Archive for the 'interviews' Category

Nestoria Interview - Ivailo Jordanov - retaggr

Published by Ed on June 24, 2008 in interviews. 1 Comment

In our June Nestoria Interview we are lucky enough to speak with Ivailo Jordanov. Currently Ivailo is founder of retaggr, an online identity system, while simultaneously working on launching a new property portal for the Russian market. Before that he was founder of Zoomf, an innovative, web2.0 UK property portal (and Nestoria partner), and prior to that he was an early team member at eSpotting (now Miva), the company that introduced Europe to paid search. In short, Ivailo has extensive internet (and especially search) experience.

Ivailo, thanks for taking the time from your obviously hectic schedule to speak with us.

1. Please describe the retaggr project and how you see identity on the web evolving.
Retaggr is a service that enables active web users to link all their various online profiles into a single, always-updated, interactive business card that can be attached to virtually any type of content or interaction the user has on the web. Retaggr also provides photo tagging to enabled sites.

As users have more and more online profiles, we created retaggr because we wanted to allow users to put all their online personas in one place.

Identity is becoming more and more important especially because there are multiple places one can interact online and being able to show who they are will add credibility to their contributions. For example if there is a discussion happening on a property blog, it would be useful to be able to easily see which comments come from property professionals and see where else online they interact.

2. How does your experience in search lend itself to online identity?
The guys building the retaggr technology are from a search background and one thing that is common is that what we are building is a high volume high performance system and they do that really well. When you are storing peoples personal details, the performance and the availability of the the system are very important, while it has to cope with growing volumes as more sites become retaggr enabled.

3. What are your thoughts on the developments in the property search sector in the last year?
It is great to see that agents are realizing that their marketing budgets are better spent online, which in turn drives innovation. The experience of finding property online has improved significantly, however it is still very dependent on agents keeping their listings up to date, which is often not the case. New entrants provide a different user experience to the established property portals.

4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?

  1. The property search space is very competitive and the main challenge is to compete for the attention of property hunters with players with significant advertising budgets.
  2. If the state of the property market causes agents to cut their advertising budgets, it could have a negative effect on Nestoria’s revenues.
  3. The freshness and relevancy of the results. Vertical search engines are dependent on the listings they get from other sites and often the quality of property listings is not great.
  4. To keep the interface simple, useful and fast.

Thanks Ivailo. Useful insights from an industry insider. You are absolutely right that keeping the interface simple is a great challenge, one we grapple with all the time. Likewise freshness, a topic we’ve covered in the past, is a continual challenge. We’ll keep doing our best. Meanwhile for those user’s interested in retaggr’s innovative approach to online identity I recommend subscribing to the retaggr blog.

past Nestoria interviews: Salim Mitha, Alex Singleton, and Tom Steinberg.

BTW - for all the hardcore (und deutschsprechende) Nestoria fans - we’ve launched our Nestoria interview series in German over on the Nestoria Deutschland blog

Nestoria Interview - Salim Mitha - Wahanda

Published by Ed on May 24, 2008 in interviews. 5 Comments

For this installment of the Nestoria interview series we speak with Salim Mitha, co-founder of the recently launched health, beauty and wellness community site, Wahanda.

Prior to starting Wahanda, Salim was at Yahoo! Europe for four years where he was the Senior Director of Search and Social Search, and was responsible for the successful European launch of Yahoo! Answers across five markets. Previous to that he worked at Merrill Lynch as an investment banker and at McKinsey as a management consultant, and he has an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Salim, thanks for meeting with us.

1. As someone who recently left an internet giant to focus on building a compelling offering in a niche area, explain to us a bit your thoughts on horizontal players versus vertical players.
Essentially the way I see things, there are a three main buckets you can place most websites into. You have:

  • Type I: Horizontal sites and portals that try to provide something (or even everything) to everyone by either aggregating content into one place, or creating multiple channels and product lines accessible from one starting point (like Yahoo!, MSN, Google, youtube and even Amazon).
  • Type II: Audience specific verticals sites that focus on attracting a defined audience through a broad range of topics and interactions (like a lot of women’s sites out there, or even Facebook and LinkedIn)
  • Type III: Subject specific vertical websites or search engines that focus on a defined topic areas (like Wahanda with health, beauty and wellness, toptable for restaurants or Nestoria for property)

While one can argue correctly that some of the horizontal Type I sites contain subsets of Types II & III, the basic method I have used is based on the first order organising principle of sites themselves.

Yahoo!, as a Type I company, is always trying to create additional channels in order to appeal to an even wider range of internet users across a wider range of topics, and continue to satisfy its current user base. Y! Search, the Y! Homepage and even My Yahoo! were the starting points and navigation tools to help people reach what they were looking for, and although some (and increasingly more) of the content was not on the Yahoo! Network, the goals of a Yahoo! or Google is to create an experience and provide tools that work across the board.

One of the tradeoffs of this reality is that the depth and quality of the content and the experience is sometimes compromised, or has to be overlooked by the sheer nature of trying to juggle many balls. Additionally, the tools cannot be customised, and the investment for improving things has to be spread thinly across many areas. Getting 5 million results in Google for one query on “Paris hotels” is something we all need to put up with because Google doesn’t really know who we are, what we are looking for and how to best present all of those billions of websites they have in their index. People still love Type I websites, but these instruments have their limitations and tradeoffs.

Meanwhile at the other end of the spectrum, a Type III (subject specific) website can provide a more comprehensive and relevant experience by not focusing on the depth and breadth of the information and by also building a best of breed experience for the users of that channel. Searching for spas, waxing, massages and cosmetic surgery on Wahanda, or real estate rentals and sales on Nestoria will provide much more relevant results than doing so on Google, and the tools available to the user will not only be better, but can also be improved over time to serve that specific purpose.

The other benefit of a vertically focused subject site like the one we are building at Wahanda is that we can attract a like minded audience who shares similar passions and interests (e.g wellness, fitness, pilates & yoga) and needs (buying or selling a flat!). A Type III site can really generate significant value by allowing its users to connect and share experiences, and can over time benefit from the focus by providing a best in breed experience by focusing investment with one aim. This type of engagement and focus can also open up other doors mutually beneficial product and monetisation initiatives.

Over time, the experience can not only be more relevant and comprehensive, but also more engaging for the user who ends up spending more time and consuming more pageviews on the site. Type I companies have shown that they are susceptible over the medium and long run to dwindling audiences who become less engaged due to decreased relevancy, a relatively poorer consumer experience and the rise of a specialist Type III vertical site. Over time, Type I companies tend to move towards becoming “networks” that aggregate content (and even ads) from Type II & III companies.

2. Over the last few years Yahoo! has invested heavily in “social” or community searching, buying web2.0 pioneers like del.icio.us and flickr, and building Yahoo! Answers. What is the thinking behind “social search” and why is a category Yahoo! is investing in?
Social search recognises that machines in themselves do not tell the entire story and have limitations. There are billions of people across the world with trillions (or more) of experiences, bits of content and valuable experiences, most of which remains as tacit knowledge. Although the walls are coming down, it’s actually hard to “publish” information on the world wide web. Only a select handful of people had their own websites, which means that information dissemination on the web was essentially an oligarchy. Web 2.0 stands for the democratisation of the web - more people can be “publishers”, sharing their thoughts on blogs, their knowledge on sites like Yahoo! Answers, their pictures on Flickr, news reports on Twitter, and their best finds on delicious, etc. All of a sudden, these trillions of bits of metadata that used to be tacit or dormant can be shared and accessed by anyone.

Yahoo! (and especially Yahoo! Search) was actually very early in recognising the untapped power of social search, social media and the social web for these reasons.

One can imagine Google as a “library” - a place you can go to find information on anything from anywhere, but it’s a static, efficient machine like place. We wanted Yahoo! Search to be world-class “University” - yes, we would have a world-class library (= Search index) that was more efficient and comprehensive than Google, but that also had students, professors, dissenters, and a place where you could tap into the human knowledge element of the topics at hand, because this creates a much richer and more valuable experience. Google and other companies are starting to wake up to this reality and you can see that in recent moves in this space.

3. What are your thoughts on the developments in the property search sector in the last year? Do you see a social angle in this sector?
This is definitely a hot area, and one that continues to get better and better (but that’s because there is still so much about the experience that is frustrating!!).

It is still extremely difficult to get all of the information you need in an efficient manner, and you can really see this when you not only look for domestic property, but also commercial property and rentals. My sense as a consumer is that the real estate companies want to maintain control by guarding the information (after all information is power in this oligarchy). To the themes above about the democratisation of the web, I think there is definitely a social angle, and I think it’s the only thing that will cause the step-change leapfrog in the property search sector. My answer to question #4 below gets into why I think this is the case.

4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?
Property searching shares many similarities to searching and booking a massage or a wellness treatment. It is a high consideration decision that requires a ton of research on the product, who is delivering it, where it is, etc. Many times you rely on word of mouth to help with your decision. It is also an expensive decision, and many times irreversible! Finally, it is a highly personal decision. Either someone’s hands will be on you, or you will be spending the next year or two sleeping in that place you have chosen. Therefore, transparency of information, ratings, reviews and efficiency in finding, sorting and comparing offers are of the utmost importance.

The other similarity between Nestoria and Wahanda is that the process on both sites brings together consumers/buyers, suppliers/sellers, and the professionals/therapists/agents who are involved in the process.

Nestoria is in a field that I would consider to be very competitive up and down the supply chain, and especially online. Real estate agents were some of the first to embrace the web, but only to a certain point. I think Nestoria needs to find a way to hurdle the current obstacles in this space, leverage the power of the user in this new Web 2.0 world, and fend off its competitors to not only create long-term value, but also improve its position in the real estate supply chain.

Thanks Salim. Lots to think about here. Who knew running a ’spa site’ could be so cerebral? We totally agree with your point that by specialising on one particular aspect (in our case property search)and being very disciplined about doing only that one thing well we can deliver a more relevant and comprehensive experience to the user, than someone focused on more things. One point regarding your comment that need to ‘fend of competitors’; we try to see other players as potential partners not potential competitors.

Update: Wahanda has now launched a blog. I recommend subscribing.

past Nestoria interviews: Alex Singleton, Tom Steinberg, and Lelia Ferro.

Nestoria Interview - Alex Singleton - UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis

Published by Ed on April 10, 2008 in interviews. 10 Comments

A few months ago we featured London Profiler, a website created by researchers at University College London. For this month’s Nestoria interview we have the pleasure of talking with Dr Alex Singleton, a research fellow at UCL’s Department of Geography and Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis about London Profiler and the various other projects the department does.

Alex, thanks for taking the time to speak with us.

1. What is the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and what are the types of projects you work on?
The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) is an initiative within University College London to develop emerging computer technologies in several disciplines which deal with geography, space, location, and the built environment. Researchers at CASA are involved in a broad range of research activities including developing models and simulations of urban areas, pedestrian movement, implementing 3D Globes, the geography and ethnicity of names and multiple projects around geographic Web 2.0 type technologies.

My A-Level geography teacher once described the discipline of Geography sitting at the “hub of the wheel of knowledge”, and although an undoubtedly biased view, this conceptualisation has flowed through into my personal research activities which tend to cross an interdisciplinary range of areas. However, broadly as a human geographer I am interested in how new data sources and technology can be used to help us visualise how the world looks, and from this information, how we can build better models of how the world works.

2. What’s new with London Profiler? What was the goal of the project and what sorts of feedback have you had from users?
The growth of Google Map type technology, and the ability to re-use these interfaces and data in third party systems has transformed Geographic Information Science; opening up the visualisation of how the world looks to a plethora of new users. However, despite this improved access to general map and satellite imagery, there are still lots of really interesting local information about the neighbourhoods in which we live which are not available through these new interfaces. This is really the crux of the research problem which I have been working on in the London Profiler project.

The London Profiler website is a repository of data about London Neighbourhoods, covering a huge variety of different domains such as health, crime, ethnicity, deprivation and education. The majority of the data we display are in the public domain, however, we have simply improved their presentation. Using technology developed in CASA we are able to transform any spatially referenced data into the tile based system used by google maps for their background (map or satellite) information. Our data is presented as another layer on top of the Google background maps, which we can fade in or out as required.

The website also provides the ability to add your own data on top of our maps from any publicly hosted KML file. For example, the KML feeds which Nestoria provide have enabled us to create a basic property search function on our site. This perfectly demonstrates how synergies between different data providers using web 2.0 methods of sharing and reusing information can create innovative new services. For example, if I were looking to buy a house; by adding the deprivation data on London Profiler and then searching for properties for sale, I could examine how the price of properties for sale might change depending on how deprived an area was. For people moving into London, who are not familiar with the local geography, this provides a very powerful tool.

We still consider the London Profiler site to be very much in beta, and in the future we have a range of plans including the addition of more data, testing alternate mapping technology and expanding the coverage’s outside of London - A national profiler would be very exciting!

3. What can sites like Nestoria do to better

  • cooperate with academic researchers?
    Supplying an open API is a great way to start building interest, however this is only useful to academics if they actually know about it. Therefore I think co-operation could be improved, firstly through promotional efforts to develop your brand awareness within academia about the types of services, but more specifically data, you can offer to academics for use in their research. This may involve coming along to some academic conferences, or perhaps delivering joint papers. Secondly, an important way in which we have conducted much of our previous knowledge transfer is through the joint funding of PhD students working on collaborative projects. These activities can take a variety of forms and offer a good foot in the door of many leading academic institutions.
  • make our data available for academic projects?
    My co-researchers and I have been impressed by the data we have accessed through the Nestoria API. This model of access is very different from how those nationally distributed data academics normally use are released, and in reality this places Nestoria well ahead of the game. It would be great if we could see census or some of our other prevalently used data disseminated using similar technology.

    I would not want to imply that there was anything wrong with the current Nestoria offering, it is very good. However, as a geographer I might look at how aggregations of the data you collect could be gathered across a number of spatial units (e.g. Wards, Output Areas), perhaps with the ability to query these information temporally. This could be really useful.

4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?
It will be interesting to see how business such as this scale, as unlike those recently publicised web 2.0 successes (e.g. Facebook) where the value is linked to the size and interaction of membership (which could grow indefinitely), a vertical search engine’s value is based on the volume of relevant data you can collect, and the frequency of clicks through this information you can garner.

The first challenge with this model is that information collected is theoretically capped at a maximum as there could (in the case of Nestoria) be a situation where you capture all property for sale within a country, thus limiting any further growth through data capture alone.

A second challenge lies in how you get the information collected out to your potential users, so they can click through and generate your advertising income. This is slightly more challenging and requires a good understanding of your potential customer base. The provision of API and those other dissemination routes such as Google Widgets / Facebook integration are excellent examples of how this can be achieved.

Finally in terms of risk, it appears to me that the vertical search engine business models are perhaps too dependent on advertising revenue derived through click through “adverts”. I suspect that to mitigate some of this risk in the future it will involve the development of new income generation streams outside of offering consumers a free service. The data collected by Nestoria undoubtedly has great geographic value and there are multiple ways in which a range of corporate services could be created without undermining the ethos of the current Nestoria model.

Great answers Alex, thanks for offering us your insights. For those that haven’t yet seen it I strongly recommend checking out London Profiler, it is an amazing tool.

Alex is correct that there is a limit to the number of houses on the market, and in the UK and Spain in most regions we are well past that limit. A bigger technical challenge we now face is correctly identifying duplicates as we now very often have the same listings from multiple sources. We hope our recent release of embeddable historic house price charts and support for the hListing microformat are just two examples of us trying to release our data in a more usable format. This is an ongoing project and one we hope to have more to report on in the future.

We’ll keep refining the data quality and user experience. We look forward to seeing what new innovations academic groups like CASA present.

past Nestoria interviews: Tom Steinberg, Lelia Ferro, Lloyd Shepherd.

Nestoria Interview - Tom Steinberg - mySociety

Published by Ed on March 17, 2008 in interviews. 3 Comments

This month we have the chance to interview Tom Steinberg, Director of mySociety, the folks behind such innovative sites as TheyWorkForYou (whose governmental data we display on Nestoria) and FixMyStreet. In the same way that we aim to make Nestoria as simple as possible to do one thing: search for property, mySociety aims to build very simple websites that help people engage with their community. Most relevantly to property mySociety recently produced some very innovative and much discussed travel-time maps.

Tom, thanks for speaking with us.

1. Please explain the goals of mySociety.
mySociety is all about building deceptively simple websites which give citizens simple, tangible benefits to the parts of their lives that are concerned with their democracy and their communities. We aim to provide benefits that are as simple and tangible as when Amazon sends you a book, but just in the more nebulous (but highly important) arena of politics, democracy, social capital and so on. We also aim to teach bits of the public and the voluntary sector how they could be spending their money a lot better to help citizens.

2. What the technical challenges you face?
Wow, big question. There are lots but some of the more interesting are:

  1. Attracting audiences with zero marketing budget to things that aren’t as inately ‘fun’ as YouTube videos of cats falling off tables. We do this by working hard on legit SEO, and by making our sites the sorts of things that lots of other people running other sites can make use of, by, for example linking to speeches made in Parliament on TheyWorkForYou, or by encouraging people to write to politicans via WriteToThem.com
  2. One challenge I especially like to work on is generating public good from private desire. One good example of this is FixMyStreet, where people who report problems end up generating a public database about local problems. On the brand new WhatDoTheyKnow.com people use the site because it’s an easy way of getting information they need, personally, but it generates a public database that Google can crawl of what people are looking for, and what the Government is giving them back.
  3. Sometimes we have sheer scale problems. At its peak load ever the No10 petitions site saw 141 people confirm their signatures successfully in one second - more than 10 times the rate that the BBC expects to be able to sign up new people, and all running on just three machines. Most of that is thanks to the lasting genius of our late and much missed colleague Chris Lightfoot, and the loving care of our awesome dev team.

3. How might some of these lessons learned in building simple apps for the mass public be applicable to to the vertical search space?
Perhaps the top lesson we can give anyone who runs a search service on a database that is constantly changing and updating is this - build alerting systems and advertise them aggressively (can you see the advert on this page? - I hope so!). People talk a lot about RSS but if you run such a database and don’t let people sign up for email alerts when a word or phrase or other unique string comes up, then you’re missing a huge number of repeat visitors, as well as failing to serve your audience.

4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?
Well, as it happens I’ve been using your site a lot in the last week attempting to find somewhere to live (has anyone got a nice 1 bedroom in the East End to let?). It seems to me that you’ve got various challenges:

  1. Persuading your users that they’re on a site that has most of what’s out there to be had. I’d like to see some some of percentage, even if it was a guesstimate of how much of the total property available in the area I’m looking at that’s currently on the market is in front of me. Google has done a great job at making people think that if it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist, so expectations of completeness are very high.
  2. Obtaining good, reasonably priced geodata to power your service. I believe you’ve only got the first part of postcodes, which caused me a bit of a headache first time I used the site. I hope that Nestoria will be amongst the voices calling for improvements in licensing from the Ordnance Survey - it feels as if change is a afoot.
  3. Partnering with companies so that the user experience of what people find is as good as the finding process. Nestoria is almost embarrassingly more usable than most of the sites that supply its data at the moment, which causes some user frustration.

Thanks Tom. Lots of good feedback here. Creating simplicity is deceptively difficult and requires continual fine-tuning. We’ll keep doing our best to encourage open geodata and to partner with sites that value user experience. Likewise, we’ll be opening up more of our data in the very near future. Keep up the great work at mySociety and please extend our thanks to the entire team. Meanwhile we invite all our readers to check out mySociety’s latest community site: GroupsNearYou

past Nestoria interviews: Lelia Ferro, Lloyd Shepherd, Adam Samuel.

Nestoria Interview - Lelia Ferro - 4Homes

Published by Ed on February 4, 2008 in interviews. 3 Comments

This month we speak to Lelia Ferro, producer at Channel4.com’s property website 4Homes, home to many of the UK’s leading property shows like Grand Designs, Property Ladder, and Location, Location that attract millions of viewers each week. The site is updated several times a day with tips and guides on everything from house buying to architecture. Channel4 recently partners with Nestoria, to use Nestoria property search technology.

Lelia brings long experience in the online property industry to her role, having previously worked at property portal FindaProperty.

Lelia, thanks for speaking with us.

1. Discuss some of the challenges of managing the online presence for popular offline brands like Channel4’s portfolio of property programming. How do you use the medium of online to enhance the television experience?
It is a challenge, mainly due to the high volume of programmes, but 4Homes has a loyal user base and is a well established site. I often put it like this. The 4Homes programmes inspire people and the website empowers them to do it for themselves. So the website is an extension of the programme experience. I try to maximise the medium by getting users involved and devising relevant functionality that complements the shows.

2. Do you see the UK public’s appetite for property diminishing anytime soon? Or is the seemingly insatiable hunger for all things property related a permanent part of the national psyche?
I think a credit crunch might slow the property market very slightly and trends in purchasing shift over time, but the passion for property is here to stay. It remains one of the main ways of securing your future financially, plus people are becoming more and more interested in architecture and their environment thanks to programmes like Grand Designs.

3. What are your thoughts on the developments in the online property sector in the last 18 months? What do you see coming in the future?
I think it has been a very exciting time. When I was still at Find a Property, there were only a few major players in the online property world which meant they could command the industry in terms of pricing and loyalty. Now that’s all changed. There is a lot more choice and second generation property searches like Nestoria give users what they want which is the ability to quickly find what they are looking for all in one place. It is a better user experience overall and less work and money for estate agents who just want their properties viewed by as many users as possible. In the future I think we will see a lot more collaboration between site owners, not just in the property sector but all over the web.

4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?
Sites like Nestoria have the benefit of being young and fresh. The company takes an open source approach to business and this works in their favour. Many of their older competitors are owned by large corporations and they benefit from effective promotion. By taking advantage of key partnerships, as they have with Channel 4, Nestoria will be able to significantly close the gap on their competitors.

Thanks Lelia. It’s a great honour for a small start up like Nestoria to work with a leading UK media brand like Channel4, and we look forward to a successful partnership, as one of many mutually beneficial tie ups with traditional media brands.

past Nestoria interviews: Lloyd Shepherd, Adam Samuel, and Gabor Cselle.

Nestoria Interview - Lloyd Shepherd - MessyMedia

Published by Ed on January 8, 2008 in interviews. 5 Comments

This year we kick off our Nestoria interview series with Lloyd Shepherd, one of the co-founders of new UK blog network MessyMedia. Lloyd has a long history of being at the intersection journalism and technology innovation having worked in senior roles at Yahoo! Europe and the Guardian Unlimited before starting MessyMedia. Messy was launched in September 2007 and is developing a portfolio of blogs marked by their ability to both entertain and inform. So far they’ve launched Westmonster (covering politics) and Glitterditch (covering London nightlife).

Lloyd’s personal transition from traditional offline media to the pure online blog format is indicative of the great state of flux in media today. We face a situation in which new technologies allow us to spend more and more time interacting with ‘media’ while simultaneously forcing long-established media brands face to challenge many of the assumptions of their long-standing business models.

Lloyd, thanks for meeting with us.

1. Explain a bit the idea behind MessyMedia and what role you see blogs playing in the media landscape going forward.

We launched MessyMedia with two fundamental propositions:

i. The tools to publish online are now so extremely low-cost they are effectively free. This has led to an explosion in online publishing, most of it in the form of amateur writing (ie, “blogs”). People have written a lot about how blogs represent a new form of free expression and how it’s going to change journalism, etc. etc. etc., but really all blogs are is a manifestation of the sudden ubiquity and access to online publishing tools. Less than a decade ago, you’d have spent getting on for half a million quid on a content management system, an ad-serving system and a stats/user-tracking system. These days, those things are effectively free. Just like the Gutenberg press powered new forms of expression, so Movable Type (named after that press) is enabling people to reach audiences with what they want to say.

ii. In the UK, those new tools have led to a great many new sites appearing, but very few of them have attempted to take on established media players. Contrast that with the US, where blog networks and large special-interest sites running on blogging platforms have attracted massive audiences with sharp, pacy words written to professional, or near-professional, standards. We perceive a gap in the market between amateur publishing such as blogs on the one hand, and mainstream media on the other. We want to play in that gap.

So those two propositions - cheap publishing technology combined with a gap in the market - led to MessyMedia.

2. How do you see established offline media brands adapting to the shift in consumer attention online?

They’ve already shifted enormously, something they’re often not given credit for. The interesting thing in the last couple of years has been the extent to which newspapers in particular have embraced “blogging” as a format - not just a technical format, but an editorial format. A looser, chattier, more direct style has emerged, and it’s often very powerful. What’s interested us is how specialist offline publications like the Spectator have plugged into a whole new way of talking about their specialist areas. It’s interesting - most commentators have focused on the dread term “user-generated content”, while the really interesting stuff has been happening in journalist-generated content, which has changed rapidly and interestingly to adapt to the new medium.

3. One of the traditional foundations of newspaper revenues has been classifieds. What are your thoughts on the developments in the classifieds sector in the last 18 months?

Newspapers have already seen their classifieds revenues collapse as a result of online. But we may be reaching an interesting point here. All a classifieds advertiser wants is response - that’s much more important than cost. If newspapers can drive response, online and offline, they’ll still have a business. As more and more classifieds providers come onstream, what will happen to the response rate of any one of them? Will older, established media continue to keep some audiences, and thus guarantee some response?

4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?

I think the main challenge for any new online player is establishing a brand and an audience quickly, and then ensuring some loyalty. People are creatures of habit, so you need to be habit-forming. This is the main advantage existing brands have - they’ve already become a habit for their audience. If you can provide functionality which is cool, original and useful, and if you can get in front of people often enough to become a habit, the sky’s the limit. That’s why the Web’s so exciting.

Thanks Lloyd. We agree the web’s an exciting place. We’ll be making a few announcements about Nestoria’s role at the intersection of web2.0 and ‘old media’ in the coming weeks. For those looking to see the future of online journalism (or just an entertaining read) we recommend subscribing to Westmonster. You can follow MessyMedia, predictably, via their blog.

past Nestoria interviews: Adam Samuel, Gabor Cselle, Gregory Marler.

Nestoria Interviews - 2007 in Review

Published by Ed on December 31, 2007 in interviews. 1 Comment

Greetings Nestorinites!

As a team of very limited resources we’re always stretched. More and more the issue becomes not how to do things, but what we should be doing at all.

Over the last year each month we’ve made space here on the blog to interview different thought leaders from the world of property, online mapping, and how internet technologies are influencing our lives. Our hope is that by highlighting the opinions of some of these influencers we can stimulate the debate regarding how best to apply the amazing technical possibilities the internet allows.

For today’s post we thought we’d highlight these conversations and also update you on where some of these people have now gone.

From the realm of Property we had the pleasure of speaking with:

The rapidly innovating world of ‘neogeography‘ is a space we draw a lot of product inspiration from. We were lucky enough to speak with some of the space’s most influential thinkers over the last year:

Finally, many of the challenges we face here at Nestoria like relevancy, usability, extracting meaning from masses of data, and the ever-present challenge of grappling with new technologies and their uncertain implications are shared by other web businesses. As such it’s natural for us to draw ideas from other innovative internet sites. We spoke with several folks from diverse sites about the issues they see and what we can learn from it.

Thanks to all of this year’s interviewees. We’ll of course be continuing the series into 2008, and welcome all suggestions as to whom you’d like to see interviewed. In writing this review one thing that leaps out at me is that our list is 100% male, which is of course a very poor reflection of the reality of the world. We’ll see what we can do to address this gender imbalance in the new year.

BTW - For our Spanish reading friends, we of course also run a parallel interview series on our Spanish blog.

And with that all that remains is for me to extend happy New Year’s greeting to all our readers! See you in 2008.

Nestoria Interview - Adam Samuel - Nubricks

Published by Ed on December 17, 2007 in interviews. 3 Comments

This month we speak with Adam Samuel, author of Nubricks, an influential international real estate blog documenting the ins and outs of overseas property. Along with great articles, Nubricks Overseas Property Podcasts probe a bit deeper to some of the issues affecting the international property development industry and have garnered a strong following of listeners seeking a snapshot on the different overseas markets emerging.

Adam, thanks for making the time to speak with us.

1. As a long time observer of the market, how has the current state of the mortgage market changed the outlook for overseas properties?

The overseas property industry has come of age over the past 5-10 years with new emerging markets appearing on the scene on what seems like a weekly basis, as soon is Thailand heralded as an investment hotspot Vietnam comes along as the new kid on the block. The strength of the established property markets of Spain, France and Portugal is very much associated with a strong, diverse mortgage market, offering buyers and investors the opportunity to borrow money against property in these locations. These overseas property markets are essentially driven by wealthy northern Europeans seeking a warm climate in close proximity, that is easily accessible through a choice of low-cost carrier alternatives and above isn’t too far out of their comfort zone where property practices are well established and ’safer’ than say an emerging market it is these factors which ensure these countries remain the most popular and diverse within the market for overseas property. The lack of mortgage option available to foreign purchasers in many of the new emerging countries means they enjoy limited appeal from mainly cash rich investors who are able to purchase buy property outright. They are perceived as being riskier with greater risk of fraudulent buying practices taking place due to poorly regulated marketplace. The upside of a market being less accessible means property prices on the whole are lower and as the property market there develops there is greater potential for a return on your investment. Continue reading ‘Nestoria Interview - Adam Samuel - Nubricks’

Nestoria Interview - Gabor Cselle - Xobni

Published by Ed on November 7, 2007 in interviews. 4 Comments

This month we speak with Gabor Cselle, VP Engineering of innovative start up Xobni. Xobni focusses on helping people extract value from the information generated by how they use email.

Before joining Xobni, Gabor worked at Google and Yahoo! He has a masters degree in computer science from ETH Zurich.

What intrigues us about Xobni is that they are helping people gain insight by extracting information from the mass of data in their email inbox (the name Xobni is inbox spelled backwards). In some ways this is similar to Nestoria’s own challenge of organizing masses of listings data. Our recent launch of acccess to property metadata is a similar attempt to gain higher level insights into the database.

Gabor, thanks for talking with us

1. Explain the idea behind Xobni, and the power of making information visible.

The only thing that has changed about email in the last ten years is that we’re all getting 100x more of it.

Email clients are unchanged from a decade ago: You get three panes - folders, your list of emails, and a preview area. This user interface is the small hole in the wall through which peek out at vast seas of information: tens of thousands of archived messages that document our behaviors, buying habits, travel plans, relationships, and social networks.

At Xobni, we want to make this data visible, useful, and actionable. We’ve built two products: Xobni Analytics, which shows you statistics about your email usage, and Xobni Insight, which is a sidebar for your email client. First, it offers lightning-fast email search. You start typing, we start searching. It shows you information about the people you communicate with. Imagine that I’m looking at an email from you. It shows me the profile for Ed Freyfogle which contains:

xobni profile
  • A glamour shot, so I recall who you are.


  • A graph of what times of day you send me emails, so I know when to expect a reply from you: San Francisco and London are 8 hours away, so this will tell me not to expect emails from you in the afternoon.


  • A list of connected people we derive - Who introduced me to Ed? Oh yeah, it was this Jerry Yang guy.


  • Past conversations we had (in a Gmail-like manner)


  • A list of recent attachments from Ed. Next time we’re negotiating a contract, this will allow me to find the latest version without having to search for the email it was attached to.

All of this information has been hiding in your email archives. Xobni makes it visible.

2. What are some of the technical challenges you face?

First, we’re on the desktop and are dealing with a lot of data. We have users with 250,000 emails in their archives, and we need to be able to show information quickly. We built some proprietary technology which is a database for email information and supports quick querying and aggregation.

Second, we have to integrate with existing email clients. Some of these technologies and interfaces have been around for more than a decade. They come with lots of bugs and cruft. Also, as with any desktop application, we have to support a wide variety of configurations. There are almost as many unique Windows configurations as there are Windows machines, and we need to make sure we work on all of them.

3. How might some of these concepts be applicable to the vertical search space, such as property search with Nestoria?

Email and property search are very different. We have all the data on the person’s harddrive or webmail account, but you need to reach out and grab it from the web. We can simply order email search results by date or contact popularity, while you need to take into account match for search criteria, physical distance, and result freshness.

I use Craigslist for searching for real estate in San Francisco. I’m constantly frustrated by it. The search criteria are city, min and max price, and whether cats or dogs are allowed. This is not that useful if you’re looking for a specific number of bedrooms in a specific neighborhood. You guys kick ass.

Gabor, thanks for the vote of confidence. You’re right the volume of information we all have at our disposal is rising rapidly. We share your belief that finding ways to relevantly and quickly present masses of data is a key technical challenge for the future.

For those interested in tracking the progress of Xobni as they move towards launch please subscribe to the Xobni blog and/or Gabor’s personal blog

past Nestoria interviews: Gregory Marler, Artem Pavlenko, Harvey Edgecombe.

Nestoria Interview - Gregory Marler - Living with Dragons

Published by Ed on October 22, 2007 in interviews and partnerships. 12 Comments

Recently I had the chance to speak at the UK Geography industry’s annual conference - AGI 2007. The final event of the conference was a discussion about ‘neogeography’ versus traditional geography (christened ‘paeleogeography’ by former Nestora interviewee Ed Parsons at the event). There was much debate about what the term neogeography means and whether neogeography is at odds with or complementary to paleogeography. There was however no disputing that neogeography has caught the industry’s attention.

One example of neogeography in action is Gregory Marler’s recently begun Living with Dragons project. Gregory will spend the next few years living without commercial maps! We are delighted to announce Nestoria will be sponsoring Living with Dragons for the next few months to see how Gregory’s experiment turns out.

Gregory created his first website at the age of 12. After completing college he went to work on online production at the New Statesman. While there Gregory worked on the new website launch and it’s many new blogs. After a couple of years, he decided it was time to experience university life before he got to old. This month Gregory moved to Durham to start a degree in Computer Science. He forgot to pack some maps, and has yet to see his first dragon.

To kick off the partnership, we’ve invited Gregory to be this month’s Nestoria interviewee.

1. Explain the idea behind the ‘Living with Dragons’ project.

Well the whole story of how it began is on the blog, but it can be cut down to something quite short. I made the decision to move to Durham, after only having spent 2 days there. In spring I looked on the OpenStreetMap, a non-commercial mapping project and Durham was very white/blank, it almost said “here be dragons”. So as I was into this amateur mapping stuff, and liking adventure, I decided I would go out and map it without knowing where I was going. I moved here in October and set up the website to keep me knowing my purpose while readers of the blog can make sure I don’t cheat.

2. What sorts of response have you got?

Well it’s only been a week since I started but I’ve brought it up in a lot of conversations. A bit risky seeing as these are new friends I’m trying to make and everyone at home thinks I’m obsessed and a geek going to mapping conventions. Everyone here has been so interested that no conversation has gone the same way. I’ve discovered that archaeology students have a big interest in the map, the computer society would even like me to do a talk. On the business side it is looking like several organisations want to get onboard, such as the wonderful support from Nestoria.

3. What are your thoughts on the developments in the online geography sector (maps, etc) in the last 18 months?

Well I haven’t been following the whole sector closely but I’ve had an eye on OpenStreetMap related activity for some time. OSM seemed to flourish in the last year with more people suddenly being aware of the community mapping project and it becoming easier and easier to join in. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to the conference but listening to the podcasts we don’t just have to be mapping now. Take a break and play with the maps, make some art, program scripts that play with the data.

How the user holds and controls the map has moved online sites to use slippy maps and even globes. Now we, the users, want to be overlaying stuff on maps: photos, lines and routes, hotels, even disaster areas in foreign countries.

4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?

I think the challenge that applies to many online services is to maintain a good user interface that is simple. For a vertical search engine you want to be adding more search options. With the aim of allowing the user to tell you exactly what they want to find, or even which options they’re not bothered but would prefer. This is great but too many options and suddenly the balance will flip and they’d rather search vague terms in a general web search or phoning several local estate agents.

Thanks Gregory, we’ll work hard to keep it simple. Best of luck with the mapping. For those readers interested in following Gregory’s progress please subscribe to Living with Dragons.

past Nestoria interviews: Artem Pavlenko, Harvey Edgecombe, Marc Wick.

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