Exit via eBay?

An e-mail from an old acquaintance informs that his company will be selling one of its products on eBay. Not just licenses, but the whole deal including code, websites, and doco. Everything but the dev team, which has 'moved on' to other projects. The product itself is a combination individual and group scheduler, fully Web 2.0/AJAX buzzword compliant.

Right now the auction isn't very interesting, at just over $120. It's got another six days to run, and is worth a watch. While the tactic feels like a punt, if something like this obtained an interesting price it could suggest a means for brokering small product or company exits that don't fit into the conventional i-banking range. A result that was interesting from a VC's point of view would be extraordinary, but this feels more like the foreshadowing of a possible alternate exit path for two stage ventures.

Update 7/11/06: Auction price now over $14,000 with 24 hours or so to go. Still not going to ring any bells, but getting a bit more interesting. Stay tuned.

Final update: And that's where it finished. Hard to call it anything but a failure. Perhaps there will be a marketplace for sale of product level assets at some point, but this clearly wasn't the first case. One notable issue here was the lack of a team to back up the code, which needn't always be the case.