- The voices of bitter experience: ActiveRain’s petition against Move, Inc., is a heart-breaking sob story with no legal merit – BloodhoundBlog
I’ve read ActiveRain’s lawsuit against Move, Inc., twice now. I had thought that I might parse the document, to show its fundamental weaknesses, but this isn’t necessary. It’s so weak that we can knock the whole thing down in a few paragraphs. …
> The last part of this is hysterical. - Wireless Usage On The Rise – FBS Blog
As promised, we’ve mined our MLS usage statistics for wireless access. The following chart speaks for itself …
Archive for September, 2007
items for 09.29.2007
September 30, 2007items for 09.28.2007
September 29, 2007- From Scratch – A radio show about the entrepreneurial life – NPR
Good set of interviews from company founders.
(tags: entrepreneurship podcast) - Things that cost around $66,000 – 1000Watt Blog
1 year’s tuition with room, board and flights home from Princeton A 2008 Mercedes GL320 CDI SUV A10% down payment on a luxury condo with panoramic views at the Rivage Tower in Panama A month’s vacation at Frégate Private Island… - Ask 37signals: Pressure to grow? – Signal vs. Noise
Great insight into what it means to “grow” a software company from a great source.
What a strange news week…
September 27, 2007I thought the whole CAR virtual headquarters in Second Life story was strange, but weird real estate related news just keeps rolling in:
- There’s a report that Fidelity National Financial is looking to buy fast food chain Wendy’s.
> Huh?!? - ActiveRain is suing Move.com for $33M over an acquisition that fell apart right around the NAR mid-year conference in May of this year. The lawsuit alleges that the Move.com board of directors had approved the deal, that it was to be announced at NAR, and that it fell apart hours after ActiveRain handed over all their secrets.
> Bummer for ActiveRain, but it’s always fun when Move.com is getting sued! - The CEO of Point2 Technologies resigned, then pled guilty to sex offense charges.
> Scandal up in Saskatoon!
And the weeks not even over yet!
items for 09.26.2007
September 27, 2007- Todays Takeover Rumor Bought to You By Google And Sirius – TechCrunch
The Motley Fool is running a story on a rumor that Google is considering a takeover offer for US Satellite Radio provider Sirius.
The merger between Sirius and XM has yet to be approved by Federal Regulators and hence Sirius would become a takeover target if the merger failed. Google is still seeking more inventory for …
CAR launches Second Life presence – Are you kidding me?
September 26, 2007I would love to know how much this cost each member of the California Association of Realtors. This “technology” ought to really help the rank and file sell more houses.
From the press release September 19, 2007:
Virtual headquarters open for business as CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® launches Second Life presence
LOS ANGELES (Sept. 19) – The CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® (C.A.R.) today cut the virtual ribbon on its new Second Life headquarters building, accessible at http://secondlife.car.org or through www.secondlife.com. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its more than 9.3 million “Residents” from around the globe.
“C.A.R.’s foray into the virtual world of Second Life through our headquarters building features numerous interactive and informational items, including the top five reasons to use a REALTOR®; information about the Association’s upcoming trade show, the CALIFORNIA REALTOR® EXPO 2007; and informational take-away note cards for visitors,” said C.A.R. President Colleen Badagliacco. “The virtual building replicates the C.A.R. logo, with an open-roof design to accommodate “fly-ins,” the primary means of locomotion in Second Life.”
Second Life Residents create avatars – virtual representations of themselves – and can buy, sell and trade with other Residents. According to Linden Labs, the creator of Second Life, the site’s marketplace currently supports millions of U.S. dollars in monthly transactions, handled with the in-world unit-of-trade, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to U.S. dollars at the Linden Dollar Exchange.
“The C.A.R. Second Life headquarters also features an interactive 65-inch plasma TV capable of streaming up to five different on-demand video clips from C.A.R., which visitors can watch while relaxing on a virtual sofa,” Badagliacco said.
Visitors to C.A.R.’s Second Life headquarterswill need to have Second Life installed on their computers. To install, go to http://www.secondlife.com/download.
Leading the way…® in California real estate for more than 100 years, the CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® (www.car.org ) is one of the largest state trade organizations in the United States, with nearly 200,000 members dedicated to the advancement of professionalism in real estate. C.A.R. is headquartered in Los Angeles.
The GigaOM Show
September 26, 2007One of the blogs I read daily is GigaOM. He recently started a new on-line “TV” show where he interviews guests once a week about what’s going on in Silicon Valley. Very interesting and worth checking out. Today’s show has the head of Zimbra talking about their sale to Yahoo and Jeff Clavier talking about his new fund and seed staging in general. Om’s co-host is Joyce Kim, a lawyer specializing in venture financing who brings good questions and information to the show.
items for 09.23.2007
September 23, 2007- Best customer service letter ever – blog.pmarca.com
Letter from online electronics vendor Woot as published on Woot’s web site: I have received more than three emails from Zune buyers who are upset about Woot dropping the price of the Zune by $20 one month after it went… - That’s it, public company accounting is broken – blog.pmarca.com
One of the dirty little secrets — or rather, dirty huge non-secrets — of Wall Street is that public company accounting has been diverging further and further from cash accounting — which is to say, reality — over time. Over…
items for 09.16.2007
September 16, 2007- The Exciter: CouchDb views in Ruby instead of Javascript
Just what it says. CouchDb seems to be getting a lot of interest.
(tags: ruby couchdb) - A Offline Gmail Client: Sweet – TechCrunch
A report from India’s Hindustan Times indicates that Google is prepping an offline version of Gmail.
It’s claimed that a client has already been designed, is in testing, and runs (not surprisingly) on Google Gears. Google has previously offered an offline version of Google Reader using the Gears browser plugin. Other companies embracing the Gears platform …
Automatic blog posts from your del.icio.us bookmarks
September 16, 2007Similar to the way I wanted to share my Google Reader Shared items on my blog (that post is here), I also decided I wanted to share some of my del.icio.us bookmarks. If you aren’t familiar with del.icio.us (read previous coverage here), it allows you to bookmark sites in the internet “cloud”, then easily access those links by searching, by tags, or through an RSS feed.
Del.icio.us offers a tool, currently in beta, to do just this, but it offers very little in the way of customization. To get to it, log into del.icio.us, choose ‘settings’, then ‘daily blog posting’. This tool didn’t work for me – I wanted a way to specify that only certain tags get posted to my blog, I wanted control over the look of the post, and I wanted the option of posting a draft so that I could examine it before it goes live.
Below is a Ruby script I wrote that accomplishes all these things. It consumes an RSS feed of your recent del.icio.us bookmarks, optionally only those tagged with a specified tag, formats them, and automatically posts them to your WordPress blog using their XML-RPC interface. I really don’t want every bookmark I make to appear in my blog – neither do you – so I have set up my script to only include bookmarks I tag “post:tzetzefly”. As I create bookmarks throughout the day, I simply add this tag, along with any other descriptive tags, and I know that this item will appear on my blog later that day.
You can run this manually, or schedule it to run at a specific time as a cron job. Note that this does not rely on inserting the post directly into the WordPress SQL tables as I’ve seen other WP plug-ins do – that requires you to have access to the WP database, which you don’t if (like me) your blog is hosted at wordpress.com.
Again, what this shows is how easy it is to “glue” together different web services to accomplish a useful goal when all the players use well documented web standards. The script can be found here. Read the comments at the very top for examples of how to run it. Make sure you edit your personal settings in the “Stuff you should change” section.
The power of del.icio.us
September 16, 2007Del.icio.us is one of the most useful web sites I’ve started using in the past couple of years. At it’s simplest level, it’s a way to move your web bookmarks out of your browser and into the internet “cloud” so that they are accessible on any computer you use. In the old days (that’s three years ago), you’d bookmark important sites on your office computer, then when you were at your home computer and you needed that site, you were out of luck. Now, with all your bookmarks in del.icio.us, you can get to those from anywhere. The site is free and now owned by Yahoo.
At a deeper level, you can tag every bookmark with keywords and add a description. If you have a lot of bookmarks, this makes them easy to find by a simple search box. In a sense, you’re creating your own little personal search engine – all sites you’ve bookmarked are now searchable by tag and by description. Bookmarks are public by default, but can be marked private for your logged in eyes only.
The format of del.icio.us urls are very straightforward – this is where the real power starts to come into play. To find all sites I’ve tagged with “ruby”, just go to:
Del.icio.us calls itself “social bookmarking” and this example shows that off – all public bookmarks you make are easily accessible to others. Now when a friend asks you for information about web hosting companies, you can just send him a link that looks like this:
and he’ll see everything you’ve tagged “web hosting” during your web surfing over the past year.
You can even access an RSS feed for these public bookmarks. If someone you trust is always uncovering juicy tidbits about real estate that are worth checking out, subscribe to their feed (for example) using:
http://del.icio.us/rss/donaldtrump/real+estate
Now every time they tag a page using those tags, it will appear in your blog reader.
Rather than a specific user’s bookmarks, you can look at those of the entire del.icio.us user base. Remember, these are sites that have been specifically marked by a human being as having useful information. For specific subjects, this can be even more relevant than general search sites like Google. The site has a very usable UI for searching, but here are some sample url shortcuts you can go to directly:
Sites tagged “web hosting” – http://del.icio.us/tag/web+hosting
Popular sites – http://del.icio.us/popular
Popular sites tagged “ruby” – http://del.icio.us/popular/ruby
As a Realtor, you could do something like tag listings that you’d like your buyers – the Robertson’s – to see at remax.com, then just e-mail them a single link – for example:
http://del.icio.us/debbiesellsboca/Robertson
or allow them to subscribe to a feed in their blog reader – for example :
http://del.icio.us/rss/debbiesellsboca/Robertson
Now whenever you bookmark a new listing and tag it “Robertson”, they will see it. You can even tag other pertinent information you want them to read, like articles about mortgage rates, schools in the area, market conditions, etc, and they will all appear in their blog reader.
If you’re using Firefox, there is a very useful extension available here. It puts a couple of buttons in your toolbar that make it super simple to bookmark any page and bring up your list of bookmarks without having to open the del.icio.us site.
Del.icio.us also has very good developer tools you can read about here. I’ll be showing off one of those in my next post.
items for 09.14.2007
September 15, 2007- ELASTRA – The Infinite Database
ELASTRA is the world’s first infinitely scalable solution for running standard relational databases in an on-demand computing cloud.
(tags: aws mysql cluster) - The Power of Six – I, Cringely . The Pulpit | PBS
… Google would overnight become the largest U.S. ISP with direct and very high-performance access to its customers, including those using the new Google Phone or any other phone that supports WiFi connections, like the iPhone and many others. Google becomes the biggest and lowest-cost ISP and potentially the biggest and lowest-cost mobile phone company in the bargain. …
Technical difficulties
September 13, 2007In the process of exporting and importing entries to fix the mis-spelling issue, it looks like all posts got re-published to the RSS feed. Sorry about that – but we’ll live.
Worse is that I lost several comments – they were no longer properly tied to their original posts after the import (sorry Greg and Keith). I’ll keep trying to figure it out, but I guess I’m getting what I paid for from WordPress.com (FREE!).
items for 09.13.2007
September 13, 2007- Century 21, the first choice among young, first time buyers – 1000Watt Blog
Focus groups are so critical. Even informal, unscientific ones are better than nothing. They always reveal hidden gems. Last night I found myself in the company of a dozen 27-31 years olds. None owned a home. When asked what I… - Can Amazon Make Startupping A Science? – GigaOM
Amazon (AMZN) is trying to turn the art of internet startups into a science. At an open event at Stanford yesterday, a couple hundred or so entrepreneurs, VCs, and developers talked about how Amazon Web Services — cheap and elastic storage, computing, message queuing, and payments — could change, or is already changing, their businesses.“We’re … - Looking Back To The Future of Data Centers – GigaOM
I was talking to some colleagues earlier this month about Intel’s (INTC) plan to have an 80-core processor ready for the market within five years.I’ve written about commodity computing in this space before, but this latest Intel announcement made me realize that we’re on the verge of a fundamental architectural change in the enterprise data … - Franchisors: It’s time to get back into the real estate business – 1000Watt Blog
A few weeks ago I gave a presentation at a technology briefing sponsored by a major computer hardware manufacturer. The audience was a small group of executives from a large real estate corporation. I shared my perspective on how mobile…
Automatic blog posts from your Google Reader Shared items
September 9, 2007You may notice every once in a while I have a post titled “items from” and some date, with the content being some (hopefully) interesting items I’ve read on the web that day. Creating that post looks like a simple matter of manually creating a new post, copying and pasting the title and a summary, then adding some formatting and publishing. While that isn’t too hard, even easier would be if you could just share interesting items in your Google Reader (using the “Share” link) during the day and have them magically appear later that night in your blog.
Below is a Ruby script I wrote that does just that. It consumes an Atom feed of your Google Reader Shared Items, formats them, and automatically posts them to your WordPress blog using their XML-RPC interface. You can run this manually, or schedule it to run at a specific time as a cron job. Note that this does not rely on inserting the post directly into the WordPress SQL tables as I’ve seen other WP plug-ins do – that requires you to have access to the WP database, which you don’t if (like me) your blog is hosted at wordpress.com.
This whole process takes less than 100 lines of Ruby, including lot’s of comments. What this shows is how easy it is to “glue” together different web services to accomplish a useful goal when all the players use well documented web standards. It also shows how simple, yet powerful, a dynamic scripting language designed for the web can be.
The script can be found here. Read the comments at the very top for examples of how to run it. Make sure you edit your personal settings in the “Stuff you should change” section.
Later, I’ll show you a similar script that automatically creates blog posts from your del.icio.us links.
items for 09.08.2007
September 9, 2007- Labnotes � CouchDB: Thinking beyond the RDBMS
SQL databases being replaced by scalable REST web services in the future?
(tags: database scaling)
Google GData API
September 7, 2007I’m doing a lot of reading right now about feed protocols like Atom. Google basically uses Atom to provide feeds for all their data sources, but they add a query component to it and call it GData. Man – this stuff is powerful, yet super easy to use. I guess that description pretty much sums up everything Google does.
An Atom feed is an XML standard that is very easy to parse/consume, either using straight XPath or with a language specific toolkit. In Ruby, I currently use FeedTools. Most browsers (I have tried Firefox and Safari) are able to display an Atom feed in a pleasant way, so you can enter the sample urls below right into them and see the results.
The parameters on these urls should be very self explanatory. Feel free to try different values, like changing the city name to your city.
Show videos on YouTube for homes for sale in Boca Raton:
http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/videos?vq=home+for+sale+boca+raton&max-results=20
Show listings on Google Base for homes for sale in Boca Raton:
http://www.google.com/base/feeds/snippets?bq=home+for+sale+boca+raton&max-results=20
Obviously, these are pretty simple examples and just scratch the surface, but the point is that producing feeds using the Atom standard allows Google to expose their data in a standard, easily parsed format that are simple to consume.
I’ll have something soon on consuming your Google Reader shared items.
More YouTube GData developer docs here.
More Google Base GData developer docs here.
items for 09.07.2007
September 6, 2007- Is a REALTOR Music Video A Bad Idea? – Comeover.com – The Blog
In theory, yes it is a very bad idea but here is Rich Fravel (aka Rich the REALTOR) performing his first hit, aptly named “Rich the REALTOR.” Rich, resembling David Byrne, pulls it off somehow, someway. - First American to cut 1,300 jobs – Lansner on Real Estate
Register staff writer Colin Stewart reports …
Santa Ana-based title insurer First American announced this morning that it plans to cut about 1,300 jobs this month. The job cuts are in addition to 600 jobs eliminated earlier this year.
The combined cutbacks will save about $108 million a year, First American said. With real estate transactions … - Return Of The Schwag – TechCrunch
The true hard core geek/fanboy crowd loved ValleySchwag when it launched in the Spring of 2006. For $15 per month you would receive a package containing tshirts, stickers, pens and other junk that new startups pay a fortune to have created with their logo printed on it. Usually this stuff is handed out at parties …
items for 09.03.2007
September 3, 2007- Google Wiki Prepares To Launch – TechCrunch
Google may finally be preparing to re-launch wiki service Jotspot, nearly a year after it acquired the company. Jotspot has not allowed new customer registrations since the acquisition was announced, although existing customers retained access to their accounts.
Google Operating System noted that the Jotspot discussion board and help desk have moved over to Google. More [...] - Five Facts About Google Phone – GigaOM
Is Google (GOOG) Phone fact or fiction? Engadget says Google’s entry into mobile phone business is for real, and the company is going to announce it soon. Scott Kirsner talked to a bunch of folks over who are intimately familiar with the effort and outlined his findings in an article for The Boston Globe.The story [...]
On the relationship between open source software and real estate business models
September 3, 2007
I had originally titled this “Installing Ruby on Rails on Mac OSX”, but as I typed, it gradually became about this other, more general, topic.
I saw this a little too late, but next time, I’m going to try RM-Install from Five Runs. Looks like it installs a very comprehensive Ruby on Rails stack from one place in minutes.
This is also an interesting look at an open source business model. Notice that they are offering you the free Ruby on Rails stack that you need, in a value added package, in exchange for lead information. You must enter an accurate e-mail address because they are delivering the actual download link to your inbox. To be clear, everything they are giving you is open source and freely available from different sites, but they are combining it into a single package so that the customer can save time and increase compatibility.
Five Runs also currently offers a Rails management solution called RM-Manage (very cool, watch the demo video) for which they charge a monthly subscription fee. From the looks of it, these two offerings are just two pieces in a much larger suite of services they are building out to ride the wave of Ruby on Rails as it washes into the enterprise space.
This model relates to real estate in so many ways:
- What can you package up and offer potential customers, at low cost to you and free to them, that are still valuable enough for them to give you valid contact information?
- What are you doing to ensure you contact that lead ASAP to find out further needs, establish a real relationship, and move them on to your other offerings that will generate real revenue?
- Traditionally for real estate agents, that real income is in the form of commissions, but what can you learn from an open source based software company about generating revenue from suites of related products? Maybe on a subscription or per use basis?
- Note how simple and professional, both the site in general and the lead form in particular, are. They make it very clear, in a subtle yet direct way, that “mickey@mouse.com” will not cut it here. If you want the value, we want the real you.
How long do you think it took me to get an e-mail from Five Runs? Yep, about thirty seconds. Of course it was automated, but if I now proceed with the download and the install goes smooth, I receive true value and I now have a positive relationship established with this company.
How long do you think it will take before someone actually calls me on the phone? I’d bet this week I’ll hear from someone.
News alert: The folks at Google are pretty clever
September 2, 2007As if Google Earth wasn’t cool enough already, now you can fly a plane above your house!
