Deal Fun is one of a new breed of “auction” sites, in which participants bid on new retail products whose prices increase incrementally each time another bid is placed.

Here’s how it works: DealFun starts the bidding for each of its offered items at one cent, and an auction time of fifteen hours. As each person bids, the price increases by one cent. Further, if the auction has less than 20 seconds remaining, the clock is reset to 15 seconds.

Each bid costs the participant sixty cents. Bids are purchased in packs before the auction begins. Participants need to make sure they buy enough bids to ensure they don’t run out before the auction ends.

To win, you just have to be the last person to place a bid.

And that’s the sticking point. If you monitor the bidding on an auction, you’ll notice how, as the clock ticks down to the bell,  someone else puts in a bid and the 15 second clock starts anew. To stay in the auction, you must then rebid at a cost of sixty cents. And then someone else jumps in, the clock resets, and you must bid again.

All of that clicking means that a participant will very quickly become fairly heavily invested in bidding on a product. Then, once you’re into a product for forty or fifty bids, you practically have to keep bidding to protect your investment.

Thus, while the deals generally look good at first glance, the savvy buyer must figure into the item cost the cost of the bids.

For DealFun, this model is a bit like a having the key to Fort Knox. Suppose you have an item such as an iPad which ends up selling for $300 (a steep discount over retail for the eventual winner). Since the price goes up by one cent per bid, that $300 represents 30,000 bids. Each bid nets DealFun sixty cents. So DealFun’s take on that iPad is $18,000.

When I’ve explained this to people, the first reaction is that there’s some sort of dealfun.com scam I don’t think that’s quite true. After all, someone DID get the iPad for $300. For that person, what DealFun makes on the sale really is irrelevant (Apple builds the iPad for approximately $250 and sells them for $500+. I don’t see anyone accusing Apple of ripping its customers off). Further, anyone who bid but didn’t win can still buy the iPad at retail minus the cost of their bids. That lets you recover your losses to a certain degree.

Still, you really have to pay attention to how you bid. Bidding against autobidders can drive up your costs with no appreciable gain. And working against bidders who are known to have deep pockets can do the same. Getting in too early also burns bids.

Deal Fun has a lot of products available: iPads, iPhones, Kindles, Laptops, LED TVs, PS3s, Watches, Jewelry, Toys and other consumer electronics and hard goods.

There are a lot of similar sites out there. Deal Fun, however, offers some features that differentiate it. First, there’s no weekly or monthy win cap. Other sites (presumably those with more limited stock) limit players to a certain number of wins in a given time span. They’ve also got a “Beginner’s Auction” that lets people try the site before diving into the big game.Newbies get a win guarantee on items with a retail value of less than $100: if they don’t win in the first 24 hours, all their bids are reset.

The big difference, however, is that on Deal Fun you can still get an item after the auction is over by paying the retail price less the cost of the bids you used to try to acquire the goods. That somewhat lessens the sting of spending money on bids and not coming away with a product.

This has been a sponsored post.

If you’re taking a vacation to California, it’s probably worth your while to take a look at the Disneyland LA tickets offerings at dnticket.com. They offer significant discounts on DisneyLand tickets. For example, a one day Park Hopper ticket normally runs $105, but is advertised for $84 on dnticket. They’ve also got discounts for other theme parks. I’m not sure how they do it, but my guess is that they buy blocks of tickets at a discount, then resell them with a markup.

As I’ve written in other posts, the internet has radically changed the travel industry empowering consumers to get deals that once were reserved for insiders. This is just another example.

This has been a sponsored post.

Travel is among the many things the internet has revolutionized. Once upon a time, when you wanted to take a vacation, a travel agent was needed to book flights and hotel rooms, select restaurants and entertainment venues and reserve tee times. Agents had a virtual monopoly on information and sweetheart deals with various airlines and resorts.

Now every man is his own travel agent. In just a few minutes on a computer, you can drive airlines iinto a price war for your business, choose from a thousand available hotel rooms, and make reservations at four star restaurants. Then, of course, you book the golf.

For Hawaii Golf vacations, once the travel plans are cemented, you could head over to Par Hawaii, an online site that lets you book Big Island Golf and Oahu Golf at discount rates.

Browsing the photos on the site, I can’ help but think that after Scotland, my next big golf trip will be Hawaii.

Full disclosure; This has been a sponsored post.

When the Zombie Apocalypse arrives, the survivors will be the smart ones who stocked up on their outdoor supplies ahead of time. Running to to your local S-Mart in the middle of an outbreak—dodging the zeds and competing with other survivors—is a sure way to end up as lunch.

Adabak offers as complete a line of outdoor products as I’ve seen, ranging from yard goods, to camping gear, power supplies, emergency supplies, outdoor fun and garden gear.

In short, everything you need to weather the coming crisis—or just enjoy the great outdoors until then.

This has been a sponsored post.

While watching President Obama’s jobs speech, I kept thinking that it’s like he sliced the first drive out of bounds, reloaded for a mulligan and then put the second ball in the same place.