cart and buy right away. The real estate tab was a referral service, and auctions required haggling.

Meanwhile, Johnson said, Eziba cannibalized sales from its main site.

Eziba was a modern boutique that featured large photos of the products, in contrast to Overstock’s more straightforward, traditional e-commerce layout, which stressed searching for items displayed in small thumbnail pictures. Eziba offered a dozen or so products at a time by email, as compared to the hundreds of thousands of items found daily on Overstock.

“We watch and see what competitors are doing,” Johnson said. “We thought private sales sites would be good to experiment with … What we learned was that it wasn’t bringing us any new customers.”

Johnson concluded that they could offer the same deals on Overstock.

He also said manufacturers were concerned that by offering discounts on items for Eziba, it was hurting future sales over the next week or month.

“We did not see the lift in Eziba that we were hoping,” he added.

The 12-year-old company is stuck with a model that surfaced when shopping first became prevalent on the Internet. With 2010 revenues of $1.1 billion, it all of a sudden appears out of style compared to smaller start-ups that are able to raise millions of dollars in venture capital.

And even while those more trendy companies get all of the attention, a majority of sales still are occurring on traditional megasites, like eBay, Amazon and the Overstocks of the world.

One business Johnson said the company investigated but never launched was daily deals.

“We did some development on the Groupon model,” he said. “But we aren’t bullish on the model. The merchants we talked to said it brings in a nonloyal, coupon-using customer that doesn’t come back. I wish them (Groupon) the best, but there’s 600 other Groupon-like competitors. It wasn’t the right time to say ‘me, too.’”

The vacations tab is expected to relaunch in December with a new provider, and will offer a larger array of products, including hotels, rental cars and airfare. It will rejoin three other categories — shopping, cars and insurance. In a note to users, it says: “We promise we aren’t lying by the pool or sitting under a beach cabana, but are hard at work exploring even better vacation destinations, packages and exclusive deals.”

The company also continues to expand internationally. Today, it ships to 91 countries, and in the next two to four weeks, expects to add another 23 countries. The shift from using O.co instead of Overstock was to support visitors in more languages.

In the three months ended Sept. 30, the company’s revenues fell 2 percent to $239.7 million, from $245.4 million in the year-ago period. Its losses also widened to nearly $8 million from $3 million.

The company attributed the decrease in revenues to several reasons, including lower conversion rates, 8 percent fewer new customers compared to last year, and its rebranding efforts.

The spots will appear on “Top Gear,” “SportsCenter,” “Tosh.0,” “The Daily Show,” “Top Chef” and “The Rachel Zoe Project.”

The campaign’s tagline is “When it’s on your mind, it’s on eBay.”

We knew that the ad campaign was coming. While eBay hasn’t advertised in awhile, it decided now is the right time, after spending the last year redesigning its site to no longer focus exclusively on auctioning off used goods.

In fact, 62 percent of eBay’s current listed items are being sold for a set price, and 70 percent are new.

The ad campaign, which will also feature QR codes and online ads — including YouTube and Yahoo homepage takeovers — was created by independent San Francisco ad agency Venables Bell & Partners.

It’s not too shocking that eBay is targeting mobile users for this campaign.

This holiday season will likely be the biggest shopping event ever for mobile (only because it’s still so new), with tablets driving a lot of so-called “couch commerce.”

By the end of the year, eBay expects mobile sales to exceed $4 billion. Other e-commerce leaders, such as Amazon, are not as vocal about their mobile revenues, but are equally investing in applications and tools for shoppers to use on the go.

EBay’s apps have been downloaded 50 million times and generate an astonishing amount of traffic — one purchase is made every second. That breaks down to a pair of shoes sold every nine seconds, and 2,000 cars every week.

Since it was founded in 1994 as a research lab, Walker Digital LLC has made much of its money by spinning out its inventions, like online travel agent Priceline and vending-machine firm Vendmore Systems LLC, as independent businesses.

But this year the Stamford, Conn., company has changed its strategy. After putting his patent portfolio up for auction last year, but failing to have his asking price met, Mr. Walker in February forged ties with IP Navigation Group, a self-described “patent monetization” firm. Since then, Walker Digital has filed about 30 lawsuits targeting hundreds of companies, including Amazon.com Inc., Zynga Inc. and Google Inc., alleging they violated one or more of the company’s roughly 400 patents.

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While the online auction site is best known as a place to clear out old tech gear, it is also very efficient at creating a secondary market for those willing to pay a premium for the hard-to-get new stuff. It’s a phenomenon that stretches back more than a decade, to the days of a different portable tech device: the Palm Pilot.

In this case, eBay says that some 12,000 iPad 2 models were sold in the two weeks after its U.S. launch. Breaking it down by model, 61 percent were Wi-Fi-only models (including 30 percent for the entry-level 16GB version). And users were paying quite a premium, with average selling prices ranging from nearly $200 over retail for the entry-level model to more than $400 over retail for the top of the line 64GB model with built-in 3G access.

Also of interest, roughly two-thirds of the tablets sold in that two-week period were to U.S. buyers, more than double the amount at the launch of the original iPad, perhaps reflecting Apple’s aggressive plans to quickly sell the iPad 2 internationally.

For those who like pretty pictures, eBay has a nice infographic breaking down all the data.

Today, he says it’s all “new eBay.”

At the company’s analyst meeting at its headquarters, the company demonstrated the major changes made over the past couple of years and laid out plans for how local, mobile and social will lead the next wave of commerce.

In the afternoon, Bob Swan, eBay’s CFO, took the stage to give the financial rundown that everyone had been waiting for since the morning.

Swan highlighted PayPal’s growth trajectory by saying that it expects to double revenues over the next three years to between $6 billion and $7 billion, compared with $3.4 billion in 2010.

He also talked up how mobile was gaining speed by saying that PayPal mobile transactions were estimated to double to $2 billion in total payment volume, and that mobile on marketplaces will double to $4 billion in gross merchandise volume.

Meanwhile, when looking at the company’s gross merchandise volume, he sees the business increasing from $60 billion in 2010 to $75 billion in 2013. And, to support the strength of the business, the company anticipates generating $7.5 to $8 billion in free cash flow by 2013.

Swan wants to stress that these growth rates are being driven from the company’s core businesses, and not from the more innovative stuff eBay is working on in local, mobile and social. “We are in a  different state than we were in March 2009, where the crystal ball was murky and full of potholes. Now the crystal ball is full of opportunities. We have unmatched advantages that position us to win.”

That’s possible because of the improvements the company has been making over the past two years.

“We’ve made significant and necessary changes necessary for growth. Two years ago, search was optimized for auctions and suffered. Two years from now, search will be a competitive advantage for eBay,” said Mark Carges,” eBay’s CTO of marketplaces. “We’ve rolled out many tailored experiences and selling on eBay will be vastly simplified.”

To illustrate the change, Carges showed how there’s no more irreverent banner ads on the search results page, and instead of returning up to 19 paid results, it gives shoppers the “best matches” and cuts the time in half that it takes to return results.

The company also launched the buyer protection program, which will return the price of the item and the cost of shipping to customers unhappy with purchases.

Christopher Payne, VP of eBay marketplaces North America, said the company will start to increase marketing spend on these improvements to drive awareness: “We’ve been intentionally quiet as we fixed fundamentals, but starting in the second half, we’ll start marketing this new experience.”

At lunch, analysts were so eager to talk to Donahoe he wasn’t even able to get to his seat. They crowded around him in the lobby to grill him on what impact Facebook, Apple and Google were going to have on the company’s payments aspirations.

Donahoe wasn’t phased, saying that PayPal is technology agnostic. He will support BlackBerry, Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone — and all of the iterations they produce from phones to tablets. What’s more, he says, the company is building the tools and technology for merchants to keep up in what can be a daunting world.

Analysts appear impressed with the improvements. Today, the company’s shares traded up nearly 8 percent, or $2.57, to $34.53, coming close to marking a 52-week high.

After reminding the nation that “South Korean homes now have greater Internet access than we do,” he went on to call for a national wireless broadband network.

Within the next five years, we’ll make it possible for businesses to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans. This isn’t just about–(applause)–this isn’t about faster Internet or fewer dropped calls. It’s about connecting every part of America to the digital age. It’s about a rural community in Iowa or Alabama where farmers and small business owners will be able to sell their products all over the world. It’s about a firefighter who can download the design of a burning building onto a handheld device; a student who can take classes with a digital textbook; or a patient who can have face-to-face video chats with her doctor.

It’s the latest attempt by Obama to try to solve the difficult problem of broadband penetration in America. In many places, most of them rural areas with low population density, cable and telco companies can’t make back the investments required to build out network infrastructure, and so they don’t build at all. As I’ve said here before, for Americans in those places, the options for participating in the digital culture the rest of us take for granted are few, and it often means the difference between participating and not in so much of the daily discourse that occurs online.

Part of the answer lies in taking back some radio spectrum that’s used for other things. In June, Obama signed a memorandum calling for the freeing up of certain radio frequency spectrum in the 500 MHz range. This is a block of spectrum largely owned by TV broadcasters for free over-the-air TV transmission. Broadcasters have been under pressure–and so far they are resisting–to voluntarily give those licenses up so that the spectrum can be re-auctioned off.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, essentially telegraphed that this is going to be the commission’s major policy priority in comments at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month. He has said he’d like to offer broadcasters incentives to give up their spectrum, but this would require a new law passed by Congress, and those in Congress have their own ideas about how this should be done. You can expect a lot of debate about this in Washington this year, but probably not a lot of progress.

Net income in eBay’s second quarter, ended June 30, fell 29 percent to $327 million, or 25 cents a share, from $460 million, or 35 cents a share from a year earlier. Revenue fell four percent to $2.1 billion.

The results came in at the high end of the Q2 outlook eBay provided back in April when the company said it expected revenue of between $1.85 billion and $2.05 billion and earnings per share of between 23 cents and 26 cents.

“We drove solid second quarter results, with strong momentum and market share gains at PayPal and continued stabilization in our core eBay business,” eBay CEO John Donahoe in a statement. “I’m pleased with our pace, our progress and our performance.”

Can’t be much pleased with the company’s core online-auction business, though. That continues to show weakness. The amount of goods and services flowing through eBay’s (EBAY) marketplace, called “gross merchandise volume,” fell 10 percent year-over-year to $11.1 billion. And that’s not good. Especially when Amazon.com (AMZN) is gaining market share so quickly.

“The core eBay marketplaces business continues to be the most important driver for eBay’s share price,” Heath Terry of FBR Capital Markets said in a note to clients this week. “While the company is making progress, management still has a long way to go in addressing the years of technological neglect at the company.”

Former top Yahoo advertising exec David Karnstedt (pictured here), who has been parked at a Silicon Valley venture firm since he left the company, has been named president and CEO of Efficient Frontier.

Interestingly, another former Yahoo (YHOO) exec, Ellen Siminoff, has also been CEO at the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based search engine marketing firm. She is now chairman.

Karnstedt, who was SVP of of Yahoo’s North American sales until last fall, replaces James Beriker.

He has most recently been an executive-in-residence at Redpoint Ventures, an investor in Efficient Frontier.

Here is an interview I did with Karnstedt in 2007, when he was at Yahoo.

And here is the full press release:

Efficient Frontier Names David Karnstedt as President and CEO

Former Redpoint Ventures Executive-in-Residence and Senior Vice President of Yahoo!’s North American Sales Brings Extensive Experience to the Post

Sunnyvale, Calif. – April 2, 2009 – Efficient Frontier, the worldwide leader in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) technology and services, today announced that David Karnstedt has been named President and Chief Executive Officer of the company.

Karnstedt most recently was an Executive-in-Residence at Redpoint Ventures, an investor in Efficient Frontier. Prior to Redpoint, he served as Senior Vice President of Yahoo!’s North American Sales with responsibility for more than $3 billion in revenue. During his tenure at Yahoo!, he successfully led the integration of the Search and Display sales teams into one central unit and helped establish Yahoo! as a recognized leader in both display and search marketing.

“We feel incredibly fortunate to have someone of David’s caliber join Efficient Frontier at this point in the company’s life cycle,” said Ellen Siminoff, Chairwoman of Efficient Frontier’s Board of Directors. “David’s extensive experience in the Internet space – specifically search – will be a huge asset as he leads the company forward.”

Karnstedt’s experience includes several industry firsts. Prior to Yahoo!, David led the Direct Sales team at Overture Services, the company that pioneered the paid search industry and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2003. He also served as Vice President and General Manager of Alta Vista, where he was responsible for the consumer business and helped shape product development and marketing strategies that leveraged the auctions-based search approach. Prior to Alta Vista, David served as Western Advertising Director at Wired Digital where he helped to develop some of the first advertising models on the Web. He is also active in the industry, having served on both the Advertising Council and Interactive Advertising Association’s Boards of Directors.

“As the leading global Search Engine Marketing company, Efficient Frontier has built tremendous assets –
including its technology platform, a global presence and a great team,” said David Karnstedt. “I plan to build on these key assets by expanding the company’s leadership in search, diversifying into complimentary product offerings and increasing its global presence. I am pleased to lead the company into its next phase of growth.”

Karnstedt is replacing James Beriker, who held executive positions at the company since April 2007 and was its President, CEO and a member of the Board of Directors from February 2008 until March 2009. The company’s business expanded significantly while James was CEO. We are appreciative of his efforts and contributions.

ComScore today reports that for the first 23 days of November, e-commerce spending (excluding travel, auctions and large corporate purchases) was down four percent from the same period last year. ComScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni said that “with consumer confidence low and disposable income tight, the first weeks of November have been very disappointing.”

ComScore’s forecast is that overall online spending this year will be flat versus a year ago. That compares with a 19 percent rise in spending online last year, and a nine percent rise in e-commerce for the year through October.

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