Tag Archive for 'wherecanilive'

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!

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.

Where can you live?

Published by Ed on January 26, 2009 in New Features and tools. Comments

Fellow Nestorinians,

today we announce another new service for property hunters. Where Can I Live? is a new service designed to make it simple for London commuters to find areas that might be relevant for your property search. Basically, we were very familiar with the use case of knowing where you will work (or study or otherwise spend your day), knowing how much money you have to spend, but not knowing where in London to live. We hope this tool can help solve that problem.

where-can-i-live.com screenshot

Like all of the services we feature on our interface testbed Lokku Labs, this is an experiment designed to help us learn about how users want to search for property. One major challenge we face with Nestoria is that we have only one website that tries to simultaneously meet the needs of many diverse user groups. We build these test sites as a way to try out new interfaces and new technologies that aren’t yet ready for primetime on Nestoria.

Some words of thanks for the folks involved. First of all, full credit to mySociety and their time-travel maps. Those proof of concepts gave us the idea. So last summer we started working with Chris Osborne. Chris did most of the conceptual work and built a prototype as his master’s project at UCL (BTW since working with us, Chris has gone on to big things, and currently runs #geomob a meetup of London geo and mobile developers. We’re looking forward to a great event this Thursday). London-based Doodledo helped us on the design and technically scaling things up. On a final note, big thanks to all the OpenStreetMap volunteers who created the maps.

There’s been some initial coverage of the service over on Property Portal Watch, Renthusiast, and TechCrunch.

Based on that initial coverage, we’ve been lucky enough to already get some initial feedback. This is just version 1, we know we need to add things like Overground Stations and bus routes. We’re working on it. Please let us know what you think.

Finally, we do hope this site and the other Lokku Labs sites proves inspirational for others. If you’re a researcher or academic looking to do interesting things with property information or you’re a web developer looking for an interesting project to show off your mad interface and data slinging skillz please get in touch.