mojungle - for sale on eBay

Yesterday, Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOM wrote that mojungle, mobile media sharing site, was for sale on eBay. The starting bid is $60k and the auction ends on December 14th. Can a company expect to achieve fair market value through an eBay auction?

I decided to scout around eBay to find other websites and businesses for sale. My goal was to discover what types of companies could sell and how much activity do the auctions get. My first search was to find “Websites & Businesses for Sale” with an emphasis on internet businesses. Not to my surprise, most of the results were turn-key adsense and adult content websites. I then refined my search by filtering out internet businesses that were listed for under $50k.

There were 2 pages of internet businesses that had a starting bid of 50k. None of these auctions had a single bid. In fact, most of the auctions were for domains names with a description that included a hyped up business plan meant to sucker the potential bidder.

A few of the auctions found in my search:
Turnkey Website sales, ebooks, software,scripts etc - Typical site auction
Microjets.com and VLJs.com - Domain names with hyped up sales pitch
PLASTICFENCE.COM - Domain name… Are they serious?

Does mojungle have a chance? Well, mojungle has a better chance of selling the company than most others on eBay because of media attention in popular blogs. Blogs like GigaOM have helped drive a considerable amount of traffic to the site and eBay listing. Aside for the recent GigaOM article, mojungle has been reviewed on Mashable, SmartMobs, eHub and MediaBistro. These positive reviews and general articles might entice a potential buyer.

In addition, the mojungle team has created short and fun video clips to promote the company through the popular site YouTube. The videos have been viewed over 200k times and boast some positive comments. This is a smart marketing concept that is being adopted by quite a few startups.

What is mojungle?

Use your mobile phone to begin recording your life. mojungle allows you to save and share your memories.

The company is a mobile media sharing site that is centered on taking photos/video from a wireless device and displaying the information in a flash widget. The widget can be added to a user’s website, blog or social networking page - MySpace. There are many companies out there that offer a similar service, but mojungle’s good reviews have been based on how easy the product is to use.

The directions, on the mojungle site, state to simply take a picture and send to now[at]mojungle[dot]com. Once the photo has been sent, the user will receive a text with a registration code. This code will then need to be sent to code[at]mojungle[dot]com to claim your pictures/video as your own.

I actually had a few problems with this process and was surprised considering the great reviews I read on Mashable. The mojungle site would not recognize or complete the registration process for my Sprint phone number. The photo that I sent to mojungle did appear on the site under “browse all photos”, but it was already registered to another user before I could claim it. I suspect the problem is that my cell number may have been registered by another user or issues with my wireless carrier/device.

Do you want to learn more about mojungle? I suggest checking out there eBAy listing and corporate blog. Selling the company through an auction could be difficult, but I might be wrong if popular blogs continue to drive traffic and spread the word. I look forward to seeing if the company is sold and using the service (if I can get it to work). Good luck mojungle.

(Photo was shot with a Treo 650 and embeded on LaunchTube using the mojungle service.)