- We Knew This Was Going To Happen: iPhone Equipped Passenger Takes On Flight Crew Over Weather – PlaneBuzz
“Oh joy! I can’t wait for the next ground delay or long taxi due to weather somewhere to get a smart ass with a freakin I-phone shoving it in my face saying “It’s NOT raining there… SEE !” Too late … already happened to me.
Pretty funny story. - The Serverless Internet Company – Scobleizer
At one point Max seemed like he was joking around with me when he told me “we don’t own a single server.” I asked him FOUR more times to make sure I heard him right. I even got incredulous with him at one point saying something like “what the f*** do you mean you don’t own a server?” and “you mean not a single bit of your Web site comes from servers that aren’t owned by Amazon?”This is the future – the near future. Running a business is fun. Running a NOC is not fun – and that’s a huge understatement.
Archive for November, 2007
items for 11.21.2007
November 21, 2007Breaking news: Apple ads are hilarious and clever
November 21, 2007These guys are on a roll. Look how they didn’t just move the TV ads on-line, but they’re now using ad space on the sites so creatively. I hear the ads are appearing on Engadget, PCMag, and News.com, sometimes appearing with articles about Vista.
Sick of all the Web 2.0 talk?
November 21, 2007If your sick of hearing about all this crap, check out this satirical video. Funny stuff! I am a fan of the Common Craft videos that this riffs on though.
NAR Update – Day 3
November 16, 2007Had a bunch of meetings in the morning, including our friend David Crombie all the way from Australia. They are doing some pretty aggressive things in both Australia and New Zealand with flowing listing data to the web and print media. He brought all of us some bottles of Aussie wine which was greatly appreciated.
Worked the RETS booth on the show floor in the afternoon and got to talk to a few agents who stopped by to ask questions about the state of the standard. After that I made a loop of the show floor. Didn’t really see anything new that stood out this year, but was surprised by the number of booths promoting both domestic and international second home and resort properties. I’m thinking that may be a waste of time given the malaise most Americans feel about real estate right now and the weakness of the dollar overseas.
After a great cocktail party at the eNeighborhoods suite, dinner was with an eNeighborhoods crew at Isla’s Mexican Kitchen and Tequila Bar over in the Treasure Island – recommended. Ran into Bob Morse – now with FNRES – at the bar and he joined us at the table for dinner. We were referred by the concierge at the Paris, but Bob said he read a People magazine on the plane and it mentioned this is where a bunch of celebrities eat when they’re in town. The guacamole was great.
Big thanks to the Marketlinx crew for putting on a great party at Margaritaville. The drinks and food were flowing, and it was full of of industry people talking and having a good old time.
NAR Update – Day 2
November 15, 2007The CRT lunch was great. Chris McKeaver at CRT treated us right with good food and good people, which lead to great conversations. Thanks to the entire CRT crew for putting this event on. Hopefully it will become a tradition.
Mark Lesswing – CTO of NAR – filled us in on a new MLS rule that passed unanimously at the conference requiring all MLS’s to provide an up to date, compliant RETS server. Mark lobbied for this to ensure not just the spread of RETS servers, but to accelerate their usage. This is a great rule that should have a positive affect on real estate standards.
Mark also introduced Lennox Scott as the new technology liasion for the NAR President. I spoke with Lennox for about ten minutes about his plans, which center around utilizing technology to accomplish “real time real estate”.
After a series of good meetings, we went to dinner at Del Frisco’s with our old friends and great customers from Sacramento Metrolist. The rib eye at this place was probably the best I ever had!
NAR Update – Day 1
November 14, 2007Had sushi last night at Tao with John Hensley from FNRES and Mike Wurzer from FBS. These guys are such high quality, smart people and just a pleasure to be around. I always learn more in these dinner discussions than I do in three days around the show floor. If you go, make sure to try the white tuna – it was insanely good!
We had a great discussion about web services and Sam Ruby’s great new book “RESTful Web Services”. (I’m hoping to provide a book report here on this soon.) Seems like every time I read a book or article and can’t wait to refer Wurzer to it, he’s already on it. Of course, lot’s of discussion on RETS too. Later Hensley provided current insight into one of my other favorite topics – Orange County real estate.
We had a couple of groups come by to say hi, and it struck me that the projects the three of us are working on are probably affecting the daily work of 90% of the Realtors out there. That’s pretty heavy.
I’m off to the CRT sponsored lunch right now, which should be interesting. I understand 140 people are expected.
Outage for many major web sites
November 14, 2007On Monday 11/14/07, I noticed some sites I was trying to access were down – wordpress.com and gigaom.com. I was trying to post a blog entry and download an episode of the GigaOM show (highly recommended) to my iPod Nano before packing for my trip and was getting pretty frustrated. Apparently a traffic accident affected a power transformer and caused AC problems at the Rackspace data center in Dallas. I read this also affected Wesabe and the 37signals apps – all major name players in the web game.
37signals does a great job openly communicating the details of the outage here. Just goes to show that all the thinking, planning, and redundancies can still be unraveled by an accident and a specific chain of negative events.
This stuff is hard.
Android (gPhone API) demo
November 14, 2007Pretty cool demo. 3G speed, hardware accelerated 2D/3D graphics, touch screen, and open API. They don’t talk about it in this video, but I’ve also read that the GPS functionality is open and accessible from the API, which I believe will be a first for mobile phones.
Big announcement
November 12, 2007
So here’s what we’ve been working on -
We’ve been running remax.com on our Enterprise Platform at eNeighborhoods for the past year and a half. Starting Spring 2008, we’ll also be running listing searches, lead distribution, and office web sites for century21.com, coldwellbanker.com, and era.com as part of a huge new deal with Realogy. Lot’s of traffic, eh? I’m calculating that the cumulative real estate listings traffic passing through our platform next summer will come very close to the long dominant realtor.com. This deal has been over a year in the making, and I know both Realogy, eNeighborhoods, and Dominion Enterprises are all very proud that it is finally seeing the light of day.
Press releases:
From eNeighborhoods – http://www.eneighborhoods.com/press_11_12_07.asp
From Realogy – http://www.realogy.com/media/pr/show_release.cfm?id=466
Photo courtesy Zap2It.
Heading to NAR – Vegas Baby!
November 12, 2007Just returned from a family wedding outside of Dallas (yeeeeehaw!), so I’m not leaving for Vegas until tomorrow morning. I’ll be there Tuesday around lunch time. If you want to hook up, drop me an e-mail – I’ll get it on my Treo.
