Last night, MTM and myself went in for a bit of matchmaking. A local software guru organized an event for start-ups looking for developers and developers looking for start-ups. It was a bit like speed dating for the nerdcore set. Nestoria are currently in the market for talented contractors to help us build some new and experimental applications on top of our API. We need people that are technically capable (can build and host online applications) and have excellent design and UI development skills (CSS, JS, HTML). The ideal person or team would be based in London and have a serious fetish for neo-cartography. We are of course open to working with those that are more geographically remote and/or less personally intense about maps. The event helped us to generate a number of good leads but if you know anybody that fits the bill and is looking for work please drop us a line.
Archive for October, 2008
Fellow Nestorneys!
I’m pleased to let you know that for the third year in a row Nestoria will be sponsoring the annual London Perl Workshop, an all day gathering of perl programmers to be held on 29th of November. The final lineup of speakers is not yet set, but we have high hopes to have a few Nestoria representatives on the list. The past events have been very informative both for experienced perl users and those just looking to get started, and anyone in the London area with any interest in perl should attend.
Fellow Nestorers,
today we announce another step forward in our effort to supply you the property searcher with rich local content to help make finding your next home as simple as possible. We’re very pleased to announce that we’ve teamed up with innovative local reviews site Qype in the UK (but also on Nestoria Germany) to begin showing property searchers data about local pubs, nightlife, free time activities and local services.
Say for example you’re keen to leave your sleepy village and dive into the scene in London. Well, you’ll probably be interested in finding something to rent in Shoreditch, and from there you can then start planning your late night consequences. Likewise, after a few years in the big city and once you’re over the age of 23, you may be interested in living as far as possible from some of these places. Regardless, we show you them all on the map. Enjoy!
BTW – This new feature means we’ve had to extend the Nestoria local content pin collection. It’s not easy to come up with a simple symbol for ‘leisure’, especially given the high standards of our users, and even more so that small band of power users we refer to as “pinspotters”.
We hope you like them:
| Pin | Example | |
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| Nightlife: |  |
Rent in Chelsea near Boujis (site of many a Nestoria celebratory outing) |
| Leisure: |  |
Lettings near Hampstead Heath |
Readers of this blog will by now be surely aware that the Nestoria engineering team has a proven attendance record through several technical conferences, including YAPC Europe 2008 in Copenhagen, YAPC Europe 2007 in Vienna as well as the two London Perl Workshop events in 2006 and 2007.
This time we’re heading back to the roots and two team members, Mike and I (Spiros) will be attending the Twincity Perl Workshop, happening in Vienna and Bratislava from the 7th of November to the 8th. Mike will be giving a talk about Perl profiling, reviewing the best tools for the job along with tips and tricks learned. I will be talking about A/B testing, how one can implement it and the basics behind its operations, including many pictu Continue reading ‘Twincity Perl Workshop 2008, Nestoria represent!’
Fellow Nestoridians!
Today we’re happy to announce that Nestoria users are now able to find listings from our new partner PropertyIndex when searching on Nestoria. Here’s an example on a search for a two bed flat in W14:
Fellow Nestoriaks!
As mentioned in our recent interview with Brad Inman, founder and publisher of Inman News is coming to London in a few weeks time to learn more about the UK market. For anyone interested there will be an informal and open-to-all event at the Windmill Pub in Mayfair from 18:00 on Thursday the 16th of October. This isn’t a Nestoria event, it’s just a great chance for anyone interested in learning about the US property market to speak with an industry leader, while also sharing a pint or two with friends from the London online property scene. No need to RSVP, just show up. We look forward to seeing you there. A bit of background on Brad for those less familiar with the US property scene: Inman News is the most authoritative source of independent real estate news in the United States. It syndicates its content to more than 50,000 newspapers and websites around the world. Real Estate Connect, Inman’s twice-yearly conference, attracts over 1000 top executives from technology and real estate to conferences twice a year in New Year and San Francisco. An entrepreneur, journalist and technology expert, Brad is best known for highly-successful internet content businesses including Homegain.com, an internet lead aggregator which he sold in 2005 to Classified Ventures. He is also the founder of Turnhere.com, a leading provider of low-cost, internet video advertising for small and medium-sized businesses. See you on the 16th!Fellow Nestorphiles!
One of the biggest challenges we face in offering a compelling property search experience is that on the one hand users like Nestoria for the simple, fast, clean experience, on the other hand, property is inherently a complicated topic with lots of little details. We’ve discussed some of our approaches at addressing this in the past. This challenge applies not only to the presentation of the properties and the filers for sorting them, but also to the tools around finding a new home. As we become an increasingly digital society people want their data in more and more formats. For example maybe you want your property search results via geoRSS, or KML or GPX. Or maybe you want to email a Nestoria page to someone you’re house-hunting with. We offer all of these formats and options, but want to find a way to make them available to users who want them without cluttering the experience for everyone else. Likewise some users (but probably only a small percentage) may want to see the OpenStreetMap version of Nestoria So for some time we’ve been mulling what to do. Yesterday we launched our new “viral/tools panel” on the property search results page. As you can see on this screenshot of property for sale in Sheffield, on the upper right side of search result pages users can now click on the panel to display a host of options for sending results to your friends or bookmarking or alternate formats.
