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

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

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

• a comprehensive database, sorted by relevancy
• great local data and photos about the location your interested in
• tools for property searchers like RSS and our Italian Facebook app
• easy to use tools for Italian webmasters
• goodies for developers like a full API and KML
• and of course, the Nestoria Italia blog to keep our users informed (please subscribe)

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

Happy house hunting to our Italian friends!

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

As regular readers of this blog will know we take local content seriously here at Nestoria, one needs only check our gallery of local data pins. We’ve done our best to be comprehensive, partnering with many interesting sites across the web like They Work For You or geograph.org. So we immediately sprung into action when an anonymous user got in touch via our feedback from to tell us:

“There are over 60 Merseyrail stations throughout the Merseyside area and services extend as far as Chester, these should be included in your info.”

At first there was disbelief in the team as we thought we had gathered the data of every tram and local rail system in the UK (we have Birmingham, Manchester, Nottingham, Newcastle, and many others). We thought we had them all, but we were wrong. Today we’re pleased to announce that users will find yet another local content pin on Nestoria! Behold:

the Nestoria Merseyrail pin:

See an example if you search for homes for sale in Birkenhead.

Big thanks to the user who tipped us off. Please keep the suggestions coming. For the trainspotters amongst you, learn more about the Merseyrail, for the rest of you happy house hunting!

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

Good news, we’re pleased to announce that Nestoria property searches will now also find homes for sale and for rent from Homes24, owned by Archant. With over 100,000 listings across the UK, this is another step forward for us in being able to offer our searchers a comprehensive property search experience. Of course for a small start-up like ourselves, its also a big vote of confidence for one of the UK’s leading media groups to chose to work with us.

Here’s a screengrab from a search for houses for sale in Cambridge.

We hope you’re as pleased as we are. Best of luck with your house hunt!

It’s hard to believe it, but it’s now two years since we first revealed Nestoria to the world when we launched our little property search engine covering just London.

Many thanks to all of our partners and user for your continual support and feedback. It’s been a great two years. While we know we still have a long way to go (we hope to have some interesting announcements for the UK next week) we’re proud of what we’ve achieved and we couldn’t have done it without all of you.

Here’s a screenshot from the day we launched two years ago. As you’ll see the changes are subtle. Search is the art of continual fine tuning.

To celebrate this accomplishment, and also in anticipation of the impending launch of Nestoria Italia (BTW betatest starts next week, all beta-testers welcome), we headed off to Farringdon for an Italian feast.

We look forward to the next two years and continued geographic expansion!

On a final note, we know many of our diligent blog readers are interested in the technical side of things here at Nestoria. We thought you might like this tidbit: the uptime of our oldest production server:

Last login: Fri Jun 20 17:53:43 2008
f1:> uptime
17:53:53 up 514 days, 19:22,  2 users,  load average: 0.82, 0.53, 0.44

See you at the John Snow for a celebratory pint!

Our international expansion plans draw ever nearer. We’re looking for a few German and Italian native speakers to take a peek at Nestoria Deutschland and Nestoria Italia before we open up to the public in a few weeks time. Expect a few rough edges, but otherwise we hope to offer the same simplicity of house searching that we present to house hunters in the UK and Spain.

If you’re interested many thanks for your help and please get in touch via our online form, we’ll send you an invite in the coming weeks.

We’re sure everyone knows what these are by now - systems put in place to charge motorists entering or present within a specific area, with the aim of reducing traffic congestion.

A few facts about the Manchester system:

• Setup is expected to cost £2.8bn
• Provisional launch set for 2013
• Will consist of 2 ‘zones’ (one outer, one inner)
• The outer zone will be drawn roughly around the M60
• The inner zone will outline the city centre
• Entry charges will only be triggered during the morning (07:00-09:00) or evening (16:00-18:30) and will be £2 for entering the outer zone plus a further £1 for the inner zone
• Exit charges will only be triggered during the evening and will be £1 upon exiting each zone
• Public transport capacity and links are expected to be increased to ensure alternatives for motorists

What does this mean for Nestoria users?

Those that have used Nestoria to search for aproperty in central London may well have seen a little next to some properties. This is to let you know that this property is within the congestion charging zone. Why is this important? If you live within the zone, you get a 90% discount on the charge - not bad! There may also be other impacts - it would be more expensive for friends to drive to see you and so on.

We had this data up for London as soon as we launched, and even marked those properties in the London western extension before it went live, so that you could plan ahead.

We plan on doing the same for Manchester as soon as the zones are agreed upon - this should help you make the right decision about your next property, and make your search for the perfect nest that much easier.

Happy hunting!

]]> http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/2008/06/10/manchester-congestion-charge/feed/ http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/2008/06/04/nestoria-engineers-at-yapc-europe-2008/ http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/2008/06/04/nestoria-engineers-at-yapc-europe-2008/#comments Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:20:30 +0000 astle http://blog.nestoria.co.uk/?p=297 Hello Nestorcandinavians,

MTM and I just got word that our talk proposals have been accepted for YAPC Europe 2008. We had a good time at last year’s event and are proud to be actively contributing this time around.  I am going to speak about the various Perl profiling modules and MTM will relate some of the lessons learned building a high volume/low maintenance ETL system.  Alex and Spiros will also be present in Copenhagen, so the entire team will be taking a break from building new features and concentrating on learning a few new tricks.  We look forward to seeing friend old and new in August.

Today we take another step forward in terms of offering the UK property searcher total comprehensiveness. I’m pleased to announce that starting this week, you will now find (in addition to our many previous partners) the listings of Team Association, from their property portal Teamprop. With over tens of thousands of listings from independent estate agents all across the country, it’s a welcome addition to the Nestoria database and a step closer in our quest to deliver a simple and easy to use property searching experience all across the UK. Here’s the screenshot:

Happy house hunting!

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)

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.