Astone, the Telegram auctions bot
Astone, reltime auction platform for Telegram
The Challenge
This is a project born from an internal idea, a lot of times was asked us to develop solutions to manage auctions. There are a lot of auctions applications, typically web based, but we wanted to do something innovative, exploiting the power of Telegram, a platform that we appreciate a lot.
The Solution
We developed this telegram bot as a platform to serve both users, willing to publish auctions than users that want to bid for items.
With Astone user can create an auction from Telegram itsef, is in place an approval process to avoid publishing contents that can infringe copyright or other rules.
When an auction is approved, a start date and time is set. When auction starts, Astone creates an engagement experience, with the pressure given by the same experience a user can live going to a real auction.
The outcome
The outcome is a proof of concept that is used as starting point for a lot of custom projects. Occasionally the original bot is updated bringing to it some improvements.
The original project is released as open source here