Tzetze Fly

I’ve been using Jott now for a few weeks and it’s super useful.  You set up a (free) account, give it your e-mail address and phone number, and (optionally) any other friends e-mail addresses who you may want to Jott.  Once set up, you just dial Jott (a toll-free 866 number) and the automated system asks who you want to Jott and what your message is.  You can Jott “myself” or any friends name that you already set up on the web site.  A few minutes later, the recipient gets an e-mail with a text transcription of your message.  The voice to text translation works really well in my experience.

I use this all the time driving to or from work - anything I’m trying to remember, especially to do lists - I just Jott them and then I have a nice list waiting in my inbox when I get there.  Highly recommended.

Today’s my last day here at eNeighborhoods. An interesting thing happened today that I think sums up the whole five years here pretty well.

In January of 2003, I arrived on the fourth floor of the building - where we had about one third of the floor rented - went into our little conference room, and had my first meeting here. We had one product at the time - the eNeighborhoods desktop product - which made it easy to create neighborhood reports and maps from a CD installed Windows app. The goal of the meeting was to figure out what functionality we could add to the product to increase sales and usage, and we pretty much decided that day that we would add MLS connectivity, CMA, and Buyer Tour.

Today, I went into our beautiful executive conference room, one of the three conference rooms we have here, where we now occupy the entire fifth floor. I sat with half a dozen people from a great team with tons of industry experience. We now have over a dozen products, and the topic of today’s meeting was the release date for the Realogy project, wherein we are providing IDX listing search and lead capture for all of their brands. This is similar to the RE/Max project, wherein we host remax.com and provide IDX, lead capture, lead management, and broker web sites for the second most trafficked real estate site on the net.

From the one product with a couple of features to many products, including enterprise level web sites, in five years. It went so fast…

Image by ((brian))

Update: Greg created a killer video documenting the five year climb.  Love it!!!

An interesting post last night by Om Malik regarding possible business models for Twitter has sparked a lot of discussion. Here’s my two cents, and Om’s response.  Join in - either here or over there.

Continuing the theme of love, standards, and sharing in the New Year, it’s good to see the news from Zillow, Yahoo!, Trulia, and other real estate listing sites that they will work together with RESO to ensure data standardization using RETS. That’s a big win for the brokers and the real estate industry as a whole, as it will add great efficiency to their processes. The RETS Data Schema workgroup deserves a lot of credit for creating a thorough and flexible XML schema over the last couple of years. I know that was a lot of work, but it’s showing great results now.

Coverage in the press and blogoshpere has been very positive:

• Inman News
• TechCrunch
• BloodhoundBlog

Had 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.

The 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!

On 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.

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.

Just 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.

Radiohead announced last night on their blog that the new album is finished and will be release in just 10 days. Of course, I went and pre-ordered the ultimate disc box set right away, but news reports today indicate they are trying a new and different approach with the download version of the album. Unencumbered by a traditional record contract, they’ve decided to make the disc box available at a high price with extra goodies for their fans who will have no problem paying for it, then make the downloads available at little to no cost. It looks like the downloads will require users to register with personal details which can then be used for future marketing.

Earlier, they had announced that the album would not be made available on iTunes, so it looks now like this decision was related to giving them maximum control over the downloads and not having to split (or ensure) any profits.

Not having to share profits with a record company, having very low distribution costs, and having an established brand and fans who will support value-added products and tours all add up and give them the luxury to try a different approach. It strikes me that this is very similar to an open source software model: use low distribution costs to get a software tool in front of as many people as possible, then sell value-adds such as support, maintenance, enhancements, and indemnification, then use the established brand to come up with other products and services to sell the user base.

Is the new Radiohead album the first “open source” album? Or is it just a big train wreck waiting to happen?

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.

Photo credit