Fellow Nestorbrants,
Recently we’ve been spending a bit of time working on the Nestoria API. This got us exploring the wonderful world of APIs in general (BTW a great way to stay on top of things is via the delightful blog programmableweb). One project we’ve had our eye on for some time, and wanted to highlight here, is Yahoo’s YQL effort. YQL is effectively an “API of APIs”. It allows anyone to pull in any number of datasources via a well-known SQL-like syntax. All sorts of datasets are available, and it’s not hard to add more. Best of all the Nestoria API is also accessible via YQL, for which we have Sam Pullara and Francisco Jesús Jordano Jiménez to thank. Nice work guys! Here’s an example query. But to see the true power you should spend some time playing with Yahoo’s online console (you need to be logged in, so no link). If you’d like to learn more (which I highly recommend) Yahoo! developer advocate Chris Heilmann gave a great presentation showing the potential of YQL. It’s well worth checking out. Overall YQL is a great innovation as it moves us yet another step closer to the internet of “small things, loosely joined”. It’s great to see Yahoo! driving these efforts. On a related note, for our German-speaking friends, here’s our interview with Christian a few months back.Archive for the 'API' Category
Fellow Nestorzoans,
a quick post – we’ve gone live with version 1.17 of the API. This release exposes a few fields that our friends down south seem to like. But more on that another time. As always full technical details can be found on in the Nestoria API change log.Fellow Nestorholics!
A few months back we reported on the iProperty app for Apple’s iPhone. Today I’m pleased to report that the pace of innovation remains relentless and several others have taken advantage of the Nestoria API to create their own apps that make searching for property on the go even simpler. The winner, as we had hoped, is you the user in that these apps are even better and cheaper (ie free!). First and formost we’d like to feature Sten Hiedel’s excellent UK Property app.
http://www.propertynearme.com and magic happens.
Many thanks to everyone who uses the API, and even more thanks to those of you out there who find and report bugs. Keep innovating! We’ll keep making things better, you can expect some tweaks in the coming weeks.
As someone who’s been working on the internet for over a decade it’s great to see the promise of high-speed, affordable, personalised internet access while on the go finally happening. Actually, not just happening but happening via an absolute explosion in innovation and creativity.
Meanwhile, if this post has whetted your technical appetite and you’re looking for a challenge, we’d love to see someone whip up a nice app using our average house price data As always, we close by wishing you happy house hunting.Fellow Nestornards!
just a quick post to announce that we just went live with v1.16 of the Nestoria API. We had some feedback from a user asking why we didn’t allow filtering by number of bathrooms. Lame! So now we’ve added it. Apologies for the oversight. Enjoy. As always, full technical docs and release notes can be found here. Thanks for your feedback.Fellow Nestornavians,
A few weeks ago we announced support for big images in our property lists. Today we continue on our bigger is better trend with the announcement of the release of version 1.15 of our API. The full release notes are, as always, to be found on the API documentation page, but in short we now return both a smallthumb_url AND a larger img_url.
| thumb_url | img_url |
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| 60×60 | 160×120 |
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.
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.
Fellow Nestorianos,
apologies for the lack of notice, but yesterday evening we deprecated several old versions of our API. If you have not yet already, please upgrade to version 1.14, or, even better, don’t specify a version at all in your request and get the newest version by default. Again, apologies for the impromptu switch. circumstances necessitated it. In fairness, version 1.14 has been the stable version for almost 10 months now. As always, please feel free to send us any feedback you have about the Nestoria API or Nestoria generally.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.
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.
Greetings fellow members of the Nestorinese Empire,
today we need your help. As we announced a few weeks ago, we now offer historic house price data via our API. As an addition to the existing Nestoria house price widget – which shows the current average asking price for an area – we will soon be launching a widget that shows historic price trends for any area. The problem we face is the same one we are confronted with in designing our property search results page: on the one hand we have a wealth of information, on the other hand we need a simple intuitive way to present it for the benefit of users. Thus, we turn to you, our loyal blog readers, for some help. Please let us know what you think of the following potential designs (note that the data is made up in all cases).
