Archive for the 'New Features' Category

Nestoria on the Yahoo! homepage

Published by Ed on February 11, 2010 in New Features, events and tools. Comments

Fellow Nestorhooligans,

As devout blog readers will recall, we’re big fans of all things Yahoo! for their great tools and even better open data attitude. As one example of many of why we love the big purple machine, I’m delighted to see we’ll be co-sponsoring WhereCampEU in a few weeks (along with several other lovely folks I should note – bless you each and every one).

A while back Yahoo! embraced the “if you love the user, set him free” attitude and began integrating third party content on their homepage – one of the most heavily trafficked sites in the internet. This is amazing on so many levels – great for users, daring business wise, and phenomenal technically. When Yahoo! rolled this feature out in the UK they partnered with well known brands like the BBC and TfL. That makes sense, as those sites have great content that users value. They also opened the platform and allowed anyone to build a Yap (Yahoo! Application). Which is also great, as it encourages technical innovation (which we like).

But now, dear Nestoria fans, is where things get very interesting for those interested in free and easy property searching. To kick start UK interest in the new yap platform, a few months ago Yahoo! announced a contest, inviting 50 different companies from across the UK tech scene to build yaps. The best part – the prize for winning would be featured on the Yahoo! UK homepage, one of the most visited sites in the UK.

Well, we do like a challenge, so we dove in head first and whipped up our own yap. It gives me great pleasure to announce that we won! From today the Nestoria UK Yahoo! Application is available to help any Yahoo! user find property to buy or rent quickly and easily without even leaving Yahoo!

Just like Nestoria itself, our yap tries to be very simple but also very functional – to get you to the information you need as easily as possible. The Nestoria yap takes the user’s location settings (in an anonymous fashion of course) and defaults the location. So things should hopefully “just work”.

Here are some screenshots of the yap in action.

Nestoria Yap featured bottom left on www.yahoo.co.uk

Nestoria Yap featured bottom left

Small view

Small view

Large view

Large view

Change your settings

Change your settings

For all the Nestoria groupies out there, catch some video coverage of some of the Nestoria team in action at the competition. Many thanks to Yahoo! for hosting a great event, opening up a great platform, and giving a small start up like ourselves such a great opportunity. Congratulations also to the other competitors for their innovative yaps. Second place went to PayPal, while Capital Radio earned third.

As Javier correctly mentions in the video, what really matters is that you, our users like it. So please tell us what you think.

In keeping with our “write once, launch everywhere “philosophy, and with our basic guiding principle of “it’s not a party unless the Italians, Germans and Spanish can join in” we’ve also released local versions of the yap inGerman, Italian, and Spanish. Enjoy!

Of course, any mention of a new tool would be incomplete without a bit of focus on the technically interesting bits. We’re particularly pleased that this project resulted in a new bit of open source code for the world. Our man Alistair, who headed up the project, released Net::Yap, a perl wrapper for doing the Yap OAuth dance. May 1000’s of new perl-based yaps blossom!

BTW – for all the true app addicts out there, don’t forget to take the Nestoria Facebook app for a spin. While you’re at it, take a peek at all of our tools to make property searching easier.

Drop in pageviews

Published by Ed on February 10, 2010 in Nestoria Rank and New Features. Comments

Fellow Nestorinos!

One thing we occasionally get asked about here at Nestoria is how many pageviews users generate. My typical response, generally to the horror of the question asker, is “too many”. Why? Well, because it’s easy to create more pageviews – just don’t give people the best answer. Instead force them to click “next”, “next”, “next” to find what they want. A good search engine should be presenting relevant content to users as quickly as possible and sending them of to that content. More pageviews would indicate we’re doing a bad rather than a good job.

Why do I bring this up now? Well, a few weeks ago we began intensively testing a fairly significant change to the Nestoria search results page, and we’ve now rolled it out to all users. The goal: reduce pageviews dramatically by helping users get to their dream home as quckly and simply as possible. Not to bore you with the technical jargon, but we’ve now gone to a full AJAX implementation – basically relevant content should just “automagically” appear as you move the sliders, the map, etc.

Screen shot 2010-02-10 at 19.15.40

So far feedback and measured behaviour has been very positive. As with any change, it’s unlikely we got everything perfect on the first try (actually this isn’t the first try – we’ve tested many implementations of this), so please let us know your feedback. And big thanks to all of you who have already sent your thoughts.

Whether you like this change or not, of one thing you can be certain, even as you read this note, a significant percentage of Nestoria users are exposed to a new test. The path to perfection is endless. We grow by walking it.

One final technical note – big thanks to everyone working on jQuery. We made the switch, and are loving it.

Nestoria on Layar

Published by Ed on January 29, 2010 in New Features and partnerships. Comments

Fellow Nestorphreaks,

the other day we announced our new partnership with Samsung UK in which Nestoria serves as one of several “Layars” that allow the user to find relevant local content via augmented reality.

Well, our very own Nomsa and Matteo (who loyal Nestoria fans will know from their roles as authors over on the Nestoria Deutschland blog and the Nestoria Italia blog) took our Samsung phone for a spin and made a little video that show how the Layar works for your Friday afternoon pre-pub enjoyment.

We hope you like it – and bear in mind, we’re an internet company, not professional video producers.

Have a good weekend!

PS – for those of you who love watching the Nestoria team, slide your browser on over to this entry on the Yahoo Developer Network blog where you can catch some of us in action. More about that soon.

A few notes about searching for property on the other side of the world

Published by Ed on January 8, 2010 in New Features and about us. Comments

Fellow Nestorpodians,

In last week’s 2009 review I mentioned that I’d be writing a bit about our international achievements in 2009. And indeed I shall, but first we have a more pressing overseas matter to address.

As regular readers know, a few months ago we posted about our search for an expert on all things Australian. After much interviewing – we all know there are tons of Aussies in London, but post a job ad over on Gumtree for an Australian with internet experience and you really get a sense of the scale. Seriously we were very flattered by how many of you got in touch – I’m delighted to announce we found our man. Or woman actually. The last few weeks our little team of intrepid vertical searchers has been joined by one Kat – long time internet veteran and more importantly continual source of bizarre life stories (Did you ever work as a princess at Tokyo Disneyland? Didn’t think so) that have enriched the team to no end. She hasn’t taken long to settle in and put the old e-pen to the paper. The Nestoria Australia blog went live a few weeks ago. Best of all, it seems by and large to be understandable to English speakers! So I invite you to subscribe straight away to get the scoop on all things property search related from the southern hemisphere (well Australia at least). As a service to Northern Hemisphere readers the content will actually be printed right side up, rather than upside down.

Just like here in the UK, we’ll be running an interview series with thought leaders from the online and real estate industries, the first of which went live before Christmas where Kat caught up with digital geo enthusiast Julian Doherty, one of the creators of the delightfully named govhack project It’s Buggered, Mate.

Where else can you find content like that? Please join me in welcoming Kat to the team, and enjoy the new blog.

BTW – I know some of you may now be saying to yourself “Well Ed, that’s great. I like a good blog as much as the next person, and this Kat sounds cool, but when can I actually use Nestoria to search for property in Australia?”. Well, to take your little mental game a step further, were we actually having that conversation I would answer “Soon”.

Nestoria on your iPhone

Published by Ed on November 28, 2009 in API, New Features and tools. Comments

Fellow Nestorholics!

A few months back we reported on the iProperty app for Apple’s iPhone. Today I’m pleased to report that the pace of innovation remains relentless and several others have taken advantage of the Nestoria API to create their own apps that make searching for property on the go even simpler. The winner, as we had hoped, is you the user in that these apps are even better and cheaper (ie free!).

First and formost we’d like to feature Sten Hiedel’s excellent UK Property app.

Sten is an old friend of ours from nearby start-up MyBuilder. He whipped up the app to help with his own search for a new flat. The smooth interface and simplicity worked for him, and hopefully it will work for you. We recommend you grab this amazing app here.

We’ve also heard from Fifty Eggs Ltd. who have produced Locati, which is available both as a free lite version and a paid full version. The service is interesting because, like Nestoria itself, it mashes property up with relevant local content from sources like Wikipedia. It also offers some nice personalisation options. Nice one.

Meanwhile Property Near Me has taken a slightly different approach. Their service does not require installing an app, instead all you need to do is point your browser to http://www.propertynearme.com and magic happens.

Many thanks to everyone who uses the API, and even more thanks to those of you out there who find and report bugs. Keep innovating! We’ll keep making things better, you can expect some tweaks in the coming weeks.

As someone who’s been working on the internet for over a decade it’s great to see the promise of high-speed, affordable, personalised internet access while on the go finally happening. Actually, not just happening but happening via an absolute explosion in innovation and creativity.

Meanwhile, if this post has whetted your technical appetite and you’re looking for a challenge, we’d love to see someone whip up a nice app using our average house price data

As always, we close by wishing you happy house hunting.

Nestoria API version 1.15 live – bigger pics

Published by Ed on September 11, 2009 in API and New Features. Comments

Fellow Nestornavians,

A few weeks ago we announced support for big images in our property lists. Today we continue on our bigger is better trend with the announcement of the release of version 1.15 of our API. The full release notes are, as always, to be found on the API documentation page, but in short we now return both a small thumb_url AND a larger img_url.


thumb_url img_url
60×60 160×120

One of the big challenges we grapple with on Nestoria itself is how to display a lot of information in a very concise way, and we haven’t yet found a good way to integrate the larger images (rest assured experiments are underway!) on our search results pages, but we thought there’s no reason to inhibit the creativity of others. Enjoy.

Bigger images has been a request from API users for some time, and we’re pleased we can finally address it. Big thanks (pun intended I’m afraid) to everyone using the API. Please send us any feedback you have. If you’re thinking of using the API for a project and just need a bit of inspiration, please check out Lokku Labs where we showcase some of the projects we and others have built around the API. Finally, if the API is just a bit too techie for you, you might like our different widgets and webmaster tools.

Enjoy the weekend!

Bigger is Better

Published by Ed on August 21, 2009 in New Features and tools. Comments

Fellow Nestorfreaks,

Good news. After a few requests from webmasters, we’ve adapted our property list tool so that you can, if you wish, now show bigger property images. For those that don’t know, the property lists are a simple way that you can show relevant listings on any page. You can customise the look and feel (for example adding bigger images). Here’s a screen shot from our demo page.

big image example

Enjoy and let us know what you think. We hope webmasters and their readers enjoy it. Of course, if you likes the old small images, you can sill use those as well. Inevitably this will raise the question of whether bigger images will be coming to the Nestoria search results page. No way. Well ok, maybe. Probably. Possibly soon. We’ll see.

Enjoy the weekend.

Where Can I Live? goes International

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

Fellow Nestorfolk!

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

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

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

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

Trova la tua nuova casa
Need a place in Milan?

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

As always I close by wishing you happy house hunting!

Same Same is Bad Bad

Published by Ed on April 18, 2009 in Nestoria Rank and New Features. Comments

Fellow Nestorlinians,

As is our habit, from time to time we like to update you on our efforts to improve the quality of the property search experience on Nestoria. We put a great deal of effort into addressing all aspect of a high quality search experience, not least being relevance. I’m thus please to reveal that this week we went live with a significant improvement to the algorithms we use for detecting duplicate listings. Because we aggregate from many sources, it often happens that we have the same property from mutiple partners. This is clearly not an optimal user experience.

Techncially detecting duplicates isn’t always trivial as the information available to us from different sources can be, well, different.

Duplicates are evil!

We’re pleased that we’ve been able to make good progress on this important part of relevancy. As with all aspects of improving quality, the work is never “done”. No doubt there are still the occasional dupes lurking out there. Please let us know when you spot them.

On a related note, a few months ago I dashed off a post about quality (it’s not the same as quantity) and why we believe it’s better to show our users fewer high quality listings than many bad listings. Our finetuning of deduplication is another step in that direction.

Finally, for our international fans, rest assured the same improvements have been rolled out across Nestoria in all the markets we’re active in.

Enjoy the weekend!

Where-can-i-live.com version 1.5

Published by Ed on February 12, 2009 in New Features, events and tools. Comments

Fellow Nestorphiles,

a few weeks ago we announced the launch of where-can-i-live.com, a new prototype service under our Lokku Labs brand, that allows a different view of property search data for London commuters.

We were lucky enough to get a bit of coverage of the service, which in turn generated a substantial amount of feedback from users. We love feedback. Many thanks to everyone who took the time to let us know their thoughts, and we’re happy to announce the first round of improvements based on that feedback. We’ve now launched the following enhancements:

  1. updated travel times database
    We added a couple of missing data points. The most common request we get is to add London Overground and train times. We’re working on this as well.

  2. added walking and cycling travel times

    traveltimes

    We get the data via the CloudMade Routing API.


  3. switched to cleaner, simpler map tiles

    maptiles

    We started using the OpenStreetMap map which has complete coverage of the London area. Cloudmade just started introducing new map services based on OSM data and we were to proud to be able to test their beta (and sometimes alpha) versions.
    For the new map we used the CloudMade Style Editor which allows us to enable/disable certain elements on the map and completely overhaul the color scheme. As you see above the colors now fit nicely with the rest of the website, we use less colors, the streets are thinner and gone are elements that are only relevant for car navigation, e.g. street numbers.


We’ll be presenting where-can-i-live this Thursday at the Cloudmade London developer event where CloudMade will introduce all their new services. The venue has been expanded to allow for a few more attendees, and I invite anyone with an interest in innovation in online cartography to attend. We look forward to seeing fellow geo-enthusiasts there.

As someone who started his websurfing in the days of Netscape, I can say Cloudmade’s map style editor is one of those “sweet jesus that’s cool” apps, that raises the bar for everyone to follow. Only a few years ago you would see homepages on the web with scanned in maps (a copyright infringement I should note) and hand-drawn directions. Now in 2009 we can insert full interactive maps in 5 minutes and even change the colors!

As to what’s next for WCIL, well, of course we’re a very small team and the service will remain a proof of concept designed to inspire others to what’s possible using our API and others. Nevertheless, we’ll keep fine tuning it as we have spare cycles. Please keep the feedback coming.

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