Archive for the 'interviews' Category

Nestoria Interview - Christopher Parker - Loughborough University

Published by Ed on June 17, 2009 in interviews. 2 Comments

With this year’s State of the Map conference rapidly approaching, for this month’s Nestoria Interview we once again turn our attention to rapidly growing community mapping project OpenStreetMap (OSM).

Specifically we have the pleasure of interviewing Christopher J. Parker, who will be speaking at this year’s SOTM.

Currently studying a PhD in human interaction at Loughborough University, focusing on the phenomenon of “Volunteered Geographic Information” (VGI). In July 2009, he will be presenting his current findings on “Value and How it Changes Everything” at State of the Map 2009.

Christopher, thanks for talking with us.

1. Please tell us about your current work related to OSM.

As said in my bio, I am researching Volunteered Geographic Information from a human factors point of view. Broadly speaking, this is where people share their information (photos, videos, locations etc) with the world by uploading it to the web and adding a geotag. The output from this can be as simple as displaying where everyone’s photos were taken on a map (as with sites such as Panorama and Flickr), or the map itself (as with OpenStreetMap) where the volunteered information is the collection of ‘nodes’ and polylines which make up the map you see. As anyone who follows social media will know, the idea of this is very recent, with the term VGI only being coined in 2007 by Prof. Michael Goodchild in 2007 (Citizens as Sensors: The world of Volunteered Geography).

So what does this mean? There are a lot of questions are floating around at the moment to do with how we perceive this Volunteered Information. Aside from the technical quality (a very contentious issue), how do we as users perceive volunteered information differently from professional information. How and why do we value a volunteered source higher than a technically more complete professional source of higher quality. What is even more interesting is the idea of an emotional interface (Roush, 2007, Second Earth. Technology Review. 2007. July/ August. P39-48) where the geospatial element (the map the data is overlaid onto) is just a medium through which to explorer the emotions generated by content such as holiday photos.

OpenStreetMap, being a system almost entirely created, developed and edited by volunteers is an excellent example of Volunteered Geographic Information. Unlike allot of websites which may only cover one area of VGI (such as geotagging where a YouTube video was shot), OpenStreetMap provides a highly diverse range of features, so one may expect it to be a good representation of the human factors which run through the VGI community.

Because of this, I am interviewing a wide range of OpenStreetMap users, contributors and developers about their experiences and feelings related to use of OpenStreetMap and why they see it differently to other map sources. The research is geared away from technical issues and OSM specific topics, and other VGI sources such as Google Map Maker are being considered as well. The result of this should be to provide some unique insight into the general perception of the VGI sources, applicable to a wide range of VGI uses and applications; not just one very fast developing website.

2. What made you think this was an interesting topic? And what has the response from the OSM community been?

When I started my PhD at Loughborough I was asked to research anything I could link to the human factors of travel. After reading around the subject, the idea of people using GPS devices to ‘map’ their environment kept cropping up time and time again. I wanted to find a topic that was pretty sparse in research to date, was cutting edge and had allot of potential to move forward. The topic of Volunteered Geographic Information was probably the best find from this period as (at the time) it was only just over a year old in definition and all the research seemed to be either from a GIS technical slant or that of future speculation. I have always had an interest in technology with my background in product design, so reading about how this technology could potentially revolutionise the perception of our environment really got a fire lit under me. I suppose what sold it to me though was the lack of human factors research. One can see a new technology in many ways, but unless one understands why we perceive it the way we do, or why it diffuses the way it does, then it is hard to fully utilise it. I wanted to be able to provide that academic background that would give guidelines to developers and users so their products and services using this volunteered information would actually mean something to the consumers.

To date, the reaction from the OSM community I have been studying has been very positive. At the end of my interviews I always ask if they have any questions, and invariably it is “what have you found in your research”, followed by at least ten minutes of me explaining the findings of user value to date. I think possibly because those involved in OSM tend to be flying the flag for Open Source software the people I speak to are very happy to share their ideas and thoughts with the world.

3. It’s often said that only 1% of internet users are content creators, the rest are content consumers. Does your research support this theory, or do you think more and more users will become content creators as familiarity grows and tools become better?

Whether this statement is true or not is beyond my scope of research. Certainly there have been studies into this which show the producers in the traditional sense are outweighed by the consumers. However the maths seems to make perfect sense in that if you look at Second Life, which as of now (16:00, 17/06/2009, Second Life interface) has had 1,400,042 active users in the last 60 days. If only 1% of users produce content (in this case 3D objects) then you have 14,000 developers producing an interactive virtual world while receiving no income from Linden Lab who run the project. Now, how much of that is true is not for me to say, but even a 0.5% developer community would still be a very large contributor base.

I suppose the problem with this analogy is that it is based on the traditional view of the contributor as one who uses a relatively high degree of technical knowledge to produce something the average person either doesn’t want to or doesn’t know how; as in the case of Second Life objects. But here is the spanner in the works, what does content mean? I suppose this could be a whole area of research in itself, but one of the most exciting developments of the last few years has been the idea of putting a GPS tracker in your mobile devices. With user friendly software a child could upload their journey path from their phone to a map system, which in turn could work out the road network. Take a photograph of anything in the world, upload it to a site such as Flickr and the GPS tag that goes with it could place it on a map for anyone to explore. All of this is content in the VGI sense, where as Clay Shirky stated in his recent talk at TED (May 2009) “every time a new consumer joins this media landscape a new joins as well because the same equipment, phone, computers lets you consume and produce”. If we just geotag our information, potentially any information, it is VGI.

From everything I have read and researched to date I can only state with reasonable comfort that what we are experiencing today is just the tip of the iceberg. I would strongly encourage everyone who reads this interview to watch the 17 minute lecture by Clay Shirky linked above to get a much better case put forward than I can, but when more data and information is volunteered by normal people, the data we use may not be a representation of activity, but the activity itself.

I will close this point with a thought for everyone who has used Twitter (the 140 character long micro blog service). Type the name of any political party into search.twitter.com and you will see the personal and emotional feelings for that party come up across your screen not from any form of propaganda or media filter, but through the simple thoughts of you and me. Now consider what we would have if each micro blog post (or Tweet) came with the geo location of the writer. A map could be created of emotions towards political parties, or anything else you care to name, through the country and the world. I suppose this could be referred to Volunteered Emotional Geospatial Information (VEGI), and it may or may not follow the same human interaction issues as traditional VGI (If VGI can yet be referred to as traditional). However you could chose to look at this analogy, and the blurred role of the user and the, and in the words of Matrix not yet know “how far this rabbit hole really goes”.

4. Do you think your research findings will be applicable to all user generated content services (things like YouTube and Facebook)?

At this stage of my research I honestly do not know. My focus is at the moment on users either creating maps or creating locations such as coffee shops or other amenities on maps. Even to ask what I have found out in this area and how it applies to other forms of map mashups would be too presumptuous. However, certain trends are starting to emerge which suggest the user perception of volunteer generated maps is not quite what we would have thought when we first looked at it. My presentation at State of the Map 2009 (which will also be on my research blog) should be the unveiling of my first analysis of this data.

I think it is highly unlikely that users would view the volunteered content of a map generated with the help of a GPS device as the same as the video posted on YouTube by the disgruntled employee of some Multinational Organisation. Yet at the same time both forms of media have similar traits in the form of geo-tagging the information, openness and volunteer generated, so I would imagine there may be some similarities.

I think social media and its potential link with VGI is a very interesting topic and while, as I said before, my research may not directly influence the direction of Twitter, Facebook or other future sites, but it may influence the apps which run on them. I find it is better to see Facebook as a social operating system which allows apps to run, which in turn allow social networks to thrive; similar in a way to Microsoft Windows running Outlook which allows emails to be sent.

5. Based on your research what advice do you have for start-ups like Nestoria who are keen to benefit from the technological advancements and enthusiasm of the OSM community?

Ultimately, I feel it is a little early to provide any concrete advice from my research as it is still early days and the direction and scope of my findings may change dramatically over the next couple of years. That said, there are a few pieces of research which may prove very relevant.

Firstly I would say embrace the OSM community, but also look outside. There are probably more social networks existing than you can name, and they never stay the same in their constant and rapid evolution. I’m sure everyone can remember the first time they heard that strange word ‘Google’ uttered while they searched the information superhighway with the worlds #1 search engine of the day: Yahoo!

As a more direct take from my research, understand why and how your user base values your product or your competitors’ product. These are your true unique selling points (and their unique selling points) as they engage at the emotional level of gains over sacrifices. Every user is different and will see things in a different way, and technological superiority doesn’t always mean higher value. Sometimes why we value something so highly is a mystery to ourselves; so this is an elusive quest, but value is the key to satisfaction. Even if there is a product we may not like on an ethical level (possibly Microsoft?), we still value it higher than the competitor we ethically prefer because of X, Y and Z (possibly Linux?). So understanding why the value is what it is allows you to tailor your product or service to capitalise on those “warm fuzzy feelings” your product gives your uses, increasing satisfaction and hopefully social diffusion. How relevant my findings on user perception of the value of Volunteered Geographic Information is unknown, but I would advise any developer or mashup creating working from OSM data to take these findings into consideration when deciding how to progress in a world where the consumers and increasingly becoming the producers.

Thanks Christopher. We look forward to learning more at SOTM. For those interested, you can follow Christopher’s research on his blog and on twitter @Kyral210.

If this interview has whetted your appetite for all things SOTM you may be interest in our coverage of SOTM 2008.

past Nestoria interviews: Ryan Notz, Lance Johnson, and Peter Le Masurier.

Nestoria Interview - Ryan Notz - MyBuilder.com

Published by Ed on May 21, 2009 in interviews. 2 Comments

This month we once again dive into the London start-up scene with an interview of Ryan Notz, founder and CEO of MyBuilder.com, a site to help homeowners find and instruct builders. Prior to founding MyBuilder, Ryan worked as a stonemason, roofer, teacher and artist.

Ryan, thanks for chatting with us!

1. Tell us about MyBuilder. What problem does the service solve?

It solves two problems really: the difficulty homeowners have in finding good builders; and the problems builders have in getting the right kind of work, when they need it. I was going through a dry spell with my stonemasonry, while trying to support my wife and two kids. That kind of pressure led to a lot of frustration, and I recognised a real problem in the industry. But for some reason, rather than seeking more security in a job, I went the other direction and started a web business. There must have been something wrong with my head…

Anyway, the idea was to create a website where builders could create a profile that describes their skills and experience - and most importantly, have feedback history from homeowners who have hired them through the site. Homeowners in turn would be able to choose who to hire by comparing all this information, knowing that after their project is done, they can add to the builder’s reputation in a positive or negative way. There is an element of accountability with a system like that which I really liked.

2. Recently it seems all the hype is about pure online start-ups like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace. Your business goes in the other direction, it’s very much a tool for simplifying offline transactions. What are some of the challenges to introducing new ways of working to offline trades.

That’s an interesting question. I very much think of MyBuilder as a technology company, though I can see how someone else could take a different view. We are trying to solve a real world problem, that’s for sure. Bricks and mortar make up the real world, but so do people - and this is the most important element. We’re trying to help bring people together who want to interact with each other, through a fantastic communication tool: the web. Facebook and Twitter are no different, actually.

In terms of convincing builders that they should be looking online to find work, I don’t think that’s our job. We provide a tool for those who want to use it, and if it’s useful enough, that side of things takes care of itself. We’ve seen people learning how to use the web for the first time because they’ve been told they can get work through MyBuilder.com. The need to earn a living is so powerful, you can’t imagine what some people will do. And I can really relate to that.

3. Again and again I hear people talk about how much easier life is for start-ups in the US. Yet, you, an American, chose to start your business here in the UK. Why? And how have you found the business atmosphere versus the US?

Well, to be fair, I was already living here when I started the business. My wife is English and my kids were all born here. But I could have easily moved to California or Austin, and my wife would happily have gone along. We even lived in Philadelphia for a while after having our first child. I guess I just fell in love with Britain and saw the need for MyBuilder here. It is a problem that is particularly acute in the UK. The business climate has certainly worked for me, I have no complaints. More importantly perhaps, was my decision to move from Bristol to London. I love Bristol, but that made all the difference. From fund-raising to building a team to meeting with potential partners, it’s so much easier in London. I think of other tech hotspots like Silicon Valley in the same way: the critical mass of people just makes it easier.

4. MyBuilder has wracked up some impressive awards and great press coverage. What’s the secret? What advice do you have for others contemplating starting their own business - especially those folks looking to bring new technology to bear on traditional industries?

I’m tempted to say that there’s no special sauce. But maybe there is, and it’s just a combination of things. For me, it started by addressing a real problem and having a desire to make the world a better place. It may sound cheesy, but I think that’s important. It’s also about what you want to do with your life and finding a path that’s fulfilling. If starting a business becomes the right thing to do, then you have to do it and rise to the challenge. It’s certainly not easy. It takes a lot of courage and persistence and hard work. You give a lot of blood, sweat and tears along the way. If you’re not doing the right thing for yourself, you won’t last. If you are doing the right thing, people around you will recognise that.

Ryan, thanks for the revealing chat. I can confirm that starting a company takes persistence and hard work. As we like to say, it’s a roller coaster - hang on and enjoy the ride. Keep up the great work!

For any readers out there thinking about having some work done, check out MyBuilder.com

past Nestoria interviews: Lance Johnson, Peter Le Masurier, Henry Yates.

Nestoria Interview - Lance Johnson - Nokia Interactive Advertising

Published by Ed on April 6, 2009 in interviews. 2 Comments

For our April Nestoria interview we have the pleasure of interviewing Lance Johnson, Global Head of Sales for Nokia Interactive Advertising. Nokia Interactive Advertising allows brands to create more valuable relationships with the world’s four billions mobile consumers.

A regular speaker at industry events, Lance worked as a consultant for numerous startups before joining Nokia. Before that he was GM of Mobile Media for Yahoo!, rising through the ranks there from his original role in Yahoo!’s Munich office where he was responsible for various media products. Orignially from Colorado in the US, Lance was a Fulbright Scholar studying economics in Freiburg, Germany.

Lance, thanks for speaking with us. A few questions:

1. The one area the economic downturn doesn’t seem to have dented is innovation in the mobile space. The last few years have seen an amazing amount of new development, from the traditional heavyweights like Nokia but also new entrants like Apple and Google. For those of us not in the industry, can you briefly summarise the current state of affairs in the mobile world?

Services are really what’s driving innovation in mobile at the moment, with the top end devices but also with low and mid range devices. Nokia has a 37% market share globally and we’re really looking to create sticky services and content that consumers love as it helps us to strengthen our connection to the consumer. This is the reason we’ve launched Ovi, which includes services such as Nokia Maps that come bundled on device.

If services are what’s driving innovation, then advertising is what’s going to drive revenues. Increasingly consumers want something for nothing (or not much), and they have high expectations. By linking up with brands, we’re ensuring quality content for consumers through a sustainable business model, and matching up brands with consumers that are likely to be interested in their products.

What I think is interesting for mobile advertising and for digital advertising in general is that the lines between advertising and good service are blurring. When an ad campaign is executed well, it can be indistinguishable from direct customer communication.

2. Mobile advertising has long been heralded as “the next big thing”. How will the current economic climate effect that? What are some of the innovations you’re seeing (or even developing).

The advertising industry is undoubtedly having a difficult year. Most analysts see advertising spend shrinking by 15-25% this year. The fact that mobile and likely interactive are predicted to grow (if only slightly) is testament to their effectiveness, and to the growing importance of the mobile device to the consumer.

Technology that ensures relevance of marketing is key, not only for better brand returns, but also for the future of advertising. We’ve lived in a world where the amount of noise from different media channels has continued to grow. Digital mediums can reverse this trend and put the consumer back in control. If you’re a brand and you want to engage a target demographic you need to meet consumers on their turf. Mobile advertising that uses location data is going to be a really interesting play.

3. Here at Nestoria we love all things geo. Nokia recently dove headfirst into the mapping game with the acquisition of major geo datasource and technology firm NAVTEQ. Likewise we’ve seen the big online players maneuver into the location space, be it Googe’s Latitude or Yahoo!’s FireEagle (to name just a few of many). Why’s everyone so hot on location?

Despite the many advances we’ve made at Nokia and as an industry, we firmly believe that the mobile phone can still be far more useful. By leveraging data based on your past behaviour, what your friends like, where you are and where you’ve been, the mobile device will become even more useful at pre-empting your needs, and providing useful services, and sometimes brand messages to help you on your way. The better the targeting and results, the higher premiums advertisers will be willing to pay. Location will be our emphasis in the 2H of 2009 and we will work every more closely with our subsidiary business NAVTEQ.

4. What chances does the mobile space hold for vertical search engines like Nestoria?

I think it’s an opportunity to differentiate your offering and innovate. In regions like North America and Europe, convergence matters. Both PC and Mobile penetration rates are extremely high. Consumers are using services on their mobiles and on their PCs that should offer useful ways to connect the two. Whether it’s researching a property online on a PC and then going mobile or capturing information while on the go and then making that information useful, there are lots of use cases. These ideas are no longer on the drawing board. Convergence is coming and the successful verticals will make use of mobile’s unique characteristics.

Thanks Lance! Interesting times ahead. For those interested in keeping up with Lance and the bleeding edge of mobile innovation he’s @lancej on twitter.

past Nestoria interviews: Peter Le Masurier, Henry Yates, Andy Allan.

Nestoria Interview - Peter Le Masurier - Juicy Red Apple

Published by Ed on March 27, 2009 in interviews. 6 Comments

This month we have the pleasure of chatting with Peter Le Masurier, the man behind UK property social network Juicy Red Apple. He is a serial entrepreneur, has just joined forces with regional property portal (and Nestoria partner) Southern Property Finder and looks after property software provider Property Owl.

Peter, thanks for speaking with us.

1. The intersection of technology and the property industry isn’t always as smooth as everyone might like. What’s your opinion of the current state of play? How has the downturn affected things?

When I ventured into this industry I thought it was crying out for technological change. One of my first published articles was titled ‘the online revolution’. That was 18 months ago and sadly it has not moved on as much as I anticipated.

I recently sat on an advisory panel for technology in real estate and we discussed a number of issues, concluding with two overriding themes, namely, acceptance and education. Agents need to first accept that they need technology, websites, online marketing and then they need to be educated in what best suits their practice. With reference to acceptance, I believe the continuing downturn is forcing agents to begin to accept that they need to consider the ‘technology’ issue. The herculean task will be once they have accepted it, how best to educate them. I have come to realise that perhaps technology has moved too quickly for agents who were not required to understand it in the good old days when property sold itself.

The landscape has now changed dramatically and exposed technology to agents and they simply don’t understand half of it. We all talk about measuring statistics, but a huge proportion of agents don’t understand the basic fundamentals of a website. So here we are with technology that is arguably too advanced for agents at the moment and too much of it.

2. Explain your recently launched projected JRA. What role do you envision it playing in the industry, and how are things going?

I set up JRA to be an online community where like minded industry professionals could come and interact. I have long been an admirer of Active Rain in the USA and its powerhouse of circa 140,000 members. I see JRA as a similar tool, an essential conduit that every industry professional will have access to and where all can interact and communicate with one another. As Active Rain say ‘… our goal is to “Empower the real estate professional‘ and as an extension empower the consumer…” which I tend to agree with.

It is going very well. JRA has a solid membership, but needs more agents to start to embrace the concept. I heard from one agent recently who said he wouldn’t want to talk to his competitor down the road. This attitude still exists in this space and will be a challenge (not just for an online community), but for every such agent there are more willing to give it a go and get involved. The bottom line is that it works, advice is being sought, discussions are being had and business is being conducted.

Given my earlier comments I am not expecting a stampede. The innovators are on JRA, the early adopters are coming and I believe over this year we will see the early majority take it on. My ambition for JRA is to see it as part of agents stable diet of online resources in the future and in every educators handbook of what an agent should be doing when embracing this space. Indeed, I believe eventually it will be a ‘necessity’ to be involved in this space.

3. Given your role at Southern Property Finder, how do you see regional portals competing with the large national (or even international) brands?

I have for a long time moaned that there are too many portals so it may seem somewhat hypocritical to become involved in yet another portal. That said, Southern Property Finder has been around for a while and had built up a decent following of local agents (South Coast). It was this local following that attracted me. Indeed, I had just written an article on niche portals which indicated that perhaps a more locally focused portal could offer an additional service to agents and users alike.

I was involved in the online travel industry a while back and saw how niche products developed in that space and also saw how ‘local’ search developed. If we can get the SEO right then a local portal ought to be able to offer its agents the attractive proposition of good quality, relevant leads at a reasonable price. Can it compete with the large national portals? I see it as complementing them and offering the agent a reasonably priced marketing channel that the larger portals sometimes struggle to fill, i.e. local. The Brand is strong and can grow stronger and will offer local agents more of an opportunity to promote their local area.

With reference to my responses to your first question, I would like to point out that the technology aspect of the continuing development has been a headache and dealing with near on 300 agents all using different software providers continues to be a royal pain. I do take from this a small positive however in that agents are at least now more focussed on where/how their property is being displayed online.

4. As a regular and often very entertaining blogger, what is your advice to estate agents contemplating making the plunge and embracing the online dialog?

Thanks Ed, I am still deeply humbled that anyone reads my stuff.

My first advice would be start a blog. Commit yourself and a few people to write anything they like, but make sure you get at least three posts up a week. Research the many good blogs that are out there and just start writing. Commitment is key and as much as I enjoy writing there are times where I have to force myself to write.

There are many sites in this space that report on the daily news in the property industry. Pick one story and give your opinion, simple as that. You don’t have to disagree with it.

People often ask me what makes a good blog? To be honest I have no idea, I have written blogs I thought were good and no one has read them and then the one I wrote at midnight because I had to gets rave reviews. It is probably easier to say what not to do. Do not write for search engines, stuffing your content with keywords will not read well. The relevant keywords will be in there if you just write as it is. Do not self promote, you are not there to say how your product will change the world. Always give credit to other authors and link to sources, references.

Perhaps in this industry the one piece of useful advice I would say take heed of is: Be Honest!! The industry suffers enough in the opinion polls and agents embracing this space should bear that in mind! Your readers are a clever bunch and will spot a blagger a mile off.

Second, open a twitter account - yes it is the darling of the moment and may not be as popular in 12 months time, but 6 months is a long time in this space and you are already 6 months behind your competitors who are on there. It is hugely popular at the moment and will continue to be so for a while. So what you don’t get it, get on there and play. Half the people on there don’t get it and this is part of the fun. You will learn what works, what doesn’t, but simply interacting in this space will increase your brand awareness. It now has SEO value as well.

I will of course say join JRA, not only will this increase your knowledge and open up endless possibilities but it will help give you ideas of what to write for your blog.

Anyway, many agents now have time on their hands and blogging is an excellent way to inform potential customers what is happening in the local area, additional content, and therefore additional opportunity to be found through organic search. But this leads back to my first point, they have to accept they need this and then be educated as many have no idea of the real benefit of a website and what organic search may be.

Thanks Ed

Thanks very much Peter for the insightful and comprehensive response, and for your ground breaking work as a pioneer in moving the industry forward.

You can keep up to date on Peter’s many projects by joining Juicy Red Apple, subscribing to the PropertyOwl blog, or following @propertyowl on twitter.

past Nestoria interviews: Henry Yates, Andy Allan, and Stephan Uhrenbacher.

Nestoria Interview - Henry Yates - estatecreate

Published by Ed on February 17, 2009 in interviews. 10 Comments

This month we speak with Henry Yates, founder and CEO of recently launched start-up estatecreate, a service designed to make it simple to create a single property website and distribute it. Henry has a long history in the UK internet start up scene; prior to estatecreate he co-founded Face the Youth planning agency and Univillage, a social network for students.

Henry, a few questions:

1. What is estatecreate? What problem does it solve?

Estatecreate.com allows property owners to easily create their own website for their property and then automatically distribute their content to property classified sites and portals via feeds.

We give property owners all the tools they need to market their own property. Estatecreate enables owners to differentiate the presentation of their property by having their own look and feel, a stand alone website and their own URL. We also make it easy to list their property on multiple sites without having to register and re-upload all the details separately on each site.

2. How do you see the economic downturn effecting the private seller space?

Everyone is looking for opportunities to save money so I think sellers will increasingly look into promoting their own property alongside using an agent. Sellers that go down this route may still ask an agent to handle their enquiries in return for reduced commission.

3. In most European countries private sales make up a significant percentage of the market, but in the UK the percentage has traditionally been very small. Why? Do you see this changing?

I think this is primarily due to the differences in the way portals operate. In most of Europe the property portals offer private sales as well as agency listings, giving home owners the choice of marketing their own property or using an agent. The main portals in the UK have not historically allowed consumers to list their own properties making it difficult for home owners to easily reach a decent size audience.

I do see this changing for two reasons. The first is that we are offering UK home owners an effective way of marketing their own property. Estatecreate allows home owners to reach a large audience of buyers by aggregating lots of classified sites where you can list your property privately. The second is that new entrants to the portal market such as Globrix, Zoomf and Zoopla! will force the market to start to move away from annual subscriptions to a performance based model, fragmenting the market. A more fragmented portal market will make it easier for portals to take on private listings.

4. To what extent has the change in consumer internet technology, be it mass market sites like Facebook or YouTube, or specialist sites like Nestoria changed the way people search for and market classifieds?

Great question. I think sites like these have had a huge impact on consumer behaviour. In terms of search, people no longer start their search for a property with an agent. Instead, they start their search using sites, such as Nestoria, that allow consumers to easily search for property knowing that they are seeing the majority of properties for sale on the market.

Sites such as Facebook and YouTube have made people much more comfortable using web applications and publishing on the web. We believe that these sites have paved the way for consumers to embrace web applications such as estatecreate to market classifieds.

Thanks Henry, it’s great to see the pace of online innovation in classifieds pushed forward. We agree with you that as users become more used not only to always-on high speed bandwidth, but also with the shift from being merely consumers to becoming participants in the media process, the potential exists for radical changes in behaviour - and thus also in business models.

past Nestoria interviews: Andy Allan, Stephan Uhrenbacher, and Gary Gale.

Nestoria Interview - Andy Allan - OpenCycleMap

Published by Ed on January 5, 2009 in interviews. 5 Comments

For our first Nestoria interview of 2009 we’re pleased to have the chance to speak with Andy Allan, one of the creators of OpenCycleMap.org. OpenCycleMap (OCM) is a flagship example of the power of opening up access to geodata. It’s built on top of OpenStreetMap, and was recently commended by the British Cartographic Society. When not working on OCM Andy is a Tech Lead at CloudMade.

1. What’s OpenCycleMap all about and how did you get the idea for it?

OpenCycleMap is a customised online map for cyclists, based on OpenStreetMap data. It shows things that are interesting to cyclists including signed cycle routes, offroad cycle paths, bike shops and bike parking - and of course hills - whilst diminishing other things like motorways that are of little interest. I’d been mapping for OpenStreetMap for about a year when some people were discussing customised maps, and I went ahead and attempted the cycle map in July 2007, and it’s a hobby that’s snowballed since then.

2. What are some of the technical challenges of the project?

The main two technical challenges have been getting my head around how everything works - from spatial databases to geoprocessing to mapnik style rules - and dealing with a huge world-wide project. The cycle map started off UK only, but has steadily increased to cover Europe, and then the whole world. But this takes up huge amounts of disk space, especially for the height data needed for the contours and hill colouring, takes forever to rerender each week, and its popularity sucks up an increasing amount of bandwidth. And if all that weren’t bad enough, the 81,000 OSM volunteers keep on adding even more data for me to deal with!

3. What has been the response from users?

Overwhelmingly positive. It’s continually held up as an example of what’s possible when the underlying OSM geo-data is made available, but as well as being creatively different from a standard web map it’s also pretty useful in its own right as a map for cyclists. By far the best thing is the feedback from other countries, across Europe and around the world, from people who have used and enjoyed it. But the work never ends, since almost all of the praise comes along with a “it would be great if it could also…” line attached!

4. What can we expect in 2009 from OCM specifically and from works built on top of OSM generally?

My plans for OpenCycleMap are fairly straightforward - to work on improving the map rendering even further, adding more detail and brushing up the documentation to entice more people in to contributing. But I’m much more excited about the projects that are taking the maps I generate and building on them - I’ve seen some previews of a great journey planning site that’s about to be released. There’s a few side projects, including cycle-tailored maps for Garmin GPS units and walking route maps that I’m working on in the background, and hopefully everyone will get to benefit from them at some point.

As for OSM generally, I think 2009 is going to be when OSM projects really start catching everyone’s imagination. I’ve seen a growing acceptance of OSM over the last six months in the techy community, and more and more people are coming up with interesting applications, especially for mobile devices, that use OSM by default. Here at CloudMade we’re working on various APIs that’ll make it even easier to develop cool applications, and you’ll hear more about them from us as 2009 progresses.

5. There is an OSM version of Nestoria,and we’ve considered switching fully to OSM in a few well covered areas like Berlin or central London. What’s your advice?

Go for it! You wouldn’t be the first, Flickr! have done similar things for their maps where OSM is better than their other map suppliers in many places around the world, famously in Beijing but also such places as Sydney. Anyone in your position should consider what their customers are wanting from the maps on your site - if it’s just for a vague orientation then there’s not much to choose between different maps other than their cartographic style. But when I’m poking around for a new flat on Nestoria I’m much more interested in all the stuff that only OSM shows, like where the nearest pubs and supermarkets are, whether it’s near industrial areas or open spaces with plenty of paths through them, and for me whether there’s bicycle parking near the train stations!

Thanks Andy. You are absolutely right that home searchers are interested in relevant local content. We’ll keep experimenting during the course of 2009 to try to stay at the forefront of innovation in online cartography. For those interested in OCM you can follow Andy’s progress via his blog - assuming of course he’s not out pedaling.

past Nestoria interviews: Stephan Uhrenbacher, Gary Gale, and Muki Haklay.

Year in Review - 2008 Nestoria Interview Series

Published by Ed on December 30, 2008 in interviews. 1 Comment

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.

Nestoria Interview - Stephan Uhrenbacher - Qype

Published by Ed on December 21, 2008 in interviews. 2 Comments

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.

Nestoria Interview - Gary Gale - Yahoo! Geo Technologies Group

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

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.

Nestoria Interview - Muki Haklay - University College London

Published by Ed on November 2, 2008 in interviews. 4 Comments

This month for our Nestoria Interview we chat with Muki Haklay a Senior Lecturer at University College London’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering. A long time participant in, follower and commentator on the ‘neogeography’ trend, Muki recently published about OpenStreetMap, and its explosive growth. He is a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and a member of the Association for Geographical Information (AGI).

Muki, many thanks for speaking with us

1. Why is that OSM and other neogeography projects have grown so rapidly in the past few years?
I think that around 2005 there was a fundamental shift in some underlying technologies and social trends that allowed it. Of the wider driving forces, I think that there are 5 significant ones: GPS availability, Web standards, Broadband, Data storage and a new paradigm in programming APIs.

Quickly explaining what I mean:

1st May 2000 should be the birthday of Neogeography, because that was the day when President Clinton removed the selective availability of GPS signal so we can capture locations easily and with good accuracy. Without this decision, we wouldn’t have the huge explosion in location data.

The second thing is web standards. I still remember when I first read on Dave Winer’s blog (although it wasn’t yet called that) about the release of SOAP, and the whole development of XML and other standards. Without the evolution of XML,SOAP and the gradual adaption of browsers that are capable of running AJAX which took some years, we wouldn’t be able to run geographical applications which usually require more processing than an email application.

The third is broadband access – as Tom Friedman notes in ‘The World is Flat’ - because of the Dot.Com crash and the infrastructure that companies like Global Crossing and WorldCom created at the end of the 90s, we now got cheap and fast broadband across the world. Think about piping lots of tiles to the user’s browser and you realise that you can’t do it over a dialup.

The fourth point is data storage. We tend to forget that as late as 2000, the cost of gigabyte storage was about $10, which again limits the ability to tile the world. By 2005, it was 50c.

Finally, with all these things, a new paradigm of light APIs emerged. The learning curve of Google API is much shorter than, say, understanding how to program a typical GIS mapping sever, such as ArcIMS or MapServer.

Take all these together, and you have an explanation of why Neogeography happened in 2005 and not 1995. It’s interesting to notice how, as in many other aspects of geographical computations, GIS and Geography is more complex/voluminous/computationally intensive so it lags behind other applications by about 10-15 years. You can show similar lags in the development of geographic technologies in previous generations of computing platforms.

2. What are the implications for the professional GIS community?
I’ve noted on my blog the implications of all these are far reaching. For too many employers, the justification in employing GIS professionals is that the software used to create maps is very complex, so having specialists who produce maps is justified. But if it is possible to create maps with a simple API instead of buying an expensive and difficult to maintain Internet mapping server software, or if it is enough to analyse the data by creating a point map on Google Earth – then why keep the expensive professional?

This is a good thing in the long run. GIS analysis and clever use of data and analysis techniques are the real benefits of using a professional GIS package, and these are things that an API can’t handle (for now) so GIS professionals should move up the chain and focus on services where their geographic knowledge really adds value. It’s much more exciting and interesting to use GIS to do proper analysis and not just to produce maps…

3. You recently posted about a comprehensive evaluation of comprehensiveness of OSM geodata versus professionally gathered data. What did you learn?
The report is quite extensive and covers lots of aspects of the OSM data, so it’s worth focusing on some highlights.

One of the most striking aspects is that OSM provides a different type of data in terms of accuracy – and that for many applications this is absolutely fine. Not everyone need very accurate data – so OSM teach us what is good enough in geographic information.

In terms of quality, just as in the case of open source code, we need to think about the importance of Raymond statement ‘Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’ For mapping, this should be translated as the number of contributors that worked on an area and therefore removed ‘bugs’ from it. And this is an aspect that the OSM crowd need to figure out and that will improve quality. Too many places are covered by a single person.

I’ve also understood the completeness is more important than high accuracy – as you think about fitness for purpose, you understand that once OSM will get to 75-80% coverage of a place, the data will be very valuable and very usable.

One of the motivation for another part of the analysis was a matter-of-fact comment from Steve Coast (ed: see past Nestoria Interview with Steve Coast) about mapping less attractive locations (council estates) and I wanted to check if this tally with government measures of deprivation. Indeed, more deprived areas are far less mapped then wealthy areas. For me, that’s one of the overlooked aspects of Neogeography – it doesn’t really happen in digitally excluded place. Even in places such as India where Google do their Map Maker activities, they do it with students, who are naturally coming from a wealthier background and not with socially excluded people…

4. What effects will crowd sourced geodata have for the the web community in general and start ups, like Nestoria, in particular?
Well, because we’re just three years since it really took off, we need to wait and see which sources are becoming stable and reliable.

For example, as we get more geotagged images, and with tools like photosynth and the developments in image recognition, I think that we will see lots of applications that use visual imagery to extract geographic information – think of getting data on all the shops in an area by looking at their signs.

As I’ve noted, we also need to wait until some places will have a robust coverage – once OSM got proper coverage of a major city such as London I’m sure that we will see exciting applications from CloudMade or similar ventures that build on it. It’ll enable many more start-ups in the area of geographic information. For example, UCL and London 21 Sustainability Network are currently setting up a community mapping social enterprise (that’s like a start-up, but all profits go for social goals). It’s called ‘Mapping for Change’ and it will focus on making places more sustainable. Getting the data is a major issue for us. Using OSM as our source of geographic information will enable us to spend our effort and money on engaging communities, not on buying data. I’m sure that there will be many more examples.

Thanks Muki. We recommend anyone interested in tracking Muki’s work learning from his experience subscribe to his blog. We look forward to watching OpenStreetMap’s continued growth in coverage and comprehensiveness, and finding ways for Nestoria to work together with the academic community. Readers may be interested in our past cooperations with UCL).

past Nestoria interviews: Brad Inman, Simon Baker, and Tim Youngman.

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