Google Docs; not Microsoft Office 2010

This week Microsoft will take its Office 2010 suite out of beta. If you’re considering upgrading Office with Office, we’d encourage you to consider an alternative: upgrading Office with Google Docs. If you choose this path, upgrade means what it’s supposed to mean: effortless, affordable, and delivering a remarkable increase in employee productivity. This is a refreshing alternative to the expensive and laborious upgrades to which IT professionals have become accustomed.

Google Docs has been providing rich real-time collaboration to millions of users for nearly four years. It lets employees edit and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the browser from anywhere in the world. We recently made tremendous strides in improving Google Docs formatting, speed and functionality, and a growing number of companies are now using it as their primary productivity software.

Of course, you probably already own Office 2003 or 2007 (or maybe Office 2000?), and there’s no need to uninstall them. Fortunately, Google Docs also makes Office 2003 and 2007 better. For example, you can store any file – including Microsoft Office documents – in Google’s cloud and share them in their original format (protected, naturally by Google’s synchronous replication across datacenters). Plus, in the coming months, Google will enable real-time collaboration directly in Office 2003 and 2007, as you can see here.

Google Docs represents a real alternative for companies: a chance to get the collaboration features you need today and end the endless cycle of “upgrades”. For more information on the choices available to you, check out the summary below. But don’t take our word for it – you can try Google Docs and the rest of the Google Apps suite for free. The only thing you have to lose is a server or two.

Management Companies Offering Concessions | UrbanEdge


Management Companies Offering Concessions

Check back often and save!

This list provides information on buildings that have specified that there are currently incentives for tenants. These deals are usually limited time offers, so you may want to check back frequently to get the best deal.

Building Manager Incentive
Kips Bay Court   One Month Free Rent
2 Gold Street   One Month Free Rent
45 Wall Street   One Month Free Rent
455 West 37th Street TF Cornerstone Two Months Free Rent
505 West 37th Street   Two Months Free Rent
Chelsea Centro   One Month Free Rent
Liberty Towers   Reduced Security Deposit
Gracie Mews Jack Resnick & Sons, Inc One Month Free Rent
Plaza East TF Cornerstone One Month Free Rent
Plaza West   One Month Free Rent
The Colorado JRT Realty Group, Inc One Month Free Rent
1481 Fifth   One Month Free Rent
The Octagon   One Month Free Rent
1270 Amsterdam Avenue Dermot Realty Management Company One Month Free Rent
11 Cornelia Street   One Month Free Rent
121 Seaman Avenue Dermot Realty Management Company One Month Free Rent
99 John Street TF Cornerstone One Month Free Rent
Atlas NY Gotham Organization One Month Free Rent
4720 Center Blvd   One Month Free Rent
328 West 47th Street   One Month Free Rent
348 West 47th Street   One Month Free Rent
375 Edgecombe Avenue J&M Realty One Month Free Rent
266 Washington Avenue Dermot Realty Management Company One Month Free Rent
30-36 Sickles Street Dermot Realty Management Company One Month Free Rent
The Oxford Houses Jack Resnick & Sons, Inc One Month Free Rent
Pacific   One Month Free Rent
The James Madison   One Month Free Rent
The Thomas Jefferson   One Month Free Rent
Riverside at Newport   One Month Free Rent
East Hampton   One Month Free Rent
Southampton   One Month Free Rent
415 East 90th Street Shalimar Management One Month Free Rent
333 East 95th Street Shalimar Management One Month Free Rent
410 Lefferts Ave   No Security Deposit for Qualified Tenants
219 east 89th   One Month Free Rent
3 Family House Woodside / Maspeth   One Month Free Rent
119th & Third Muss Development Company Free Fitness Center
The Madison   One Month Free Rent
via urbanedgeny.com

 

After f8: Implementing the Open Graph Protocol around the Web - Facebook Developers

We shared an update last week about the products launched at f8 and that over 50,000 websites have already implemented the new social plugins to become more personalized. We created the Open Graph protocol in support of social plugins as part of our efforts to help realize the vision of the Open Graph.

Any website can implement the Open Graph protocol. It allows any web page to become a rich object in any social graph, making it easy to find what people are liking across the Web -- from a movie to a blog. To start integrating the Open Graph protocol into your Web pages, read our documentation.

Last week, Facebook's David Recordon gave a presentation at the WWW Conference explaining the design decisions behind the Open Graph protocol, which is embedded below. Additionally, members of the W3C's Linked Data Camp helped to develop a RDF schema file which relates the Open Graph protocol to existing ontologies (such as Dublin Core, FOAF, and DBpedia).

Open Graph Protocol Design Decisions

Developers have created Open Graph protocol implementations in Java, Perl, PHP, and Ruby, as well as a WordPress plugin that makes it easy to add the metadata to any blog. Services like og:it parse any Web page and display Open Graph protocol data. Toby Inkster hacked together a system that converts the Open Graph protocol RDFa markup to JSON and Chris Thorpe created OpenGraph.in, which outputs HTML and JSON.

Beyond helping relate the Open Graph protocol to Semantic Web technologies and developing a variety of open source implementations, the community identified that a page type for an 'article' (such as a blog post or story on CNN) was missing. Multiple developers stood up saying that they would implement this new type if it were to exist, and it's now part of the specification.(We'll be shipping support for the new article type this week.)

Even though we released the protocol less than two weeks ago, it's clear that a community is already forming around it. This community is already taking an active part in its evolution and developers are excited about building upon these new tools. We look forward to even more development and adoption in the coming weeks and months. Visit the Open Graph protocol site site for more information.

Mark, a product manager on the Facebook Platform team, likes the Open Graph protocol.

UMapper

I suppose I have always been a bit of a cartography geek, quick and ready to name some obscure capital at parties...  And I have happily traversed the far reaches of internet mapping, behind my desk, fascinated by the sublime visual perspective and the sheer interactive functionality of Google Earth, Bing Maps 3D, and the myriad of applications within each.

So, I was very excited last week when I found UMapper, a brand new, open-source map generation platform, which allows you to create fully customized, user-generated overlays out of all of the major web mapping platforms (Bing Maps, Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Yahoo.), and export your very own embeddable KML files to use in your blogs, websites, etc.

UMapper also has a really fun “geogame” creator called GeoDart, where you input geographical areas and questions and they will generate a location-based trivia game.  See below for an NYC landmark trivia game:


Pretty cool!

Here is a GeoDart game of Countries and Capitals:

20 Tools to Bring your Real Estate Business to the Cloud

20 Cloud Tools Presentation                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

A smarter real estate search

Thanks to Pandora we no longer have to search for new music. Pandora searches for us. We set up a play-list on a genre, song or band and new tracks present themselves based on common attributes. When we like or dislike each new track, Pandora learns our tastes. And continues to refine the tracks it adds to our play-list. Extend that matching logic across the entire user base and the app becomes exponentially smarter. More valuable.

It makes other ways of searching for music feel archaic.

Like searching for real estate listings is today.

There’s no question that designers and UI experts have made real estate as pretty as can be. And developers have made it simple and quick. Everything from walkability scores to education data and local blogs have been mixed into the experience. But in the end, searching for homes is still arduous. Users are forced to manually weed through their options.

 

One of the most ironic facets of real estate search as it is today is the set of fields commonly provided to users at the onset of the process (location, beds, bath, price). For these things are not always what becomes important to them in the final leg of their decision making. How often did your seller not buy the 4 bed, 3 bath, $650,000 home and instead choose the 3 bed, 2 bath $500,000 place because it had a better view, a bigger back yard, a different school district, or a finished basement to die for?

Real estate search today might be pretty, mashed and fast. But it’s not smart. Or intuitive. Or built to do anything other than to provide us a fabulously detailed patch of content we have crawl through.

But imagine a Pandora for real estate. A system that allowed users to tailor a search by liking and disliking the listing results the system provides them based on their broad parameters. By crunching our responses along with those collected by all who came before us, search could be considerably more productive.

The nuances of how this could be created are not lost on me. But if Amazon can do it with books and Pandora can do it with songs, I’m convinced real estate could do it with listings. Especially if we could find a way to suck in the user generated content – the things people are thinking, tweeting and facebooking about properties. Yes, a legal minefield – but one we should attempt to sweep.

This sort of thing would be possible if we placed more energy into what could be rather than protecting what was. Or worse, indulging the real estate molehills this industry loves to turn into mountains.

A map here, an API there – big deal. This is what I’m talking about: