Archive for July, 2009

OSCON – New Venue, Great Content

Published by astle on July 28, 2009 in events and technical. Comments

Those that follow these things will know by now that OSCON 2009 took place in San Jose, California rather than its traditional home of Portland, Oregon.  Since this was my first year in attendance, I can not compare the two locations, but I can say that SJ was a welcome and consistently sunny break from the unreliable British Summer.  Lokku was good enough to let me go for the entire conference (2 days of half day tutorials followed by 2.5 days of one hour sessions and exhibitions), and I’ve come back quite a bit wiser on the happenings in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community.

I took the opportunity of the tutorials to get my head around some new (to me) programming languages.  SmallTalk is the original OO lingo with a legacy going back to the 1980s.  It has never been in favor for commercial development despite having had features back then that many “modern” OO languages (e.g. Java) lack today.  I was impressed by the Squeak development environment and its close interaction with the SmallTalk VM.  Working with SmallTalk requires a big change in mindset, but I see how it is worth it for a certain family of applications.  I get the impression that lots of current SmallTalk work is based on Seaside – a web frameframework that is the basis of the very cool DabbleDB online data navigator.

Erlang is another language with a long history that is back in the news of late.  Originally developed by academics with an eye towards use in the telcoms industry, its easy parallelism and compact syntax seem to have attracted a new audience.  Erlang and the Open Telecom Platform (OTP), make it easy to build applications comprised of many threads free communicating among eachother.  It is another tool that changes your approach to coding.  Erlang lacks some basic constructs that you find in almosst any “commercial” language.  For example, the best way to do a while() loop is through tail recursion.

Databases are another hot topic in the FOSS world right now.  MySQL got bought by Sun and Sun got bought by Oracle.  Many businesses (like Lokku) rely on MySQL and there is a certain amount of uncertainty out there about its future.  For whatever reasons, a number of MySQL forks have appeared.  I attended a session on one of these forks called ‘Drizzle’.  It is an effort to create a micro-kernel DB ready for scalable deployment in “The Cloud” (more on that later).  Best guess is that they will have stable code with a deployed userbase about this time next year.  Other groups are taking a different tack and eschewing SQL althogether in favour of databases focused on more particular uses.  For example, CouchDB is a documented-oriented database from the Apache Software Foundation and Neo4J is a database optimized for searching graphs.  Lots of movement and innovation in this area.

The various keynote talks were a mixed back of predictions and advocacy for various ideas and causes.  Getting FOSS into government and government money to FOSS-based companies was a topic of much discussion.  Along those lines, Sunlight Labs and others made their case for opening up government data.  Seems that the new US administration is moving in a direction that pleases the e-telligensia.  Our future also seems destined to bring us smaller devices offering ubiquitious services and more women working in IT in general and FOSS in particular.

The trip to San Jose was definitely worth it for more than just the sunshine and fish tacos.  I could certainly see myselfor others from the Lokku team) returning to OSCON in the years ahead.

Where Can I Live? goes International

Published by Ed on July 23, 2009 in New Features. Comments

Fellow Nestorfolk!

A few months back we announced the launch of Where Can I Live?, our tool for allowing you to search for a place to live via tube stations in London. Today I’m pleased to announce that we’ve now expanded the “Where Can I Live” brand to several other major EU cities: Barcelona, Berlin, Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan, Munich,and Rome, and we hope to add a few more in the coming months. So now you can find that new dream villa on the Med, or the rooftop flat only a few streets away from the Oktoberfest. Go crazy and let your housing imagination run wild.

Wo soll ich hinziehen in Berlin?
screenshot of wo-soll-ich-hinziehen.com in Berlin

Big thanks go out to “the Original Geomobster” Chris Osborne who helped us with this project. And of course the kids at CloudMade who make the cool map rendering tools that make it so easy to have nicely styled OpenStreetMap maps.

Please give the new sites a try, we think they’re a useful tool for folks moving to “the big city”. But don’t just take our word for it – we’ve had some good coverage from the old blogosphere about the new sites. Have a read over at Immobilienportale, TheSTARTUP, Loogic, and error500. And of course there’s the local langage coverage on the other Nestoria blogs: auf deutsch, en castellano or en italiano.

Trova la tua nuova casa
Need a place in Milan?

All of these projects fall under Lokku Labs, which is where we show of some of our experiments. We try to explore new technologies or interfaces that aren’t yet ready for Nestoria. Please have a look and let us know what you think. Hopefully we’ll have some more new things to report in the coming weeks. But if you’re into geocrafting you don’t need to wait until then, just take the old API for a spin.

As always I close by wishing you happy house hunting!

SOTM09 Summary

Published by Ed on July 20, 2009 in events. Comments

Fellow Nestordammers!

Last weekend Mike and I had the pleasure of attending State of the Map, the annual gathering of the OpenStreetMap community, in Amsterdam. Congratulations to the organisers for putting on a fantastic event, and the the OSM community for the amazing progress over the last five years. The past year specifically has seen great advancements from OpenStreetMap on difficult topics like the data license, rolling out a new API, and the general technical problem of rapidly scaling the number of contributors and users.

The conference addressed many of these topics and much more. There we many great talks, and it was a great chance to learn about the ever expanding OSM ecosystem. OSM founder Steve Coast rallied the crowd with his keynote about “OSM 1 Million”, Aaron Cope from flickr talked about how they’ve used OSM to enhance their user experience, and Mike Migurski from Stamen showed off some of the beautiful things that are possible when you have access to the raw geographic data.

But these are only a few examples of the many good talks, and I advise you to check out the talks yourself. Thanks to the organisers for recording everything.

While the technical talks were interesting, the most innovative use of OSM data surely had to be the delicious OSM cake maps.

OSM cakes
photo thanks to flickr user rhodes

The diversity of the crowd was striking, with representatives from well over 20 countries. Many countries took the opportunity to present, and some of these talks were the most interesting of the weekend. The diversity of challenges the OSM community is taking on is considerable; from countries like Egypt, Palestine and Cuba where political considerations impact the mapping process to developing countries like Pakistan and Moldova, to countries like France and Canada where much of the nation’s geodata has been donated and volunteers now face the nontrivial task of importing it into OSM.

It was great to catch up with old friends (and it was pleasing to see how many of the speakers were past Nestoria interviewees!), and to meet new ones. But of course there was also work to be done! On Sunday I had the chance to address the crowd about some of the lessons we’ve learned about how users search on Nestoria, and how this might be applicable to OpenStreetMap.

How People Search For Locations

There’s also a podcast available here.

I was pleased that the talk generated the desired healthy discussion, which will now continue over on the newly created OSM geocoding mailing list. If you’re interested in geocoding (and really, aren’t we all?), please get on the list and start contributing.

Finally, a big thanks go out to the organisers of SOTM09 for putting on a great event from start to finish. The facilities and hospitality were excellent and we’re already looking forward to the next major OSM event: FOSSGIS 2010 in Osnabrück in early March.

Property search to go

Published by nomsa on July 9, 2009 in API. Comments

Hello Nestor iFans!

We are happy to report that a developer named Iain McLean has taken us up on our offer and gone and developed a new application for the iPhone using our free Nestoria API. It is called iProperty and available via the iTunes Store.

iproperty1iproperty2

The reviewers at Know Your Mobile have only praise for iProperty. The many features include filtering by number of rooms, rent, buy, houses, flats, and price. It allows you to search by entering a location or alternatively by pinpointing your geolocation via the iPhone’s GPS and searching within a specified radius. Truly, property search on the go. The App is also available for property search in Italy, Spain and Germany.

Nestoria.it turns one year old!

Published by Ed on July 5, 2009 in about us. Comments

Fellow Nestoripolitanos,

The birthday season here at Nestoria continues. This week we celebrate the one year anniversary of the launch Nestoria Italia service!

When we started one year ago little did we know the coming year would see the most dramatic downturn in post-war history. But as the Italian market has grappled with the economic tsunami, and the never-ending excitement of Berlusconi’s party schedule (Surely internet entrepreneurs should be getting invites? Right? No one needs – or deserves – a Mediterranean break more than me) we’ve kept our head down and slowly but surely fine tuned the service.

Many thanks to all the users who have sent us feedback, and to all our our partners (Over the last months we’ve added a few more). We of course still have a very long way to go, but you can rest assured we’re working on it.

For those interested in more detail, Matteo, our resident Italian, has kept things cranking over on the Nestoria Italia blog, and if you speak Italian I highly recommend you subscribe.

Ciao!