The good people at The Guardian are hosting UK Scale Camp on the 4th of December. As far as I know, this is London’s first event focused exclusively on scaling applications for the web. This is an unconference, so the schedule is not set in stone, but the content will likely be similar to Velocity, with a European focus of course. Scaling high-performance web applications is something that is near and dear to our hearts at Nestoria. And so is drinking. For those reasons, we are doubly proud to be the event’s first sponsor and to have our money going towards crucial Friday beverages for attendees.
Not yet clear if anyone from Nestoria will be speaking at the event, but given our 3+ years of scaling up Nestoria from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users, I think we should have at least some relevant source material to draw from. Always nice to share a few war stories, but also very much looking forward to hear how other European web companies are integrating the long list of new scaling-related technologies out there – especially those from the FOSS community.
Fellow Nestorlinians
it’s my pleasure to announce that I and Javier (fellow Lokku founder) will be speaking at this August’s
Property Portal Watch Workshop in San Francisco.
For those that don’t know, over the last year
Property Portal Watch has become the leading global forum to comment on the online property industry. If you read our blog, you should be be reading PPW. More importantly, if you are a senior decision maker at a property portal you should probably be attending the workshop.
Our one hour session will not be about Nestoria, but rather about the common challenges we see property portals across all markets facing and the innovative solutions we see different players adopting. While every market has it’s peculiarities, it is remarkable how similar the difficulties are for all players, particularly those that come from an offline/print heritage. If you have any thoughts on what you’d like to hear, or questions you’d like addressed, please
let us know. I’m looking forward to a heated question and answer exchange as well. We’ll post the presentation here afterwards.
The workshop is of course just the first day of the
Inman Conference. We attended the first
PPW workshop at January’s NYC Inman conference and
last summer’s Inman Connect in San Francisco. Both were great events, with a diverse group of speakers and vendors from the real estate and technology industries. Most of all it’s a good chance to get above the day to day grind and reflect on the broader trends and new technologies effecting the industry.
We hope to see you there!
Related posts: PPW founder Simon Baker discussed his motivations for the site and the community around it in an
interview with us last autumn.
Photo available create commons copyright from user livenature at Fickr
Fellow Nestornicians,
A couple of days ago we went to the first
Mozilla Labs Meetup in London. The Labs themselves are only a tiny part of Mozilla, in case of Europe most people (8 if I remember correctly) work distributed from home. Pascal and Jane Pinette explained the idea behind
Mozilla Labs and showcased some of the recent projects. With words, not lengthy PowerPoint presentations.
Mozilla is always looking for new and innovative approaches to browse the web, interact with web content or simply helping users to enjoy the web more. Those approaches need to be discussed with the largest possible group of users, tested, re-validated and challenged. That’s why Labs builds an online collaboration center where anybody can upload screenshots of new idea, comment on other and discuss. It’s an interesting approach that takes advantage of the power of the masses, and it was very interesting to hear them disucss grappling with the issues this approach presents. Big thanks to the Mozilla team for the interesting chat (and of course the great products). We especially enjoyed the “guerrilla” style of the venue.
Here at Lokku (the company behind Nestoria) we test and explore our ideas on our own testing platform
Lokku Labs. These projects are often a different way to search the same data or they mix data with other sources. Basically it’s a playground for us to experiment.
The next Mozilla Labs meetup is
The Bespin Special tomorrow, Tuesday March 10th near Kings Cross. Watch out for other European events, e.g. the
Mozilla Add-Ons Workshop in Berlin at the end of March. Also if interested subscribe to
their blog for more announcements.
Fellow Nestorfriends,
another chance to see the Nestoria team in the flesh is coming up. We’re delighted to announce we’ll be presenting at the upcoming
#Geomobevent Friday March 27th at the Old Truman Brewery in east London. Big thanks to our ex-collaborator
Chris Osborne for organizing.
We do all sorts of geodata wrangling here at Nestoria. In the past at various techie events we’ve spoken about the technical challenges of geocoding and i18n or described some of our experiments with OpenStreetMap. We’re unsure of what exactly to present at this event, so we call upon you, dear friends, to please let us know (
via twitter, in the comments here, or via our
feedback form ) which piece of the Nestoria geo system you’d be most interested in hearing us present about.
Regardless, if the past #Geomob events are any indicator, it is certain to be an informative and entertaining gathering. This month #Geomob is partnering with the good folks behind
Minibar to broaden the audience. I’m particularly pleased to see that we’ll be sharing the lineup with two past Nestoria interviewees:
Andy Allan of
OpenCycleMap and
Nick Black now of
CloudMade.
We look forward to seeing you there. Many thanks to the organizers.
Fellow Nestorfolk,
As promised, we’ll use this time between Christmas and New Year to reflect on 2008. Just as we did
in 2007, in this post we look back at the various events we had the chance to speak at. We’re always interested in telling our story, and in learning from others in the online community, and while blogs and twitter and Facebook are great they will never replace face to face interaction. Over the last yer we had the chance to present at many great events, and we look forward to many more in 2009. In case you missed them:
In January I started things off by being a
panelist at Adriande Capital’s “Future of Search” event. MTM followed that by
speaking about Mapstraction at Oxford Geek Night.
While not technically a public speaking event, it was my pleasure to be
a guest in the Guardian’s Tech Podcast in February. Meanwhile in Spain we were well
represented at the Madrid Facebook Developer’s Garage, and Ruben waved the Nestoria flag as a
panelist at OME 2008 in March
Nestoria in Madrid at Facebook Developer's Garage
In the summer we had the pleasure of sponsoring and speaking at both
OpenStreetMap’s State of the Map conference in Limerick (
BTW, it was just announced that SOTM2009 will be in Amsterdam in July – see you there) and
YAPC::Europe in Copenhagen where both MTM and Mike spoke.
Continuing with the perl theme,
Spiros and Mike represented Nestoria at the TwinCities Perl Workshop, while
Alistair and I rounded out the year by speaking at the LPW08
Overall a great run of conferences, many thanks once again to the organisers. We’re always trying to broaden our spectrum and are on the lookout for interesting events for 2009. All suggestions are very welcome.
On a related note, within Nestoria we run our own weekly series of “tech talks”. Usually someone in the team presents the interesting details of his or her current project, but occasionally we invite external speakers. I’d like to thank everyone who made the time to come and speak with us this year – we learned a lot. I know many techy types read this blog. If you’re in London we’d love to learn from you and have you come present your work to the team. Likewise of course if you’re interested in learning more about Nestoria and your audience would be interested in the challenges (technical or otherwise) of European vertical search, then please
get in touch.
Last night, MTM and myself went in for a bit of matchmaking. A local software guru organized an event for start-ups looking for developers and developers looking for start-ups. It was a bit like speed dating for the nerdcore set. Nestoria are currently in the market for talented contractors to help us build some new and experimental applications on top of our API. We need people that are technically capable (can build and host online applications) and have excellent design and UI development skills (CSS, JS, HTML). The ideal person or team would be based in London and have a serious fetish for neo-cartography. We are of course open to working with those that are more geographically remote and/or less personally intense about maps. The event helped us to generate a number of good leads but if you know anybody that fits the bill and is looking for work please drop us a line.
Greetings Nestorinards,
Recently we announced our
sponsorship of OpenStreetMap’s 2008 State of the Map conference in Ireland in July. Today I’m pleased to update that announcement with the addition that I will be one of the speakers at the event. I hope to see you there.
A provisional lineup has been announced and looks to be very interesting, and we’re very much looking forward to the conference. As part of the buildup to the event, the various speakers will be interviewed on the SOTM blog, and
my interview went live yesterday.
For those who will be at the conference, please send any and all comments regarding the talk and any points you’d like me to cover in more depth. For those that unfortunately can’t make it to the conference we’ll of course be posting the slides here. And finally, for those of you desperate for more examples on the rhetorical skills of the Nestoria team here’s the
overview of last year’s events where Nestoria team members have spoken.
Tomorrow night several members of the Nestoria team will be leaving ‘the Nest’ as we lovingly refer to our office and heading over to Zoomf’s Property Seminar the topic of which is “Searching for Profits”.
The main event will be a panel discussion with experts from the realm of estate agency and online marketing. As the market tightens up we’re seeing more and more folks in the industry taking a closer look at their marketing efforts to see if they really are getting value for money, and the back and forth is sure to be thought-provoking.
Amongst others the panel will feature past Nestoria interviewee
Harvey Edgecombe of
Renthusiast. Despite the fact that Harvey thinks Alexa is a reliable way to measure internet usage, he has some interesting thoughts on the market. I’m looking forward to a good discussion.
If you’re at the seminar and would like to learn more about Nestoria or have some ideas of how we could improve our property search then please say hello. Many thanks to
Zoomf for organising and hosting the event.
Meanwhile, Nestoria super engineer Marc Tobias will be presenting about
mapstraction over at
Oxford Geek Night. Poke you’re head in if you’re in
Oxford and technically minded. If the past is any indicator it’s sure to be a great event.
Fellow Nestorpudlians,
Continuing in our
series of posts looking back on the last year we thought we’d highlight the various conferences and events we spoke at over the last year. As you can perhaps surmise from this blog, we’re keen to get the message out about Nestoria. Please let us know if there are any events you’d like to see us at in 2008.
So, dearest Nestoria blog readers – where would you like to see us in 2008? Anyone organising a conference with an audience interested in hearing more about the challenge of European vertical search (from the technical or the business side) should please
get in touch.
