Congratulations to the Zoomf team: their property search site is now showing results from the whole country.
This has been a big task: unlike the paid for inclusion property sites, Zoomf is a search engine that includes all the property listings it can find, so they’ve had to build a huge database of all the agent websites to point their clever, clever software at.
This article in Director (the monthly magazine of the Institute of Directors) contrasts the start-up options of the US with those of the UK. The US situation sounds extremely favourable:
There are several people in the article who started out in the UK and moved to California to really get their businesses off the ground. From personal experience, I’ve seen a wide range of ways that funding can be obtained for start-ups in the UK, but it is really hard work, and it sounds a lot easier in the US.
It was nice to read about some UK success stories, though, including Zoomf.com:
But a growing cluster of successes is beginning to provide UK graduates with an alternative. Zopa, Garlic, Monitise, OnOneMap, Nestoria, Zoomf and Zubka are all original, scalable UK tech firms. Says Klein: “Not only is there access to an amazing ecosystem of talent, but you now have sophisticated venture capital. People are being myopic when they think of Silicon Valley as the only place to build Web businesses.”
As part of its recent design upgrade, the team at Zoomf.com has introduced a very interesting new feature: the ability to search visually within a defined polygon on a map. Here’s an example.
Here’s how it works:
It’s beta software, but it’s clear it has stacks of possible uses, like keeping track of properties within school catchment areas, on specific bus routes, near your favourite chip shop… Given that you can save your searches and get an RSS feed of them, or even check them on your mobile, it’s set to be a very useful feature.
News International is (according to this article) about to launch a vertical search engine focussed on the UK property market. To some, this might seem like a fairly uninteresting development in online property advertising. There are lots of property websites in the UK, Rightmove being the most prominent. Zoomf (who I’m involved with as a non-exec director), Propertyfinder and a host of other companies are also in this very competitive niche, so you might ask who needs another property website?
Yesterday I presented at the AdMonsters EU Leadership Forum in London. AdMonsters is an international group of people working in online advertising operations and the group included people from a wide range of online publishers and agencies, including Channel 4, the Guardian, News International, AOL, Harvest Digital and Digitas.
My presentation is on Slideshare and here:
I had a great time, especially enjoying the presentation by Fru Hazlitt, MD of GCap London. Presenting was fun too. I recorded the audio, so I’ll replace the Slideshare with a movie of the slides plus audio soon.
My presentation explored the origins and possible solutions (including the one mooted by IASH) to the problem of how to safely place ads next to user generated content. Essentially, I think a combination of behavioural targeting, automated content analysis and manual publisher classification is probably needed, and that a code of practise based solution like IASH’s won’t solve the problems to the satisfaction of advertisers who need innovation and results.
This is a movie of slides plus video from my presentation last Thursday. It was weird spending so much time listening to myself speaking again when I made this: I hope it sounds better to you than it did to me!
I participated in a discussion last night about property and web 2.0, sponsored by my friends at Zoomf.com. I presented a personal view of what we mean by web 2.0, and Mike Carter spoke about how it’s impacting the property business here and in the US. We were joined by Andy Etches from Brightsale and Ben Brandt from Rat & Mouse, the popular London property blog. Annie Turner from GoMoNews hosted the conversation and it was a very enjoyable evening.
I never know what to expect from panel discussions. Last night I felt I was involved in a discussion about a rapidly changing business, which isn’t totally sure where it’s going to end up. Read more »
I’m one of the panelists at tomorrow night’s seminar on Property and Web 2.0, hosted by Zoomf.com. There are a few spaces left, I gather. I’m giving an overview of what web 2.0 is, Mike Carter’s going to apply that to the property market, and the other panellists will be introducing their work as well. Then Annie Turner from GoMoNews will chair a discussion. I’m expecting an interesting debate about how the property business can make the most of all that web 2.0 stuff.
We’ll be recording it all for later podcast.
I helped to run a consumer forum for Zoomf.com last week. Poppy’s written it up here. I had a great time, and it’s always incredibly useful to listen to first hand comment. The group was young and skewed toward rented property, which means it’s not 100% representative, but it was terrific to hear the things they liked (simplicity, speed) and the things they wanted (trade secrets, of course!) 2 things that surprised me: the group is hardly using the mobile web at all, saying it’s still too slow and expensive, and how much they were using the web. Hardly any TV, hardly any print, they were all using the Internet for something like 6-10 hours per day.
And of course Facebook was the website none of them could do without.
I’d like to echo Zoomf’s thanks to the participants: I had a really good time and learned a lot.
I’ve been talking to the team at Walkit.com over the last few days. They’ve got a fabulous website, that creates walking routes for people, showing them calories consumed and CO2 saved if they walk instead of driving, and today they launched walkit.com for Edinburgh, just in time for the festival. The team is tiny, and they’ve produced something that works really well, generating enormous amounts of public interest and PR.
And then there are my friends at Zoomf.com, who’ve produced a fully functional property search engine that spiders websites, has the most attractive Ajax user interface and all sorts of web 2.0 bells and whistles in the pipeline. Again, small team, massive result.
The output of the teams building these sites is phenomenal, when I compare it with some other projects that I’ve seen, and that’s got me thinking about the variables that drive productivity in software development. Both of these teams are immensely self-motivated (driven by love of a cause, their personal work ethics, the possibility of building a business that has value to investors), both have almost total freedom to choose the process and technologies they use, and they make extensive use of software that others have built. Whether it’s Google Maps, Drawlive, Wicket, Thinkingcap, PHP, Apache or whatever, they’re leveraging the work of thousands of coders to create their products. They’re re-using, and making that an art in itself. They’re building mechanisms that allow people to contribute even once their sites are live: feedback, new walking routes, star ratings and comments … So in the end, all their customers become product developers too.
As for the low productivity projects, I see lack of clear, timely decision making on every one of those.
Oddly enough, the problems with technical projects are almost never technical.