Virtual reality is all the rage these days, but we were delighted when our live event in Florida last week turned in some amazing virtual stats. Florida was a little different for us this year. While we hosted a large, live event, approximately 45% of our items were located at our seller’s sites. Anyone who attends our Thursday auctions knows this is par for the course. Going into last week we wondered what the impact might be at such a large live auction. The results were astounding - once again a testament to the power of online.

The end of the year is shaping up to be pretty busy for the heavy equipment industry.  At IronPlanet, we have a large number of sales scheduled for December combined with a large amount of inventory in our two new formats - Make Offer and Truck Locator. It takes more than humans to create an efficient marketplace for this inventory.   This is where machine learning comes in.

You may be familiar with the term and you are certainly familiar with the results.  Machine learning drives everything from the results you see for a Google search, to the prices you get on Uber, to the news that appears in your Facebook feed.  In my last post, I talked about using IronPlanet’s data to build a more efficient marketplace.  Well, in the past couple of months we have begun to implement machine learning approaches to bring these data capabilities to life in order to predict and impact pricing and sales outcomes.