This sounds cool. Real-time auctions on the web should be a lot of fun. Post a link whenever you're done.

Genuinely curious: how is eBay not a real-time auction?

I assume they mean like an in-person auction. People increasingly bid until their max and when there are no more bids, the auction ends.

Sorry for the late reply. Yeah, this is for a more classic auction house.

It's called "open outcry", I think. The kind with an auctioneer, a room full of people with paddles and the object (or a photo of it) up front.

It's an English auction with a pre-defined bid ladder, and people can also pre-register with a maximum (hidden) bid, according to which the clerk will bid for them.

We are streaming their auctions online, and now they want people to be able to bid at home as well. Christie's (in England) already does this.

We think it might become a big deal when smaller auction houses in small towns can have this - today, the prices are not as high as they "should", since the market is local. If we can open it up, more people, and more knowledgeable people, will bid and more of the money will flow to the original seller (or so I think).

It's a fairly simple server on Tornado, which receives the bids etc and passes messages with long-polling, with a memcache backend for scaling.