Fellow Nestorvolk!
As regular readers of this blog will know we take local content seriously here at Nestoria, one needs only check our gallery of local data pins. We’ve done our best to be comprehensive, partnering with many interesting sites across the web like They Work For You or geograph.org. So we immediately sprung into action when an anonymous user got in touch via our feedback from to tell us:
“There are over 60 Merseyrail stations throughout the Merseyside area and services extend as far as Chester, these should be included in your info.”
At first there was disbelief in the team as we thought we had gathered the data of every tram and local rail system in the UK (we have
Birmingham,
Manchester,
Nottingham,
Newcastle, and many others). We thought we had them all, but we were wrong. Today we’re pleased to announce that users will find yet another local content pin on Nestoria! Behold:
| the Nestoria Merseyrail pin: |
 |
See an example if you search for
homes for sale in Birkenhead.
Big thanks to the user who tipped us off. Please keep the suggestions coming. For the trainspotters amongst you, learn more about the
Merseyrail, for the rest of you happy house hunting!
In our June Nestoria Interview we are lucky enough to speak with Ivailo Jordanov. Currently Ivailo is founder of retaggr, an online identity system, while simultaneously working on launching a new property portal for the Russian market. Before that he was founder of Zoomf, an innovative, web2.0 UK property portal (and Nestoria partner), and prior to that he was an early team member at eSpotting (now Miva), the company that introduced Europe to paid search. In short, Ivailo has extensive internet (and especially search) experience.
Ivailo, thanks for taking the time from your obviously hectic schedule to speak with us.
1. Please describe the retaggr project and how you see identity on the web evolving.Retaggr is a service that enables active web users to link all their various online profiles into a single, always-updated, interactive business card that can be attached to virtually any type of content or interaction the user has on the web. Retaggr also provides photo tagging to enabled sites.
As users have more and more online profiles, we created retaggr because we wanted to allow users to put all their online personas in one place.
Identity is becoming more and more important especially because there are multiple places one can interact online and being able to show who they are will add credibility to their contributions. For example if there is a discussion happening on a property blog, it would be useful to be able to easily see which comments come from property professionals and see where else online they interact.
2. How does your experience in search lend itself to online identity?The guys building the retaggr technology are from a search background and one thing that is common is that what we are building is a high volume high performance system and they do that really well. When you are storing peoples personal details, the performance and the availability of the the system are very important, while it has to cope with growing volumes as more sites become retaggr enabled.
3. What are your thoughts on the developments in the property search sector in the last year?It is great to see that agents are realizing that their marketing budgets are better spent online, which in turn drives innovation. The experience of finding property online has improved significantly, however it is still very dependent on agents keeping their listings up to date, which is often not the case. New entrants provide a different user experience to the established property portals.
4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?
- The property search space is very competitive and the main challenge is to compete for the attention of property hunters with players with significant advertising budgets.
- If the state of the property market causes agents to cut their advertising budgets, it could have a negative effect on Nestoria’s revenues.
- The freshness and relevancy of the results. Vertical search engines are dependent on the listings they get from other sites and often the quality of property listings is not great.
- To keep the interface simple, useful and fast.
Thanks Ivailo. Useful insights from an industry insider. You are absolutely right that keeping the interface simple is a great challenge, one we grapple with all the time. Likewise freshness, a topic we’ve covered in the past, is a continual challenge. We’ll keep doing our best. Meanwhile for those user’s interested in retaggr’s innovative approach to online identity I recommend subscribing to the
retaggr blog.
past
Nestoria interviews:
Salim Mitha,
Alex Singleton, and
Tom Steinberg.
BTW - for all the hardcore (und deutschsprechende) Nestoria fans - we’ve launched our
Nestoria interview series in German over on the
Nestoria Deutschland blog
Fellow Nestoris!
Good news, we’re pleased to announce that Nestoria property searches will now also find homes for sale and for rent from
Homes24, owned by
Archant. With over 100,000 listings across the UK, this is another step forward for us in being able to offer our searchers a comprehensive property search experience. Of course for a small start-up like ourselves, its also a big vote of confidence for one of the UK’s leading media groups to chose to work with us.
Here’s a screengrab from a search for
houses for sale in Cambridge.
We hope you’re as pleased as we are. Best of luck with your house hunt!
Fellow Nestorojans!
It’s hard to believe it, but it’s now two years since we first revealed Nestoria to the world when we launched our little property search engine covering just London.
Many thanks to all of our partners and user for your continual support and feedback. It’s been a great two years. While we know we still have a long way to go (we hope to have some interesting announcements for the UK next week) we’re proud of what we’ve achieved and we couldn’t have done it without all of you.
Here’s a screenshot from the day we launched two years ago. As you’ll see the changes are subtle. Search is the art of continual fine tuning.
To celebrate this accomplishment, and also in anticipation of the impending launch of
Nestoria Italia (BTW betatest starts next week, all
beta-testers welcome), we headed off to
Farringdon for an Italian feast.
We look forward to the next two years and continued geographic expansion!
On a final note, we know many of our diligent blog readers are interested in the technical side of things here at Nestoria. We thought you might like this tidbit:
the uptime of our oldest production server:
Last login: Fri Jun 20 17:53:43 2008
f1:> uptime
17:53:53 up 514 days, 19:22, 2 users, load average: 0.82, 0.53, 0.44
See you at the
John Snow for a celebratory pint!
Ciao Nestorianos!
Our international expansion plans draw ever nearer. We’re looking for a few German and Italian native speakers to take a peek at
Nestoria Deutschland and
Nestoria Italia before we open up to the public in a few weeks time. Expect a few rough edges, but otherwise we hope to offer the same simplicity of house searching that we present to house hunters in the UK and
Spain.
If you’re interested many thanks for your help and please get in touch via our
online form, we’ll send you an invite in the coming weeks.
First came road-charging in Durham, then the London congestion charge (+ extension) and now plans have been given the go-ahead for a similar scheme in Manchester.
We’re sure everyone knows what these are by now - systems put in place to charge motorists entering or present within a specific area, with the aim of reducing traffic congestion.
A few facts about the Manchester system:
- Setup is expected to cost £2.8bn
- Provisional launch set for 2013
- Will consist of 2 ‘zones’ (one outer, one inner)
- The outer zone will be drawn roughly around the M60
- The inner zone will outline the city centre
- Entry charges will only be triggered during the morning (07:00-09:00) or evening (16:00-18:30) and will be £2 for entering the outer zone plus a further £1 for the inner zone
- Exit charges will only be triggered during the evening and will be £1 upon exiting each zone
- Public transport capacity and links are expected to be increased to ensure alternatives for motorists
What does this mean for Nestoria users?
Those that have used Nestoria to search for aproperty in central London may well have seen a little 
next to some properties. This is to let you know that this property is within the congestion charging zone. Why is this important? If you live within the zone, you get a 90% discount on the charge - not bad! There may also be other impacts - it would be more expensive for friends to drive to see you and so on.
We had this data up for London as soon as we launched, and even marked those properties in the London western extension before it went live, so that you could plan ahead.
We plan on doing the same for Manchester as soon as the zones are agreed upon - this should help you make the right decision about your next property, and make your search for the perfect nest that much easier.
Happy hunting!
Hello Nestorcandinavians,
MTM and I just got word that our talk proposals have been accepted for YAPC Europe 2008. We had a good time at last year’s event and are proud to be actively contributing this time around. I am going to speak about the various Perl profiling modules and MTM will relate some of the lessons learned building a high volume/low maintenance ETL system. Alex and Spiros will also be present in Copenhagen, so the entire team will be taking a break from building new features and concentrating on learning a few new tricks. We look forward to seeing friend old and new in August.
Join the 
