Tag Archive for 'yahoo!'

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.

Nestoria Interview – Gary Gale – Yahoo! Geo Technologies Group

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