Regular Netorblogswotians (readers) know how we roll at Nestoria. We like our data. We like data that makes us smile even more.
So, in the vein of ‘funny data’ blog posts that have gone before, I bring you:
A list of Slightly Amusing UK place names
Archive for November, 2007
Nestoredes,
The next few weeks are busy ones on the London tech calendar. The Nestoria team are looking forward to attending a couple of events:
- - Tonight, MTM (and maybe others) are going to listen to Peter Rodgers discuss what could be the future of software architecture.
- London Perl Workshop - On Saturday the 1st, most of the squad will be at Westminster University’s New Cavendish Campus for LPW 2007 - London’s premiere annual Perl event. We are official sponsors and are scheduled for four talks on a variety of topics.
- Flag and Bell - An established event that is new to us, this monthly tech pub crawl (next held on Tuesday the 4th) looks like a fine opportunity to drink beer with other local software engineers.
- PlugLondon - On Saturday the 8th, Skype is sponsoring a meet-up for the London development community. It’s a good chance to peek into Skype’s undoubtedly palatial office and see what ideas are brewing among the API-minded.
Sound interesting? Why not come along?
[Corrected 29 Nov 2007 - Sat is the 1st of Dec, not the second.]
Hello Nestormanos,
We know that many of you are advanced users perched over your keyboards (or iphones) at the bleeding edge of internet innovation. So you no doubt saw the trend over the last few months of ‘vision’ sites - starting with David Troy’s twittervision and flickrvision, and most recently copied by sites like Wikipedia Vision. Like many of the most beautiful ideas - the concept is very simple. The vision sites hook into the API of the original site and display a continual stream of random data on a map. But the outcome is very powerful. It’s somehow very entertaining and soothing to watch the map glide from point to point in the continual stream of photos and locations. We were thus delighted to see our own Nestoria API employed to create UK Property Vision. Here’s a screenshot, but to truly experience it you’ll simply have to click.
Greetings Nestorlovakians,
version 1.13 of the Nestoria property API just went live. Two minor new features by popular demand. When requesting property listings (as opposed to metadata) you can now:- limit the results to only homes with photos
- request ‘random’ sorting
One clarification on randomness - we’ve seen there is a bit of confusion. Via the API you can request a random location (in which case the response is a random place name somewhere in the UK or Spain depending on which database you’ve queried) OR you can request a specific location like ‘Brighton‘ but ask that the results be sorted in random order. I hope that clears that up. If you have questions, just ping us.
See the full change log and technical docs. Enjoy!Fellow Nestorites!
Last week we launched the integration of local sport information with our partner Sportsbase to positive reviews (theRatandMouse, blognation). As you will recall we chose to use a pin with a football (the most popular sport in the UK) to represent all sport locations.Our post prompted one reader to write in saying how much he liked not only the wealth of local data we show on a Nestoria search result page, but also the aesthetic enjoyment (dare I say ‘cuteness’) of the pins themselves.
As a result today we present to you, our loyal fans, a gallery of all the local content pins we show on Nestoria UK (of course we use different pins on our Spanish property search engine) Enjoy!| Pin | Example | |
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Rent in Soho near the John Snow (Nestoria’s favourite pub) |
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house close to Wembley Stadium |
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flat near King’s Cross anyone? |
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| Schools: |  |
buy a home near Eton |
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live near Scotland Yard |
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| Places of Worship: |  |
homes for sale in Canterbury |
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South London |
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Manchester |
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Birmingham |
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Nottingham |
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Sheffield |
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Newcastle |
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| Tube: |  |
London |
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Glasgow |
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Nestos!
Good news, after a few minor tweaks we’ve moved search by property characteristics out of test mode and now enabled it for all Nestoria users.
Hello Nestoria fans,
As you know we’re always working hard to help you find your next property. And, although alarmist cries of a national obesity crisis may suggest the opposite, we know that for many people sport is a defining part of their lives. We’re pleased to announce we’ve partnered with leading UK local sport site Sportsbase to help home searchers find their dream home beside the pitch, court, or club. Here’s an example. Let’s imagine you’re searching for a flat to rent in Aberdeen:
This month we speak with Gabor Cselle, VP Engineering of innovative start up Xobni. Xobni focusses on helping people extract value from the information generated by how they use email.
Before joining Xobni, Gabor worked at Google and Yahoo! He has a masters degree in computer science from ETH Zurich. What intrigues us about Xobni is that they are helping people gain insight by extracting information from the mass of data in their email inbox (the name Xobni is inbox spelled backwards). In some ways this is similar to Nestoria’s own challenge of organizing masses of listings data. Our recent launch of acccess to property metadata is a similar attempt to gain higher level insights into the database. Gabor, thanks for talking with us 1. Explain the idea behind Xobni, and the power of making information visible. The only thing that has changed about email in the last ten years is that we’re all getting 100x more of it. Email clients are unchanged from a decade ago: You get three panes - folders, your list of emails, and a preview area. This user interface is the small hole in the wall through which peek out at vast seas of information: tens of thousands of archived messages that document our behaviors, buying habits, travel plans, relationships, and social networks. At Xobni, we want to make this data visible, useful, and actionable. We’ve built two products: Xobni Analytics, which shows you statistics about your email usage, and Xobni Insight, which is a sidebar for your email client. First, it offers lightning-fast email search. You start typing, we start searching. It shows you information about the people you communicate with. Imagine that I’m looking at an email from you. It shows me the profile for Ed Freyfogle which contains: |
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All of this information has been hiding in your email archives. Xobni makes it visible.
2. What are some of the technical challenges you face? First, we’re on the desktop and are dealing with a lot of data. We have users with 250,000 emails in their archives, and we need to be able to show information quickly. We built some proprietary technology which is a database for email information and supports quick querying and aggregation. Second, we have to integrate with existing email clients. Some of these technologies and interfaces have been around for more than a decade. They come with lots of bugs and cruft. Also, as with any desktop application, we have to support a wide variety of configurations. There are almost as many unique Windows configurations as there are Windows machines, and we need to make sure we work on all of them. 3. How might some of these concepts be applicable to the vertical search space, such as property search with Nestoria? Email and property search are very different. We have all the data on the person’s harddrive or webmail account, but you need to reach out and grab it from the web. We can simply order email search results by date or contact popularity, while you need to take into account match for search criteria, physical distance, and result freshness. I use Craigslist for searching for real estate in San Francisco. I’m constantly frustrated by it. The search criteria are city, min and max price, and whether cats or dogs are allowed. This is not that useful if you’re looking for a specific number of bedrooms in a specific neighborhood. You guys kick ass. Gabor, thanks for the vote of confidence. You’re right the volume of information we all have at our disposal is rising rapidly. We share your belief that finding ways to relevantly and quickly present masses of data is a key technical challenge for the future. For those interested in tracking the progress of Xobni as they move towards launch please subscribe to the Xobni blog and/or Gabor’s personal blog past Nestoria interviews: Gregory Marler, Artem Pavlenko, Harvey Edgecombe.N3stor!ans,??
The Nestoria Tech team is four for four in talk proposals for the London Perl Workshop (LPW) 2007:
- Marc Tobias is going to talk about what we have learned in providing a public API.
- Ed will gather the kids around the campfire and tell a haunting ghost story about the perils of internationalis(z)ation.
- Spiros has chosen to share a few passages from his collection of sonnets about??A/B testing (also known as “bucket” testing in some circles).
- Mike??has to chosen??lead the audience in a song of praise for development infrastructure and discuss the joy and peril of code coverage, profiling, and benchmarking tools.
The other talks look to be of the same high standard as last year, so I encourage anyone with an interest in Perl to come along, if not just to nerd out a bit in the pub afterwards.?? A big thanks to the organizers.?? Hope to see you there.
Join the 