Fellow Nestordelphians,
Today we look back over the course of our interview series in 2008. We’re always on the hunt for interesting folks doing interesting things from whom we can learn, and once a month or so we publish one of our discussions with a thought leader from the realm of online property or technology, in the hopes that we can share a few new insights via the discussion. This year we’ve tried to find more ways to partner with and learn from academia, and this was reflected in our interview series where we spoke with Alex Singleton and Muki Haklay both of UCL. We’ve also chatted with some of our key partners like Tim Youngman of Archant, and Spain’s Jesus Encinar. In a twist of coincidence, our first interviewee of the year, Lloyd Sheperd, has moved on on to work at our partner Channel4 where he is now a colleague of fellow Nestoria interviewee Lelia Ferro. We’ve been inspired by several other small start ups via our chats with Stephan Uhrenbacher of Qype, Ivailo Jordanov of retaggr, and Salim Mitha of Wahanda. Our continued interest in all things neogeo was evident in our discussion with Gary Gale of Yahoo!, and Tom Steinberg of MySociety and we will certainly have more interviews from this area in the coming months. Finally we’ve had the pleasure of learning from key industry commentators Simon Baker and Brad Inman. We hope you’ve enjoyed the interviews, and of course we welcome all suggestions for next year. For those interested in looking back melancholically here’s our summary from 2007. If you’re keen to learn more about the web and new media scene in Germany, Italy or Spain, and you speak the local language, I invite you to subscribe to our local blogs where we also run regular interviews with thought leaders.Archive for December, 2008
Fellow Nestorfolk,
As promised, we’ll use this time between Christmas and New Year to reflect on 2008. Just as we did in 2007, in this post we look back at the various events we had the chance to speak at. We’re always interested in telling our story, and in learning from others in the online community, and while blogs and twitter and Facebook are great they will never replace face to face interaction. Over the last yer we had the chance to present at many great events, and we look forward to many more in 2009. In case you missed them: In January I started things off by being a panelist at Adriande Capital’s “Future of Search” event. MTM followed that by speaking about Mapstraction at Oxford Geek Night. While not technically a public speaking event, it was my pleasure to be a guest in the Guardian’s Tech Podcast in February. Meanwhile in Spain we were well represented at the Madrid Facebook Developer’s Garage, and Ruben waved the Nestoria flag as a panelist at OME 2008 in March
Nestoria in Madrid at Facebook Developer's Garage
Fellow Nestoria Fans!
Best holiday greatings from all of us to all of you. Many thanks for your help and support over the last year – we look forward to a fantastic 2009!
For our final Nestoria interview of 2008 we are lucky enough to chat with Stephan Uhrenbacher, founder of innovative pan-European local reviews site and recent Nestoria partner Qype. Besides being a great site, Qype is a fascintating business in a technical and commercial sense because it simultaneously grapples with issues of search, geolocation, user generated content and internationalization – many of the same challenges we face here at Nestoria. Prior to starting Qype, Stephan built up extensive online experience working in various roles at DocMorris.com (an online pharmacy), Bild (Germany’s largest newspaper), and European web1.0 super-brand LastMinute.com
1. Qype recently raised funds. What are your plans? Continued geographic expansion? Acquisitions? More wild parties for loyal qype users? The local space is hyper competitive. We are continuing on our track to provide a great solution for users who want to share what is good in their city. At the same time we are developing several exciting mobile products, like the new Qype Radar for iphone. And we are continuing to build our customer base of local businesses which can attract customers in a very cost effective way via Qype. 2. In the current economic climate do you see small businesses embracing new models like Qype to win more customers or retreating to the tried and true? It is certainly harder to convince people to try something new. However, as Qype drastically lowers the cost for local businesses to attract new customers, we do see a great uptake also in the UK after a phenomenal start in Germany. 3. Over the last year the mobile space has seen tremendous innovation with Apple’s iPhone and Nokia’s purchase of Navteq and subsequent emphasis on local services. What are Qype’s plans in this space? We are currently preparing for the launch of Qype Radar for the iphone, which gives you an exact picture of what is great or not so great around you. We also have released a first version of our API, which some providers are using to integrate services for other mobile and navigation devices. 4. Qype’s standard directory content is greatly enhanced with user submitted reviews. Users seem keen to write about, for example, their favorite restaurants. What possibilities do you see for reviews or user content in a less frequently used service like property search? We find it is all about frequency of usage and scale of the site. So of course we get more reviews on restaurants than on the lesser frequented services. But with the current scale of our website, 7 M unique users per month today, we see that we get a very solid review base over less often used services. thanks Stephan for your time. Anyone interested in Qype’s progress should subscribe to their blog, and you can keep up with Stephan via Twitter. past Nestoria interviews: Gary Gale, Muki Haklay, and Brad Inman.The current crisis of the housing market is exacerbating a very British obsession with house prices. Here at Nestoria we decided to approach this topic with a lighter spirit. In order to find which areas are becoming good value, we created Nestoholic.com.
Nestoholic is a web site that compares average asking prices of houses between different locations in London and the UK. Renthusiast announced the official launch of Nestoholic earlier this week.
If you are not to be carried away by the doom and gloom of this end of the year, you might be interested in finding by yourself that average asking house price is a very resilient metric. There seems to be a time lag between the mortgage approvals and the expectations of asking house prices. Sellers are, on average, seemingly not desperate and they rather wait for the right buyer to come their way. Probably private buy-to-let investors and many passive sellers with unoccupied homes are dampening the big falls of actively-selling properties as reported by estate agents.
You might as well find locations within commuting distance from London whose trends are beginning to diverge, like comparison of prices of Harpenden and Brighton. Admittedly, the very rich will not be affected anyway, we just need to check the prices in Chelsea, for instance.
Nestoholic is one of the ideas that we are testing as part of Lokku Labs. The primary intent of these experiments consists in showing some possible uses of the Nestoria API and motivate developers and webmasters to squeeze all the value that their imagination sees fit from our database.
To learn more about how Nestoria obtain its average asking prices please read Nestoria’s help page about house price data. We are looking forward to hearing from anyone ready to spend some time to create a new approach to our data, so please do not hesitate to contact us.
Fellow Nestorwits,
As you know we’re always on the lookout for new ways to spread the word about Nestoria and, more importantly, to gather feedback from our users. Well, if 140 or fewer character musings are your cup of tea (and based on the followers we’ve accumulated it seems that’s the case for some of you) then we invite you to follow us on twitter where we’ve started firing off occasionally.
Fellow Nestorphiles,
as the ancient adage goes, three things are important in buying a property: location, location, and location. We know finding your next home is inherently a “local” experience, and as such we rarely make a big deal about the fact that we operate Nestoria in multiple European markets. Nevertheless, as part of our annual summary series we thought it fitting to update you on our progress over the last year in the various other markets Nestoria operates it.
Fellow Nestorianers,
we’ve once again reached that time in which it is natural to look back and reflect on the year that has passed. What went well, what have we accomplished, but also what could be done better in the future and what challenges lie ahead (hint: many). In the coming weeks we’ll be dashing off a few blog posts reflecting publicly on 2008, but last week was a chance for the team to step aside from the day to day pleasure of vertical search engine building and clear our heads for the year ahead. In what has become a company tradition we headed down to the Basque country for a few days of celebration and contemplation. On the festive side of things, you will no doubt be glad to know that we managed to find several opportunities to sample the local cuisine, the wine, the culture and the nightlife.
Lokku hits the beach
COLD!
The future will, like 2008, be very much about doing more with less, be it the scalability of our systems or to continue building and intensifying partnerships with like-minded companies and organisations. On the note, I’d like to explicitly thank all of our valued business partners (especially those that worked with us first, when we started with nothing – rest assured that we have not forgotten your bet on our tiny start up).
In this spirit, we wish all Nestoria blog readers and, most of all, all Nestoria users a happy and festive holiday season wherever these words may find you. Many thanks for your continual feedback and support. With your help we look forward to a fantastic 2009.
Fellow Nestorvengers,
As keen readers of this blog know we’ve got a place in our hearts for trains, trams and rail systems generally. Given that, and the fact that we live in central London we’ve been avidly following the never ending debate about the Crossrail project. Well it seems, credit crunch be damned, this project is finally going forward, and it is to be hoped that it will be possible to cross London in less than an hour! Finally I’ll be able to shoot from Woolwich over to Ealing Broadway. Oh happy day! In a clear validation on this project’s irreversibility Central London home searchers will be pleased to know that we now show Crossrail as part of our local transport information:
For this month’s Nestoria interview we have the pleasure of chatting with Gary Gale, Head of UK Engineering for Yahoo!’s Geo Technologies Group.
Over the past year Yahoo! has rolled out several geography related services for the developer community. Most innovative has been location broker service Fire Eagle. Perhaps more impressive from a technical point of view is the recently released Yahoo! GeoPlanet API. Services like these are rapidly becoming part of the core infrastructure of the web and make life much easier for application developers like Nestoria (another great example is Yahoo!’s excellent user interface library which we use heavily). Beyond providing these tools, various Yahoo! consumer services – most notably flickr – have been particularly innovative in their use of the concept of ‘location’ to add to the value of their offering. Gary, many thanks for meeting with us. 1. What are the goals of the Yahoo! Geo Technologies group and why are you providing these services to the online community? We create technologies that connect Yahoo!’s users with the world around them. You’ll see these directly with our developer tools such as GeoPlanet, our Maps APIs, and Fire Eagle of course, but our technology also quietly underlies most Yahoo! web sites — we’re the ones who ensure that you receive local, georelevant information when you search at or browse Yahoo! 2. What are some of the coolest apps you’ve seen, and what apps do you hope to see emerge in the next year or so? “Cool” is a very subjective and personal thing so this is very much my own take on this topic. When we released the GeoPlanet web service, people produced mashups to explore the API and to understand the underlying data. My favourite was YPlaces, a mashup which allowed you to delve into the WOEID hierarchy that a place was part of. It also illustrated how many differing services, in this case Yahoo! GeoPlanet, Google Maps, PropertyMaps and Microsoft Virtual Earth could come together to produce a cohesive app. I’m a big Fire Eagle fan and update my location at least twice a day so I’m always on the lookup for an iPhone location updater. I’ve tried them all but keep coming back to yofe!. It’s lightweight, elegant and does exactly what you want it to do without any additional overhead or eye candy; it’s almost UNIX like in its’ simplicity. But I still think the coolest stuff is the geo technology my Engineering teams have produced and which drive Fire Eagle, GeoPlanet and most of the Yahoo! web sites. This is the technology that knows that in a string such as “great coffee in London”, London is the place and that it’s most probable that London, UK is the London that is being referenced. That’s very cool. Even more so is the fact this this technology knows this in many languages and that London, Londra, Londres and ロンドン are all the same place. I use this technology every day and I still find it fascinating and very, very cool. 3. What perspective does Yahoo! have on the pure opensource geo tools and datasets that are emerging (for example OpenStreetMap) Yahoo! is a huge supporter of (and contributor to!) Open Source, and the Geo Technologies team is similarly enthusiastic here. We’ve recently opened GeoPlanet, our global resource of named places, and we are striving to make all of our geo technologies as open and accessible as possible. We’re very impressed with what is coming out of OpenStreetMap.org, and assist with their mission where we can. 4. What do you see as the best opportunities for a vertical search engine like Nestoria to take advantage of the new services being offered by Yahoo! and your major competitors? Yahoo! is very much aware of the value of geo-informed, local data. Place and Location are the centre of all things — any products and web sites that provide geo-relevant information to their users should be looking very closely indeed at geographic and mapping tools. Indeed trendwatching.com has identified geo and maps, or “mapmania” as they term it, as one of the six key trends for 2009. My favourite quote from the trend report is “any consumer-focused brand would be stupid not to be partnering or experimenting with map-based services” and this pretty much sums up why geo is such a great domain to work in Thanks Gary. We look forward to witnessing and benefiting from the increasingly rapid pace of innovation from Yahoo!. You can learn more about what the Yahoo! Geo group is up to over on the Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog. past Nestoria interviews: Muki Haklay, Brad Inman, Simon Baker.
