This blog mainly designed to provide supporting comment for our company website, sensibledevelopment.com. We specialize in the provision of online auction software. We have clients in the machinery and charity and fundraising sector and are looking to expand in to other sectors. Hopefully I will provide some useful insight on the auction industry (and the internet at large) and it will be a useful resource for those looking to move an auction business online.

However, as this blog is hosted on my personal web address there may from time to time be posts of a lesser business nature. As we all know, too much work can make Jack a dull chap, and to be honest, who wants to be beaten around the head by business talk all day everyday. So there will the odd post about my me and my thoughts outside the general goal of this site.

Ok, that illustrates why this blog, exists. Who am I?

I am Alan Newman. I am MD of a Brighton based auction application service provider based in Brighton. I also live in Brighton, with partner, Abi and three kids, Freddie, Frank and Dexter.

I founded the Sensible Development as a freelancer and consulting vehicle whilst at Sportal, just before I was made redundant (along with a few others…) by them back in 2001.

Oh they were the days.

I left the company with some funds I had raised through the sale of a football manager game to them during my employment and decided I should have a go at it on my own. Previous to Sportal I had worked as an application developer on the trade floor of merchant bank Republic National Bank of New York. Before then I was an application developer and analyst at the Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Trust in West Sussex.

As a developer I have pretty much always been involved in application development. In the beginning it was VB on a Windows platform, then as the web started to become something I taught myself Java and migrated my skills to the open source environments. There has always pretty much be a database involved.

Once set up as a consultant I worked with Nokia and Symbian in the early days of mobile application development. I wrote many white papers for both organisations explaining the basics of J2ME development for these emerging Java enabled devices. It was pretty exciting times and I got to fly around Europe for a couple of years getting to grips with what other in various start ups were doing. There was a lot of innovation going on. This pretty much culminated in my being asked to write three chapters and a couple of demo apps for the Programming Java 2 Micro Edition on Symbian O book published by Symbian Press.

After this finished, and we started to have kids it was time to settle down and concentrate on building a business. So I returned more to my roots and got a few clients based around eCommerce and Product based CMS website. Then in 2006 we landed our first big client, Apex Auctions, and started to build their auction system. This meant I needed to grow the company. We continue to work for Apex Auction on there auction system, whilst now having produced our own auction system for license to other clients. We now have a few auction clients in the machinery sales and charity & fundraising sectors and looking forward to finding some more.