The project: every channel at once
Chasebid was commissioned by Viaan Industries for the Indian and Dubai markets, and its defining ambition was channel coverage. Participants could bid on the website, through native Android and iOS applications, or by SMS — and the platform integrated with a televised game format with live streaming, positioned at launch as India’s first TV auction game. The product also shipped with multi-language and multi-currency support for its two markets.
One auction, four channels: the engineering brief was to make them agree with each other, instantly and visibly.
Rules precise enough to broadcast
Television changes the tolerance for ambiguity. A web auction can bury edge cases in terms and conditions; a broadcast game needs a winner every time, determined by rules an audience can follow. Chasebid’s rules, preserved verbatim in the original record, show that pressure:
- bids were placed to two decimal places, widening the guessing space;
- the lowest unique bid at close wins;
- and if no bid was unique at all, victory passed to the first-placed instance of the lowest tied bid — guaranteeing, in the announcement’s own words, that “there will always be a winner”.
That deterministic tie-break is the kind of detail only an operations-grade auction forces: fairness you can explain on air, implemented as ordering logic in the engine.
Onboarding and the bid economy
Chasebid’s bid economy was tuned for a mass consumer audience: five free bids on registration to remove the first barrier, then bulk bid packages purchasable online, with bids non-refundable — the standard economics of the format, made explicit up front. Registration-to-first-bid friction matters double when your audience arrives from a TV screen with a phone in hand.
Engineering notes
The platform ran on PHP with CodeIgniter and MySQL, with Node.js, Ajax and jQuery driving the real-time bidding surfaces, over a responsive Bootstrap/HTML5 front end — the mature form of the stack our auction practice had evolved through Swilcanbids and Bidforsin, now paired with native mobile applications on both stores.
In hindsight: a 2026 perspective
The following is present-day editorial perspective, not part of the 2017 record.
Chasebid remains our clearest early example of omnichannel thinking applied to bidding: meeting an audience on web, app, SMS and broadcast simultaneously, with one source of truth underneath. The channels have evolved — today the brief would say live video in-app where it then said television — but the architecture lesson is unchanged, and it is one we carry directly into current mobile product work and auction platform engagements: the moment an auction is watched live, consistency stops being a back-end nicety and becomes the product itself.