Archive for the 'about us' Category

Ciao Nestoria Italia!

Published by Ed on July 3, 2008 in New Features, about us and partnerships. 4 Comments

Fellow Nestorionos!

Great news, we’ve just gone live with Nestoria Italia!

Nestoria Italia

Just as in the UK and Spain, anyone hunting for a home to buy or rent can now use our simple interface to start their house hunt. In total we have over 250,000 properties all across the country. We’ve partnered with strong on and offline classifieds brands like 123Case, Casa.it, Idealista, Repubblica, Casaclick, Immobiliare, and Trovocasa, and of course we will look to add more partners in the future (as we’ve recently done in the UK).

A big grazie to all the beta testers for the valuable feedback. Please keep it coming (via our Italian feedback form - we know there are still some very rough edges and we still have a lot to learn about how Italians want to search for their next home. There will be lots of fine tuning in our future. But the basics are there:

We look forward to learning from our users and partners! If you’re interested in learning more, yesterday I did a brief interview over at Renthusiast that goes into a bit more detail.

Happy house hunting to our Italian friends!

Puts down celebratory glass of prosecco and shuffles back to desk to work on nestoria.de launch.

Nestoria turns two!

Published by Ed on June 20, 2008 in about us. 3 Comments

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.

Nestoria turns two

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!

Manchester Congestion Charge

Published by Ahmed on June 10, 2008 in New Features, about us and what's hot. 0 Comments

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

Map of Manchester Congestion Charging Zones - Credit: BBC

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 London Congestion Charge Logo 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!

New Nestoria blogs for our Italian and German friends

Published by Ed on May 20, 2008 in about us. 0 Comments

Ciao Nestorpolitans,

as you astute readers of this blog will know we’re currently hard at work expanding the Nestoria property search beyond the UK and Spain - in the coming months we’ll be rolling out Nestoria in Italy and Germany.

As you can imagine these are exciting, but also very busy times for us. We have had a very positive response from the major property sites in both countries. In a few weeks time we will start the invite only beta tests, if you are interested (and can speak Italian and/or German) please get in touch. We’ll be announcing more details on our newly launched blogs; one in Italian and one in German. Please subscribe to the feed if you’d like to stay informed of our progress.

Happy Birthday Nestoria Spain!

Published by Ruben on May 15, 2008 in about us. 0 Comments

Fellow Nestoriacs!
Today we celebrate: We launched Nestoria in Spain one year ago!

Nestoria Spain homepage screenshot

Hard to believe it has been a full year since we went online with our Iberian offering.

We still have a long way to go, but the our little property search engine has been well received by users, and after 12 months we’re closing in on 200,000 users a month (source: comScore March 2008).

Equally important we’ve built up a great list of partners. We are now aggregating listings from twelve of the top property portals in Spain, and we just added well over 50,000 listings from a new partner yesterday. We also also keeping our focus on usability and metrics all along the way. In addition to all the experience and innovations that we introduced in the UK, specifically for Spain we launched property search by neighbourhoods, like Barris Maritims of Tarragona and by street name, eg. Camino de la Mar en Benidorm. We’ve learned a lot along the way, and we still have much to learn. Please let us know if you have any comments or ideas of what we could do better.

For those Nestoria fans interested in more details I recommend you subscribe to our Spanish blog. You find a much more detailed birthday celebration post there.

Future international expansion plans
We are now confident that our model can replicate to other countries. We are bracing ourselves for further expansion plans. In a few weeks time, we plan to launch Nestoria Deutschland and Nestoria Italia. More on that soon!

Hasta pronto, mi amigos!

We’re hiring. Join us.

Published by Ed on March 19, 2008 in about us and hiring. 0 Comments

Ciao Nestorianos!

We’re on the hunt for some talented and passionate folks from Germany and Italy to join the Nestoria team as we spread our dead simple property searching across the EU. The detailed position description is available on our jobs page on our corporate site.

This is a great chance for someone with minimal experience to join a motivated team building a service that will be used by millions of people.

Please get in touch if you’re the one.

Network outage

Published by Ed on March 12, 2008 in about us. 0 Comments

Fellow Nestortonians!

Bad news, our server hosting provider has been hit by a network snafu. This unfortunately means Nestoria for the UK and Spain are currently down. We’re hoping to be back online shortly.

Thanks for your patience. We’re as disappointed as you are. We’ll keep you posted. *sigh*

UPDATE: the websites are live again. They were down for about 40min.

Moving on up!

Published by Ed on February 25, 2008 in about us. 2 Comments

Nestorianos!

Like many folks in London we’ve been hit by recent trends in the property market. We’re being kicked out of our dear old office because the building is to be renovated and turned into luxury flats. Some of you might think this would be a time to celebrate; that we should be happy to leave behind the clogged toilets and the lack of heat in mid-winter. But our office has become our home. Little quirks like the window that never closed, the stolen furniture, the mice, meeting rooms with doors that won’t shut, the mysterious corridors that lead nowhere, the occasional ear drum shredding alarm, and the light switch in a different room had found their way into our hearts.

Tomorrow (we’ll be offline most of the day) we shove off to our new abode. Full of hope, but sad to be leaving behind the unique charm of an office with a tiny, 1 square metre VIP alcove (very useful whenever disgruntled team members needed a ‘time out’). We’re only a moving a few streets, we’re still very close to Covent Garden and Holborn, but it is a new chapter for our little band of vertical searchers.

To new beginnings!

Nestoria featured in Guardian Tech Podcast

Published by Ed on February 15, 2008 in about us and web 2.0. 0 Comments

Hail Nestorfarians!

While we know many of you spend your waking hours glued to your blog reader scouring the interweb for news of Nestoria and our quest to continually improve the relevance of property search results, we have received feedback that some of you prefer your Nestoria news in other formats.

For the audiophiles amongst you, we’re happy to let you know that Nestoria was featured in this week’s Guardian Tech Weekly podcast. I’m interviewed by Jemima Kiss of MediaGuardian as part of her “Elevator Pitch” series. Give it a listen. Unbelievably, it seems people are interested in other tech topics - the Nestoria bit doesn’t start until around minute 26.

For those of you who insist on text based information, there is a text transcript of the interview with a bit more information.

Have a good weekend.

Browser Wars at Nestoria (Take 2)

Published by Ahmed on January 16, 2008 in about us and technical. 1 Comment
  • You are important to us (Nestoria reader/user)
  • You use a browser to get to us
  • Therefore, the browser you use is important to us too

3 simple truths, just as true now as they were almost a year ago, when we brought you our original ‘Browser Wars’ post.

With several recent developments in the area (the sad demise of Netscape, and the rise of questionable ‘viral’ campaigns), we thought now would be a good time to provide you with the 2007 data for Nestoria browser usage. Please click to enlarge the graphs.

Browsers 2007

No major surprises overall. The Windows-bundled Internet Explorer led the pack, with a 2007 average of 84% of all visits. Firefox came in a respectable second, with 12% of visits. Safari representation was uncharacteristically high at 4%, Opera bringing up the rear of the big hitters with 1%. Interestingly, our statistics vary considerably from W3School’s, which has Firefox only 20% behind IE.

IE?Ĵs ShareFirefox?Ĵs ShareIE vs FF

So what about specific IE / Firefox trends? Well, there’s possibly a very slight negative trend in % of IE use, and a very slight positive trend in % of Firefox usage. Relative share seems fairly stable.

IE Version uptakeFirefox version uptake

Possibly the most interesting data is that for version share. IE7 overtook IE6 around October 2007 - showing that Microsoft’s big push hasn’t been in vain. However, there’s still a high number of IE6 users - I would hazard a guess that these are mostly within the workplace, where managers have not yet made the move to IE7. Unhindered by similar issues, the switchover from Firefox 1.5.x to 2.x was quick and progressed almost to 100% usage of 2.x.

To conclude
What do these statistics mean? For us, they mean time spent testing and tweaking our site on the appropriate range of browsers. For you, faithful user*, this hopefully translates into increased site performance and Property Hunting Pleasure?Ѣ?Ć.

As always, please feel free to fire off a comment, or send us some feedback.

* For the crazy cats accessing Nestoria on their PSPs, PS3s, Wiis, iPhones, we’ll do our best.

?Ć This isn’t really trademarked…

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