Boston, MA, July 01, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Invaluable, the world’s leading online marketplace for fine art, antiques and collectibles, today announced that it has secured its second U.S. Utility Patent around aggregating bidding from multiple platforms, consolidating that activity in real-time, and making it available through a single view across multiple sites and marketplaces.
This second patent, which is more specific to timed-online sale coordination, covers the fast-growing industry shift to these sales and addresses the need for these auctions to run simultaneously across multiple platforms.
D.J. Charles, Invaluable’s Chief Technology Officer, said, “The company now retains a powerful patent portfolio that covers a universal method for consolidating bidding activity across marketplaces within all auction industry sale realms - for both live sales and for the growing category of high-end, timed-online sales.
“These patent foundations began in 2013 with the realization that in order to accommodate meaningful industry growth, we had to find a scalable solution model that was missing from the auction industry to allow for massively-global participation rates across discrete platforms. Invaluable’s experience with high-volume bidding communities served as the necessary proving grounds for the concept and the resulting architecture,” added Charles.
“The future of the auction industry, now more than ever, needs to reflect that buyers come to auctions from all over the world through multiple entry points and the auction house needs to have the technology to enable and manage that buyer demand,” said Charles.
The initial patent, awarded in June 2018, solved for the issue of auction houses needing to have a number of clerks taking bids from multiple channels during a live auction. The Invaluable technology aggregates all online live auction marketplaces and funnels bids to a single auction house clerk using one clerking console powered by Invaluable. This second patent extends the method of consolidation to also include the increasingly popular timed-online (countdown) sale format, he added.
The new patent award from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office came after a two-year “continuation-in-part” application process, drawing on key benefits established in the initial invention within the first patent, said Charles.
“Invaluable has spent the past year collaborating closely with technology minds at premier auction houses and with third-party-aggregators to share the invention details and to work together to develop simple onboarding methods to enable it,” he added. “There's a great deal of enthusiasm for these advancements and we’re looking forward to enhancing the experience for the entire industry with this innovative and practical concept.”
For more information on Invaluable, to view upcoming auctions and shop from galleries and dealers, please visit www.Invaluable.com.
About Invaluable
Invaluable is the world’s leading online marketplace for buying fine art, antiques and collectibles. Working with more than 5,000 of the world’s premier auction houses, Invaluable helps buyers from more than 200 countries connect with the things they love. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Invaluable moved rapidly to help auction house partners pivot online – resulting in double-digit increases in online bidders, buyers and total auction hammer and a record 70% increase in new houses joining the marketplace. Invaluable, headquartered in Boston, has made it easier than ever for auctions houses to support their entire business: offering turn key white-label hosted web solutions, industry leading cloud-based auction management software, a consignment marketplace and the Invaluable marketplace - the largest source of buyer demand in the industry. For more information, visit www.invaluable.com or follow us on Twitter at @InvaluableLive.