tigho is forcery, nyc, real estate, advertising, tech

At Google one of our key philosophies is to take risks and to experiment. To that end, in July 2009 we announced the ability to find property for sale or rent directly on Google Maps. This is one of the “search options” next to the search box on Google Maps, and is currently available in the US, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Japan.

 

In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit listings), we’ve decided to discontinue the real estate feature within Google Maps on February 10, 2011.

 

We’ve learned a lot and been excited to see real estate companies use Google Maps in innovative ways to help people find places to live, such as Coldwell Banker’s use of Google Maps and YouTube, or Realtor.com’s Android app that lets you draw a shape on a map to find all properties you’re interested in.

 

Yet we recognize that there might be better, more effective ways to help people find local real estate information than the current feature makes possible. We’ll continue to explore this area, but in the meantime, Google offers other options to home-seekers: you can still access other information in Maps such as local businesses, directions and transit times, as well as aerial and Street View imagery to explore where you might want to move, and also use Google search results to find helpful real estate information and websites.

 

Real estate companies can also continue to use tools from Google to help connect with buyers and renters who use the Internet to research properties. For example, companies can use the Google Maps API to embed customized maps that are useful to potential clients right on their own web pages. Our Google for real estate professionals site contains various methods for generating leads and improving real estate business operations.

 

Mozilla, the developer of the Firefox browser, is working a feature that will allow users to opt-out of online behavioral advertising.

The goal is to give users "a deeper understanding of and control over personal information online," Mozilla's head of privacy said in a blog posted on Sunday [see pic below].

The feature will allow users to configure their Firefox browser to tell websites and advertisers that they would like to opt-out of any advertising based on their behavior, Alex Fowler [cq] wrote in his blog post. The user's preference is communicated to websites and third party ad servers using a new "Do Not Track HTTP header", which is sent with every click or page view in Firefox.

I just was invited to Qwiki Alpha, the interactive, "information experience' platform that creates multimedia-rich wikis algorithmically out of data sets, instead of by user input and peer review!

Despite simply being fascinating and amazingly cool, Qwiki has profound implications upon the future of search and data organization.

Please note that according to Qwiki:

1. This experience was not generated by humans. It was generated by machines.

2. This experience is completely curated.

3. The experience is completely interactive

I had written about how exited I was about the possibilities of Qwiki a few weeks ago, but apparently they have now launched the Alpha version to select users. Also on Friday, Qwiki also announced a round of funding from tech-celebs Eduardo Saverin (Facebook co-founder) and Jawed-Karim (YouTube co-founder).

I cannot wait to test this out more, but see below for an entirely computer generated entry about the word "Wiki."

This is a great slide show about the future of real estate tech that I had the privilege to see Brian Boyero and Joel Burlem of 1000Watt Consulting present at Classified AdVentures’ Property Portal Watch Workshop last week.

They are insistent up on UX and design becoming more integral to the future of the web, and I agree that search will (and needs to) become more intuitive, taking "the search out of search" as they say.

I might be a bit of a techno-utopian marketer to expect to eventually be served everything that I want immediately from the web, rather than to slog through pages of bundled media and ads, but I don't see the days of the vertical content provider (like AOL or Yahoo) being reincarnated as a cultural norm. Everything is trending in the opposite direction.

Ads are now targeted upon ever-more granular (albeit sometimes invasive) criteria. Social and hyperlocal filtering provide additional credibility to information. And industries will need to build smarter platforms that deliver relevant results to consumers, relieving us from the clutter and confusion that typifies a web search, from an MSN homepage to an apartment-search on Craigslist.

We have moved from the age of uniformity to the moment of the meta-niche and it's about finding yours, individuating your content, and doing it for the customer.

January 14, 2011—RentJuice, an online technology platform streamlining the rental process for real estate professionals and networking together brokerages and landlords announced its expansion into the New York City market. The online software, which has already been hugely successful in Boston, Chicago and Miami, is moving the availability of rental data to real-time and automating laborious administrative tasks.

“Evolving a once time-consuming process, RentJuice is helping real estate brokers capitalize on predictions that 10 million new renters will enter the U.S. market in the next five years. For New York, a city where 70 percent of the eight million residents are already renters, RentJuice will be a complete game-changer,” said CEO David Vivero.

The company also recently introduced RentJuice RealTime, a free product for property managers and landlords. The platform allows users to share their availabilities with partner agencies instantly to shorten vacancies, as well as save time and effort.

Added Vivero, “The new wave of demand for rentals shed light on slow, antiquated systems that relied on faxes, e-mails and phone calls. New consumers in the space are demanding more collaboration and real-time data—technology like RentJuice is networking together the major players and filling this need.”

Due to the usability of RentJuice’s online products, Vivero has been invited to speak at the Real Estate Connect Conference being held in New York this week. During his session, titled “Designing great experiences—The unsung art of user interface design,” Vivero will discuss how RentJuice has built a technology platform that enables its customers to easily manage the rental process from start to finish with invaluable tools, such as one-click syndication for posting available properties to 30 different websites like Zillow and Craig’s List.

This is great; think Fantasia for tech-geeks.  Literally, if your accountant took LSD, they might come up with something like this.