Ajax Girl

Real-estate site Zillow has added 10 million homes to its Website, bringing the total to 80 million (out of 91 million homes in the U.S.). Of those, the properties it has enough information on to calculate a “Zestimate” is now 67 million, up from 53 million before. Zestimates and comparable-sales data are the two biggest draws to the site, says president Lloyd Frink, who dropped by my office on Wednesday.

I gave Frink a hard time because I always find the Zestimates for properties in New York City to be way off base. “New York is tough,” he admitted. But Zillow has tweaked its algorithm and improved the accuracy of its Zestimates by 12 percent (as measured by the actual sale price versus the last Zestimate on the day of the sale).

The algorithm improved by diving deeper into the data. “We went from having a model for each county to 20 models for each county,” says Frink. The Zestimates also now take into account more than one million corrections and facts added by home owners. The margin of error is now 8.8 percent. That is an average for the entire country. You still can’t trust the Zestimates on New York City apartments. But Frink notes that a third of the site’s Zestimates across the country fall within five percent of the selling price, and that half are within 10 percent. Still, he cautions that “the Zestimate is just a starting point.”

You’d think that real-estate sites would be hurting right now, given the severe correction in the housing market. But Frink argues that in a down market research is more important than ever and says that Zillow is still benefiting from the overall shift in real estate activities to the Web. Zillow’s ad model certainly benefits from various targeting capabilities-geographic, demographic, and behavioral. Each action on the site is zipcode-specific. Frink notes that the EZ Ads Zillow sells itself go for $10 CPMs, versus $3 to $5 CPMs for backfill ads from ad networks.

Zillow is trying to create a database of all homes in the U.S., which is a different approach than other real-estate sites. “It is the database of all homes, not just homes on the market,” notes Frink. This is both a strength and a weakness. On the downside, Zillow lists only 400,000 homes that are for sale, out of about 4 million nationwide. A deal with real-estate publisher Network Communications will bring that total to 900,000. Trulia, in comparison, has 2 million.

On the upside, Zillow has a lot more comparable data than most sites. (Although, I think Cyberhomes has better data). And since Zillow lists all existing homes, it makes it easy to provisionally put your house on the market through its “Make Me Move” feature. About 100,000 Make-Me-Move homes are on the site. And in some markets, it is a pretty significant number. For instance, in Seattle (where Zillow is based), there are 30,000 homes officially for sale and another 6,000 Make-Me-Move listings, or 20 percent of the number on the market.

The other big news is that Zillow is joining Yahoo Real Estate, Trulia, Oodle, Homes.com, Realestate.com, Vast.com and others in adopting a standard way for brokers and multiple listings services (MLSs) to send in their real estate listings in a feed format. That way brokers can use the same data format for all the different real estate search engines and Websites. It is called the Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS). That should make it easier for brokers to propagate their listings everywhere.

Zillow claims 4 million monthly unique visitors. Comscore shows 1.4 million in December, and that’s been flat for the past year. Trulia, though, looks like it just passed Zillow with 1.6 million.

Zillow

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Trulia

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Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214066142/

Scoble’s video of YouTube cofounder Chad Hurley answering the question above isn’t a clear yes in relation to YouTube’s interest in live streaming, but there’s a list of startups who will be physically sick at the thought of YouTube entering this space.

The service Scoble is using to record video is Qik (see our December post here). I think Qik is a foreign slang word for poor quality mobile video, but startups offering live streaming from mobile phones is something we’ll no doubt see more of this year.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214172875/

Some of the best posts we made this week involved real “reporting” involving “interviews” and “actually talking to humans” — go figure! Today Matt and Devin sat down with magician and atheist Penn Gillette and I spoke with iRobot’s CEO Colin Angle about the future of iRobot and personal robotics.

In hardware news, we took a gander at the LimePC, a single board computer that is about as big as an iPod nano and fits into almost any case — from ultra-mini PC to an iMac-like slab.

Oh, and LG let us take pictures of their watch phone.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214168390/

Yahoo’s new technology business video show, TechTicker, is set to go live soon (officially, in the next few weeks, but I’m hearing that some early stuff may come out as soon as next week).

The show will be hosted by Henry Blodget (Silicon Alley Insider), Sarah Lacy (Business Week columnist) and Paul Kedrosky and will have 10-20 original segments per week day, focusing on financial news and the CNBC crowd.

Screen shots are starting to leak, and we have this one with Lacy and Blodget just prior to locking into a passionate embrace, I’m sure. Stay tuned for more launch information. Meanwhile, keep watching Wallstrip.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214055585/

NewsGator has decided to offer all of its RSS readers for free, including the newest versions of NetNewsWire, FeedDemon and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile. NewsGator Inbox, which has just been launched in public beta, will also be available for free.

When Nick wrote about NewsGators’ latest round of funding, he noted that NewsGator’s desktop feed readers can be preferable to web-based feed readers like Google Reader. Whereas web-based readers often suffer from a lag during which they fail to show a site’s most recent stories, NewsGator’s desktop readers tend to load up-to-the-minute stories from your favorite sites.

NewsGator will rely on revenues from its enterprise offerings going forward. The company will also increasingly record anonymous usage data in an effort “to help make decisions about what content [it believes] will be most relevant for you and for other users.”

NewsGator

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Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214028209/

Today, we get a new blogging platform from Russian/San Francisco startup Profy. Does the world need another blogging platform? Maybe not. But, hey, give the Russians a chance. The more competition, the better. If you want to try it out yourself, we have 100 invites available here (enter “Techcrunch” in the description field).

Profy combines a WYSIWYG text editor with a feed reader and a social network of sorts. A dashboard on the start page shows your latest posts, feed items, comments on your blog, and messages. You can read your blog feeds, write posts, and find out what other Profy bloggers and commenters are reading in their feed readers (if they choose to make that public). There are all sorts of templates and layouts you can choose for your blog. (Check out this one I just set up). People on Profy are searchable as well. You can send them private messages and IMs. (See screen shots below).

It is this social aspect that could help to distinguish Profy, if enough people bother to sign up. Right now, blogs are already social in that any reader can leave a comment on a post. But imagine if you could search for any blogger or commenter and send that person a private message, or check out that persons public feed to see what they are reading. It seems like a natural evolution, bringing the worlds of blogging and social networking closer together.

That said, Profy still has a long way to go. Right now, it is pretty much a closed system. The company has plans to integrate its platform with more popular blogging services so that you will be able to live and write in Profy and then export your posts to Wordpress or Blogger or Typepad. It would do well to open up its commenting and messaging systems to other social networks as well, to give people an easy on-ramp onto the service.

Here is a slide show that goes through all of Profy’s features:

Click on these screen shots for full-page views:

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214025892/

So apparently it’s National Mentoring Month and a new site called iMantri wants to celebrate by welcoming TechCrunch readers into its private beta.

iMantri seeks to match mentors up with mentees using a niche social network that focuses on “goals” and “competencies”. All those interested can go here and use invitation code “imaptc178″ to sign up.

The website is very text heavy and generally not very well designed, but the idea should gain traction if executed better over time. Members can list themselves as mentors and/or mentees for any needs imaginable. For example, you can become a mentor for someone who wants to develop better time management skills or you can seek help with project management. The service creates a space for people to match themselves up directly instead of going through services like Big Brothers Big Sisters. As such, I don’t really see it being used for the mentoring of young people, especially considering the dangers of the internet (and the public availability of iMantri profiles; you don’t even need to sign in to see them).

In addition to people profiles that display relevant needs and skills, the site also provides survey tools for the identification of competencies that a mentor could help you strengthen.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/214017553/

It’s time to plan ahead. Today we’re announcing and opening the Call for Papers for the next Ajax Experience event–in September 2008.

For the past two years, we’ve put on two Ajax Experience events, the so-called West and East shows. For 2008, we think it’s time to consolidate them into one. After doing quite a bit of research with past attendees (and no small amount of internal debating) we’ve decided to hold our single event for 2008 in… Boston!

We’ve been extraordinarily pleased with the quality of the submissions of all of our past shows, so all we can say is, keep it up! The show will take place at Renaissance Waterfront Hotel in Boston, MA from September 29 - October 1, 2008. The Call for Papers closes on January 31, 2008. Approved speakers get a free pass to show and a stipend towards airfare and hotel. See our Call for Papers page for more details on how to submit a talk.

See you there!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/213984872/ajax-experience-2008-call-for-papers

Video clips from local TV news affiliates are making their way onto the Web through a service called ClipSyndicate that’s been in beta for more than a year. The service, which is owned by New York City startup Critical Media, has more than 200,000 archived news clips and adds about 1,000 a day from about 200 local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, along with video from Bloomberg TV, the AP, UPI, and the New York Times. About 350 niche Websites are participating in the beta—including Military.com, Construction.com, and PetHealthFocus.com—and they collectively serve up two million ClipSyndicate videos a month.

Now ClipSyndicate is spreading its API to video search sites like AOL’s Truveo and other services like Magnify (which we reported earlier) and Lingospot. For instance, ClipSyndicate videos come up in regular video searches in Truveo and play in an embedded ClipSyndicate player. On this Magnify page for Barack Obama, the “Obama News” videos come from ClipSyndicate. And Lingospot, which creates an in-text search bubble when you mouse over a linked term (see left), can show ClipSyndicate videos in its bubbles. You can even find ClipSyndicate videos on Bebo, although you have to look hard and there is no official deal yet with the social networking site.

To get a sense of the entertainment value of some of this stuff, here is a news clip from a local Oregon station about a man with blue skin who is moving to California in search of more tolerant neighbors:

ClipSyndicate serves ads with the videos and splits the proceeds as follows: 30 percent to the content producer (i.e., the local TV station), 20 percent to the API partner or Website where the video is seen, and 50 percent for itself. (Although the beta and APIs are available by invite only, the company plans to open up participation to all comers by the end of the first quarter). Critical Media CEO Sean Morgan tells me that he is getting $50 CPMs on the video ads sold through his salesforce compared to $8 to $12 CPMs from backfill video ad networks because the videos tend to appear on extremely targeted sites. Think Yummy Chummy ads on PetsHealthFocus. His sweet spots are mortgage, pets and animals, and health sites. He also claims that he is seeing close to three percent click-throughs on his graphical banner ads compared to quarter-point click-throughs on run-of-network ads.

What he is excited about, though, is marrying the brand advertising of video with the specificity of search. Truveo, for instance, passes the search terms through the API, so that can inform what types of ads are shown, in addition to the actual content of the video. As ClipSyndicate’s business model develops, we’ll see if it is actually possible to make money from the long tail of video (although note that this is still professional-quality video, and much higher up the curve than most of the audience-generated video on the Web).

ClipSyndicate

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Magnify.net

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Truveo

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Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/213972348/

Johni Brown asks:

Can you describe initial direction you took when developing Highrise, before you started over? How did it differ from today’s Highrise? What aspect of it were you unhappy with, and why?

The primary problem with the first version of Highrise was that we didn’t use it ourselves. It was built on fantasy requirements of what some people might need one day. That’s an incredibly hard way to build software. And it certainly isn’t our way of building software.

Here’s an early (ugly) screenshot from the initial direction. Lots of unstyled stuff, but hopefully it gives you an idea of the complexity we didn’t like.

The focus on “some people” lead us down the path of “they might also need this” and “it would probably be cool to have that”. Before we knew it, the create a new note screen had a barrage of options that needed to be set before you could post. It was too cumbersome, too slow, and surprisingly too rigid despite trying to be flexible. (The aha moment for us was contrasting the ease of getting data into Campfire vs Highrise at the time).

Getting too clever with language and permissions
We also got lost down the rabbit hole of cleverness a few times. We wanted categories for your notes that would align to natural language. I forget the specifics exactly, but it was akin to “David has completed a phone call with Jason”. Where “phone call” would be the category. But how do you figure out what the joining words would be when the category is “fax”? “David has completed a fax with Jason” doesn’t really work. We tried too hard for too long to be clever on wording when it really doesn’t matter all that much.

The second rabbit hole was permissions. Permissions is always a deep, dark dungeon that you really would rather not venture into. But some times dragons need slaying and so we did. We started out with a ridiculously flexible system that allowed you to mix and match any number of groups and people together. You could have a note visible by “Marketing, Programming, John, and Jane”. That proved to be incredibly complex on both the implementation side and the UI side. But for a long time we couldn’t let go because we were caught up chasing edge cases.

The promises that got us back on track
So when we finally realized that this wasn’t going to work, we rebooted the project with a number of promises:

1. Design for yourself, make everyone on the team want to use Highrise—not just Jason talking to journalists, but Ryan dealing with his mechanic as well
2. Not every edge case needs solving—yes, there might be a case where having both Marketing and Jane see something but not Joe, but it’s not worth the complexity of enabling that case.
3. Start using the product right away—a lot of “what ifs” and “wouldn’t it be cools” just go away when you actually start using something and discover what really matters.

As you can see, these lessons are nothing new. We’ve been preaching these ideas for a long time, but living them is so much harder. When we let the core principles of Getting Real slide, not even we could produce software worth a damn.

Got a question for us?
Got a question about design, business, marketing, etc? We’re happy to try to provide some insight into how we’d tackle the problem. Just email svn [at] 37signals dot com with the subject “Ask 37signals”. Thanks.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/772-ask-37signals-why-did-you-restart-highrise