Archive for December, 2007

Nestoria Interviews - 2007 in Review

Published by Ed on December 31, 2007 in interviews. 1 Comment

Greetings Nestorinites!

As a team of very limited resources we’re always stretched. More and more the issue becomes not how to do things, but what we should be doing at all.

Over the last year each month we’ve made space here on the blog to interview different thought leaders from the world of property, online mapping, and how internet technologies are influencing our lives. Our hope is that by highlighting the opinions of some of these influencers we can stimulate the debate regarding how best to apply the amazing technical possibilities the internet allows.

For today’s post we thought we’d highlight these conversations and also update you on where some of these people have now gone.

From the realm of Property we had the pleasure of speaking with:

The rapidly innovating world of ‘neogeography‘ is a space we draw a lot of product inspiration from. We were lucky enough to speak with some of the space’s most influential thinkers over the last year:

Finally, many of the challenges we face here at Nestoria like relevancy, usability, extracting meaning from masses of data, and the ever-present challenge of grappling with new technologies and their uncertain implications are shared by other web businesses. As such it’s natural for us to draw ideas from other innovative internet sites. We spoke with several folks from diverse sites about the issues they see and what we can learn from it.

Thanks to all of this year’s interviewees. We’ll of course be continuing the series into 2008, and welcome all suggestions as to whom you’d like to see interviewed. In writing this review one thing that leaps out at me is that our list is 100% male, which is of course a very poor reflection of the reality of the world. We’ll see what we can do to address this gender imbalance in the new year.

BTW - For our Spanish reading friends, we of course also run a parallel interview series on our Spanish blog.

And with that all that remains is for me to extend happy New Year’s greeting to all our readers! See you in 2008.

The Nestoria Roadshow - 2007 in Conferences

Published by Ed on December 29, 2007 in about us and events. 1 Comment

Fellow Nestorpudlians,

Continuing in our series of posts looking back on the last year we thought we’d highlight the various conferences and events we spoke at over the last year. As you can perhaps surmise from this blog, we’re keen to get the message out about Nestoria. Please let us know if there are any events you’d like to see us at in 2008.

So, dearest Nestoria blog readers - where would you like to see us in 2008? Anyone organising a conference with an audience interested in hearing more about the challenge of European vertical search (from the technical or the business side) should please get in touch.

Nestoria Rank update - December 2007

Published by Ed on December 28, 2007 in Nestoria Rank, New Features, search and technical. 1 Comment

Fellow Nestorwegians,

The time between Christmas and the New Year is a natural chance to look back on the last year and what we’ve accomplished. The next few days we’ll do a few more reflective posts summarising some of the accomplishment of the past year.

First up we thought we’d revisit Nestoria Rank, the algorithm we use to try to present relevant results to property searchers. Over the last few months we’ve continually experimented with changes designed to get people to the right house or flat more quickly.

Some of these changes have been very visible, others are more related to the algorithm itself. Let’s go through some of the more visible improvements first:

We now allow you to search by property characteristics.

screenshot of searching for property characteristics

This means searches like: an unfurnished two bed flat to rent near Little Venice with a balcony are now easily possible (right now we have 111 of them in the database)

Likewise, we’ve added the ability to filter your search only for “new builds”

We know newness to the market, or ‘freshness’ as we call it is a critical part of how people search for their next home so we now show you how long a property has been on the market and allow you to sort properties by age.

We’ve also integrated more and more local content to provide context to your property search. Most recently we’ve updated the London tube lines to add the London Overground, but we also added sports facilities and parking spaces in the last few months.

But those are just some of the new features you as a user can see. Rest assured we’ve been equally hard at work optimising the backend systems that you don’t see. Over the last few months we’ve been experimenting with systems that learn from individual user behaviour and adapt in real time. This is still in test mode, but we’re almost there. So don’t be surprised if the guy sitting next to you in the office starts getting Nestoria different search results than you.

Our thanks go out to everyone for the feedback we get on new features, but especially we’d like to thank those folks who volunteered to be betatesters.

So, what does 2008 hold? Well in the immediate future you can expect better integration of the metadata we recently made available via our API, and we’re always playing with data visualisation.

BTW - If you don’t like the way we’re displaying search results you have two choices: please let us know what we could do better and we’ll try to run a test with your suggested modification, or you can try your hand at our API and build your own interface. In the last month there have been many interesting uses of the API.

Nestoria Christmas event

Published by Ed on December 21, 2007 in about us. 1 Comment

Fellow Nestormen!

Last week the team behind Nestoria visited Bilbao in Spain for our annual company Christmas adventure. A great chance to escape from our day to day work of continually fine tuning property search relevance and instead reflect on both the things that have gone well over the last year and things we can do better in the coming year (more on this in a few posts next week).

What better way to refresh our thinking than our traditional body boarding dunk in the Bay of Biscay? Now you may ask “Dear God man! Isn’t it painfully cold to get in the North Atlantic at this time of year?”, and we will answer “Yes. It is painfully cold”. But such are the challenges we’re willing to endure to ensure we’re approaching property search with fresh thinking.

Lokku team photo 2007

We look forward to presenting you a few of our new ideas in the coming year.

Best holiday greetings to you and your families from all of us here at Lokku!

Lokku team photo 2007

Nestoria data in action - London Profiler

Published by Ed on December 20, 2007 in API, Google Maps and web 2.0. 3 Comments

Dearest Nestors,

Recently Alex Singleton of UCL’s Department of Geography got in touch with us to let us know about an amazing tool they’ve developed: London Profiler.

London Profiler screenshot

The tool is a great example of the advancements in online cartography in the last 2 years. The UCL team has overlayed all sorts of data sets as heat maps on a Google map of London. They’ve integrated the ability to overlay Nestoria KML feeds with all sorts of cool demographic data like educational achievement, and health. The data is incredibly detailed, literally down to the street.

The one that we found most interesting - E-society data that measures how ‘e-literate’ the local population is. Apparently Nestoria headquarters are in an area that is ‘E-marginalised’! We’ll work on improving our computer skills. Meanwhile London Profiler is an interesting tool we recommend any Londoner or anyone interested in cool cartographic data visualisation check out.

Know of other clever uses of Nestoria data? Please let us know.

Nestoria Yahoo! Widget version 2

Published by mtm on December 19, 2007 in API and tools. 1 Comment

Nestoria search results always ready and updated on your PC at the stroke of a key?

That is now possible with the new Nestoria Yahoo! Widget created by Oleg Lavrovsky unsing the Nestoria API. (Thanks a lot Oleg!)

Apple-computer users already know the Apple Dashboard. The Yahoo! Widgets are very similar *), but they work for both MS Windows and Apple computers. Once installed you also get a clock, calculator, weather, stock quotes and hundreds of other install-able applications accessible on your desktop. Oh, and the by pressing ‘F8′ on your keyboard you can show and hide them (I did say ’stroke of a key’ :) ).

The Nestoria Yahoo! Widget version 1 got downloaded 949 times. To install the new widget go to the Yahoo! Widget Gallery and search for ‘nestoria’. You will see a large yellow ‘Get it!’ button. Click it.

The widget can be minimized (just the searchbox), mini-view (shows 3 results) and full-view (shows 8 results). It allows sorting results by price, newest, relevancy and keeps a list of your previous searches.

screenshot of Nestoria Yahoo! Widget

screenshot of Nestoria Yahoo! Widget

All feedback is welcome.

*) There is some controversy if Apple just copied the ideas from Konfabulator (now Yahoo! Widgets)

Nestoria Interview - Adam Samuel - Nubricks

Published by Ed on December 17, 2007 in interviews. 3 Comments

This month we speak with Adam Samuel, author of Nubricks, an influential international real estate blog documenting the ins and outs of overseas property. Along with great articles, Nubricks Overseas Property Podcasts probe a bit deeper to some of the issues affecting the international property development industry and have garnered a strong following of listeners seeking a snapshot on the different overseas markets emerging.

Adam, thanks for making the time to speak with us.

1. As a long time observer of the market, how has the current state of the mortgage market changed the outlook for overseas properties?

The overseas property industry has come of age over the past 5-10 years with new emerging markets appearing on the scene on what seems like a weekly basis, as soon is Thailand heralded as an investment hotspot Vietnam comes along as the new kid on the block. The strength of the established property markets of Spain, France and Portugal is very much associated with a strong, diverse mortgage market, offering buyers and investors the opportunity to borrow money against property in these locations. These overseas property markets are essentially driven by wealthy northern Europeans seeking a warm climate in close proximity, that is easily accessible through a choice of low-cost carrier alternatives and above isn’t too far out of their comfort zone where property practices are well established and ’safer’ than say an emerging market it is these factors which ensure these countries remain the most popular and diverse within the market for overseas property. The lack of mortgage option available to foreign purchasers in many of the new emerging countries means they enjoy limited appeal from mainly cash rich investors who are able to purchase buy property outright. They are perceived as being riskier with greater risk of fraudulent buying practices taking place due to poorly regulated marketplace. The upside of a market being less accessible means property prices on the whole are lower and as the property market there develops there is greater potential for a return on your investment. Continue reading ‘Nestoria Interview - Adam Samuel - Nubricks’

All aboard the London Overground

Published by Ed on December 11, 2007 in New Features. 2 Comments

Nestojans,

As those of you in London may have noticed, Transport for London is hard at work preparing our capital for the 2012 Olympics. Last month one of the first steps in the project came to life - the London Overground was launched and serves 57 stations in the Greater London area.

Needless to say, proximity to public transport is one of the key drivers of property price. Starting today we’ve added the London Overground to the local transport data that we show on search results pages. See for example this screenshot from Richmond:

screenshot of Richmond overground tube stations

We also used the update as a chance to do a bit of clean up. For example in my neighbourhood the old Shoreditch station is now gone (Long live the soon to be open Shoreditch High Street station.)

Have a look and please let us know if we’ve overlooked anything. With 275 stations on the network it’s not trivial to stay on top of all the changes.

Happy commuting!

First PlugLondon event a success

Published by mtm on December 10, 2007 in API and events. 1 Comment

Dear Nest-h??kchen *

Saturday was the first PlugLondon event in central London. 50 software developers (and one web designer) met in the fancy Skype offices over pizza and beer. And then went to the pub for more … socialising.

We saw demos from MySociety, Ebay Europe Innovate, BBC Backstage, DAO-Consumer, Yahoo! Development center and Nestoria among others. The focus was clearly on presenting new projects and APIs and getting feedback from fellow programmers. Some projects are still alpha or closed so I can’t link to them :)

As for the Nestoria API presentation (slides): I’ve never had such focused questions and suggestions, e.g. how to find duplicate photos. Several people in the audience have used our API in the past, one is using it in a Yahoo! Pipes project to find a flat in Brighton right now.

PlugLondon #2 might have a different format. 3.5 hours on a Saturday afternoon was a bit short and there wasn’t enough time to chat between the demos. I’m looking forward to the next one!


(photos from codepo8’s Flickr stream)

* old German expression for last-born/youngest child in a family

Nestoria at LPW 2007

Published by astle on December 4, 2007 in API, events and technical. 4 Comments

Neskimos,

Nestoria was proud to be a sponsor of the 2007 London Perl Workshop for the second year. All four of our talks went down pretty well:

This year’s event was as good if not better than the last. Thanks to the organizers for pulling everything together - especially the beery pub meet-up after.