Nestoria Australia Interview – Glenn Batten – First National Real Estate

Nestoria gets lots of opportunities to talk to people about technology, but less opportunity to talk to people about real estate; because while we’re a site that helps match people with their dream property, the really cool thing about Nestoria is how we help – it’s our partners who look after the property lists.  So it was especially interesting to interview Glenn Batten, who describes himself as: primarily a licensed real estate agent with a natural interest towards technology.

Glenn’s the General Manager of First National Real Estate Nerang, but he also writes about technology – especially if that technology could potentially be applied to real estate – for industry magazines and for the Business 2 Real Estate Technology and News Blog.  He’s also been involved in the development of two niche real estate software solutions as a partner in Sellercom, and is the creator of the Australian Real Estate Software and Solutions Directory which helps agents share software and online solutions.

Glenn, thanks for sharing your views with us.

As creator of the Australian Real Estate Software and Solutions Directory you’re fairly uniquely positioned on the Real Estate side of the Real Estate and technology convergence, so I was wondering what kinds of challenges you face that you’d love to find the technological solution for?

I really think there is two main technological challenges facing agents today in Australia:

The first is education. The agents on the frontline are just not aware of the options available to them and when they do start using some of these fantastic tools they often don’t really take advantage of them as best as they could. I created the Software and Solutions Directory as a way to spread the word about the technology options available to agents and their feedback has been fantastic.

The second challenge I see is that the technology favoured by agents on the frontline is not being supported by the software vendors. Technology is becoming more and more mobile and smartphones have now hit the 1ghz barrier. The Apple iPad has set the slate form factor on fire and between these two types of devices we are going to see a greater demand for mobile computing.  More and more Australian real estate agents are investing in smartphones, but the applications that would allow them to get the most out of this technology isn’t available yet: imagine standing at in front of home pointing your phone at a property and a property search using RPData just appears on the screen without typing a thing. That technology is built into the hardware of modern phones now but there is no apps that take advantage of it.

The Layar program is available for Android and iPhone smartphones already. This is a Mobile Augemented Realty Browser and allows data providers to display their data quickly and easily using Augmented Reality without the complexity of programming an AR interface themselves.  Real Estate portals from the US, Spain,  Sweden, Portugal, Russia, Netherlands, Italy, Japan, Belgium, UK, Ireland, France, Greece and Germany have all created Layars but the Australian portals and real estate groups seem to be sitting on their hands.

Is there any technology you’d dream up for the user side of the experience to help match people with their dream home?  What are some examples of features that you think your buyers and sellers would both find attractive?

One concept I thought of that would make it easier for users is an open house planning tool. More and more buyers are planning whole days around viewing open homes. A prospective purchaser would conduct a search as normal filtering all the properties according to price, bedrooms and whatever criteria they wanted. Then with a sliding time scale the planning tool would then display what properties would be available to be viewed at certain times throughout the day. A buyer would select say 10am and see they have three potential properties to view and their details. They select two of those properties and advance the timeline to 11am and 5 other homes now become available to select from and so on till the timer period they want to stop. At the end of that selection process the system would produce a list of the inspections in order to print out or email to themselves and possibly even a map of driving directions to drive from one inspection to the next.

I had an idea that it would be cool if you could use mobile Augmented Reality to look around a property and get more details about different features, or even to look inside a property while standing in front of it – that would save heaps of time for renters.  Are there any progressive technologies that you dream of utilising in your business?

That would be cool, however I don’t think the technology is out there just yet to create such a solution that would be economical for the end user. Companies like Google have the software sorted with their Streetview mapping solution where photos are stitched together so you can move seamlessly up and down the street an look around in a fully 360 degree turn as though you were standing there. The problem is probably more with the hardware taking all the photos so the software can be stitched together. Google has their fleet of camera cars and their new trike but that is just not accessible to agents, at least at the moment.  It would not surprise me that if a hardware solution could be found to fit the budget of an agent that Google would share their software technology for free.

We have one tablet in our office already and I think the iPad will really help this type of hardware take off.  Slate/Tablet pc’s have been around for quite a while now but advances in technology mean that they’re becoming more accepted by the mainstream consumer.

Nestoria sits on the technology side of the Real Estate/ technology convergence – is there anything you could suggest to us that we might be able to develop to improve the experience of our new Australian users?  Any Australia specific trends or differences from other markets that you’re able to share with us?

Because nobody else is doing it already an Augmented Reality solution using something like a Layar layer would definitely gain interest amongst consumers and agents alike. Ah, here’s one we prepared earlierIn the matter of mobile applications generally I really think a common user interface in a mobile application across the 4 primary mobile smartphone platforms (iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile) is going to be a proactive move. A common interface between the wife’s iPhone and the husband’s Android handsets is really important for continuity and a wider acceptance in general.

Thanks again for your time Glenn.  I think our office, as well as our readers will be interested to hear your suggestions about how we can help out the estate agents who list their properties on the portals that Nestoria is partnered with.

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Competing to make government data more interesting

What do you do after you’ve mashed up some information with some maps?
Well you might want to create an application to help display it.  And after the interest shown in the MashUp Australia competition both the NSW and Victorian state governments are getting in on the free-ing up government data act by launching App building competitions, aiming to pique people’s interest in doing new things with the government data they’ve released into the Creative Commons.

apps4nsw

The apps4nsw competition came first, offering a $100,000 prize pool for people with either the ideas, or ideas and development skills, to make good and interesting use of some of the government data available from the NSW Data Catalogue – which includes datasets like the Map of Fixed Speed Cameras in NSW or the Additional Transport Timetables set up for Major NSW Events.  The closing date for submissions of either app ideas, or prototypes, that will, as the website says: unlock the potential of NSW information, is the 22nd of March.

Never to be outdone by NSW, the Victorian State government announced the App my State competition, which invites people to create or imagine applications that: aim to make Victoria the best place to live, work, visit and raise a family. The prize money on offer is the same, and you’re invited to use just Victorian government data, source your own or mash it all up together.

App my State
You can have a look at some of the Vic app entries so far here and the idea entries here. The competition closes on the 23rd of April.

It’s interesting to see what kinds of things people come up with but it’s more interesting to see what new data, if any, the state governments give people access to.

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Less is more when it comes to pageviews

Normally websites pride themselves on generating a large number of pageviews from visitors – it means people are hanging around on their site for a while, looking at a few things – but for a vertical search like Nestoria the quicker we can give visitors exactly what they want the better.  A couple of weeks ago there was some intensive testing done on the UK site to help expedite people to their ideal listing, and the results: in technical speak Nestoria has gone to a full AJAX implementation.   In layman’s terms that basically means that the search information inputted is remembered when the sliders or map is moved so the lists should still have the most relevant content in them.  The good news for the Australian site is that we’ll automatically inherit the improvements.
Nestoria can always get better though, so there are always all sorts of tests going on on the sites to see how we can make it even easier to match people and homes.  If you have any suggestions it’s always the time to speak up.

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Best Valentines Card on the web…

What the world needs now...

What the world needs now...

Just when people had accepted that the world isn’t flat.

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Cool Google Tools for Aus

Being a really big country with a lot of sea between it and Google’s main headquarters can mean that new Google Map and Street View functions take a while to roll into Australia.  But there are a couple of new elements for Australian mappers to interact with.  The first one is the Building Maker tool, which has included Melbourne in the list of 70-odd cities that can take virtual building work.  Construction in Building Maker is done in block form, so you arrange correctly shaped blocks into place on the aerial images after choosing your building site – not sure if you can build your own house, or even make virtual home improvements: most people seem to have opted to rebuild interesting public buildings.

I hate to hear about Australian cliches proving to be all too true, but one of the first structures to go up in Melbourne was the footbridge over the Melbourne Grand Prix Circuit.  If you look at it in Street View you’re looking from underneath the bridge so you have to virtually back up to compare the Building Maker footbridge with the actual footbridge.

Building Maker
Which brings us nicely to the next bit of Google Aus news – they’ve brought a Street View trike over – which is a creature half bike and half traffic camera on wheels – which they use to get Street View imagery from places those little cars can’t go: trails in National Parks, beaches, bike tracks, that sort of thing.

They launched it at Taronga, which would have been my number one recommendation for its use – can’t wait to paw over Taronga Street View – but they’re asking for people to recommend other off-road Street View fodder.  You can vote for the recommendation you’d most like to see mapped hereThe track along the coast between Bronte and Bondi got my vote.

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When size isn’t everything…

The postcards depicting Australia’s impressive relative size compared to the rest of the world that appeared on this blog a couple of weeks ago afforded an interesting perspective on the wide brown land gert by sea.  This one offers another take.  It’s a population cartogram, depicting the world’s population broken up into 200 territories which are arranged size relative, but ignoring normal territorial borders.

Yep – in this one Australia is tiny! Talk about bringing us down to size tall poppy style.  It does make the world look sort of delicious though, there’s a cake-y quality to the shapes and colours…

For the technically inclined this map was created using raster datasets in ArcMap’s ArcToolbox you can read more about the map’s construction here.

In this one the shapes are retained but the data is from 2006:


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How the web has helped in Haiti

On September 11 2001 when the twin towers fell people were glued to their television screens or radios following events as they unfolded, but 8 years on when the earthquake struck Haiti people found there were there other ways of keeping abreast of the news.  It didn’t take long for Google to release a KML of their latest Haitian imagery which could be viewed on Google Earth, giving people a birds eye view of the destruction.

Here are before-and-after screenshots of the Presidential Palace and an area of Port-au-Prince:        

OpenStreet Map sprang into action as well, with mappers on the ground and remote mappers working off the latest CIA maps and GeoEye imagery showing the latest building collapses toiling towards creating an up to date GPS layout.  This was of huge assistance to emergency workers who would have taken a lot longer to reach victims using their pre quake GPS downloads.

The rest of the world could then monitor emergency situations on the Crisis Map of Haiti, a mash up of reported emergencies that people could report by text, phone call, twitter, Facebook, live streams and information reports – these emergencies have been anything from missing people reports, to fires, contaminated water supplies, aftershocks or collapsing buildings, to personal calls for help from families in their homes running low on food and clean water.  Most of the mapping is happening in America and Europe, but it’s been happening in real time none the less.

Almost a month on from the quake the internet is still coming up with fresh ways for people to stay tuned with what’s happening in Haiti, but also to lend a hand.  It may not be the most obvious mash up, but Gruvr has added a Haitian Benefit Concert Finder to their concert listing site, which maps your nearest fund raising concerts – they say that there are about 30 events being added a day.

band camp 2

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Augmented Reality Nestoria

It was only a few short weeks ago that the words Augmented Reality were first typed into this blog, but in the world of technology things can move pretty quickly – assisted by the hard work of the rest of the Nestoria team, and the fact that they’d known about it for quite a while longer – and today it’s possible to see, yes see with your own eyes, what it’s like to search for Nestoria property listings on your mobile device using AR.
The Nestoria AR app is part of a suite of useful information you can find on the Samsung Layar service which you can see at work here, popping property information up onto your screen in real time.  In the case of this video, made by the fair hands of Nestoria’s Nomsa and Matteo just outside the London offices, you’re watching it on the Samsung Galaxy, which runs Android OS, which is the Google version of the iPhone OS.

If you want to find out a bit more about how Samsung and Layar are working together there’s an interesting interview with Nick Turner-Samuels from Samsung Mobile UK on the UK blog.

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Nestoria Interview: Glen Hart of Ordnance Survey

There’s something to be said for neatly pinning everything down to a point on a map.  It facilitates technological wonders like Augmented Reality and all sorts of useful ways of interacting with data.  But surely the step beyond pinning things to a point on a flat map is being able to pin things to a point on a 3D map…  Well guess what? It’s not something that just exists in my map-geek musings, it’s actually been rolled out.  In the seaside town of Bournemouth UK of all places, by a team from Ordnance Survey, which is Britain’s national mapping agency.

Bournemouth 3D

Bournemouth 3D

Glen Hart is Head of Research at Ordnance Survey, so the right person to interview to find out more about what they did, what it means and when you might realistically be able search for things on a 3D map of your own town.  Here’s what we learned:

Ordnance Survey has recently created a three dimensional map of Bournemouth, making it, in your opinion, one of the best mapped places on the planet.  Can you talk a bit first about the value of this kind of project and secondly about the laser technology involved and how it’s all put together?

The original aim of this project was to evaluate the possibility of extracting 3D building models using a merged aerial and terrestrial laser point cloud data. This project follows on from previous work where buildings have been captured using photogrammetric techniques and total station observations.
The source data was collected by aerial LiDAR from a helicopter in July 2006 which has a density of around 60 points per square meter. Also a terrestrial LiDAR data captured with 4 laser scanners mounted on a vehicle of the same area in February 2008. This was supplemented by Digital Aerial imagery captured in June 2006.
Both the aerial and terrestrial data were analysed and checked to ensure the two datasets were within the same geographic space and there were no obvious errors, in fact the fidelity of the combined laser point cloud was excellent having an RMSE of 4cm (based on high level GPS measurements).
In order to aid point and feature identification of the merged laser point cloud, it was necessary that the data was ‘painted’ using colour values from an accurate ortho-rectified digital aerial image.

The LiDAR lasers collected around 700 million individual points of light.

Bournemouth never looked so bright...

Bournemouth never looked so bright...

What’s order do you work in on this kind of project?  Do you start with the flat map of the ground and work upwards?  How long does it take on average to map a square metre for example?

Ordnance Survey already has a very detailed topographic map of the whole of Great Britain called OS MasterMap™.   This map captures all significant features from roads and buildings all the way down to individual mooring posts, fences and curbs.  It contains approximately 450 million individually mapped features.   We use this as the base and then work up from there.  Actually it would be more accurate to say that we then work down from the point cloud (whether it originates from a Lidar or Photogrammetric source).

It is difficult to say how much it costs per square metre as this was not the precise aim of this stage of the research at that time.   What can be said with a large degree of certainty was that it would be uneconomic at this time to capture the whole country at the level of detail that was require for Bournemouth.   One of the objectives of a future extension of this research is to determine what can be economically produced given certain sets of user requirements.   At present we are collecting and analysing a variety of user requirements for 3D data.

Can you also let us know why the team selected Bournemouth for the accolade?

There were three main reasons:
The Bournemouth area contains a good variety of topographic features within a fairly small area including a good variety of building shapes (it’s got a pier), vegetation cover and also a coastal area that includes both a beach and cliffs.
The area is very close to Ordnance Survey’s headquarters in Southampton.
The lead Researcher appears to have a particular liking for Bournemouth!

What are some of the values of creating maps with this level of detail?  And what’s the likelihood of being able to map the whole country or world this way?  And how long do you think it will be until that level of detail exists?

One of the main values of creating something with this level of detail is that it gives us a set of highly accurate data that can be used as a benchmark to compare future capture methods against.   In this respect it is unlikely that we would (or could) capture the whole country to this level of detail.  it simply would not be viable or economic to do so at present.   However, the data also enables us to automatically generate simplified versions of the model, and to test these simpler models against possible user needs, thus helping us to determine what would be both economic to capture and of value to end users. Whilst it would be foolish to say that such detail will never exist for the whole country I think it is safe to say that it won’t be for a good few years (if that degree of vagueness is allowed).

Of course it is.  Technology is obviously converging with cartography in an interesting way at the moment, do you have any predictions for future?  What do you think the next major strides forward will be?

I think what we will see initially (and indeed are seeing) are simple 3D building models that don’t fit well with the terrain.  These will be replaced by more detailed models that are better integrated with the terrain and topographic mapping and finally with internal building models.   However a limiting fact will be the cost of producing detailed building models, so it is very likely that we will see models that vary in detail with lots of buildings being represent by between one and four building heights produced automatically, and only more important buildings being modelled in much more detail, but produced by more manual methods.

I’ve recently been collecting geo-spatial data for Nestoria Australia, have you come across any interesting geo-spatial implementations recently?  Both practical ones and the weird and wonderful.

Moving away from 3D I think one of the most interesting things happening in the data world is the emergence of the Linked data web which, whilst not limited to geo-spatial data, could have a major impact on how we view and interact with geo-spatial (and other data) on the Web.   This will generate some very interesting mash-ups that go way beyond the “pins on maps” type mash-up that we see today.

Thanks very much for explaining a bit more about the reality of 3D mapping, Glen.  It’s a pretty exciting thing to think about, even if you don’t have a fixation with pinning things to maps.  You can have a look at the moving 3D model of Bournemouth here.

More about Glen Hart: Prior to joining Ordnance Survey Glen worked in real time control and command systems then moved into software reliability.  Once he’d moved into the Geographic Information Industry Glen conducted research into spatial data models that where later developed into some of the foundational aspects of OS MasterMap and the UK’s Digital National Framework.  More recently his research interests have included the Semantic Web, data integration and Vernacular Geography.

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Nestoria Interview: David Dean on OpenStreetMap Australia

As well as viewing the Nestoria listings on the GoogleMaps interface you can also look at them on OpenStreetMap, which is all well and good if you live in the UK where there have been big OpenStreetMap meets designed to map whole cities all at once, but how’s the lay of the OpenStreetMap land in Australia?  We’d better chat to someone who knows and find out…  That someone being David Dean, Speech, Audio, Image and Video Technologies PhD, and the member of the Brisbane OSM community most likely to be organising the next meet up or party.

First up how did you get into mapping and OpenStreetMap?

I first found out about the project soon after it began through a link on Boing Boing, but then forgot about it for a few years until a geocaching friend mentioned it around 2007. I had a look around Brisbane then and coverage was pretty poor so I got started.

The coverage is no longer 'pretty poor'...

The coverage is no longer 'pretty poor'...

What are the OSM projects you’re interested in or engaged with at the
moment?  Or are you just mapping as you go?

I’ve done a little bit of bug fixing and minor coding for the gosmore navigation project, but for the most part I just get out there and map. I’m generally more interested in walking or riding out in the field to collect street names and other map features that are hard to get from satellite imagery. I’m happy to leave the armchair mapping to others.

What would you say is your mapping ‘claim to fame’?

I seem to have become the main organiser of OpenStreetMap community events in Brisbane. We have organised mapping events for more than a year now, and they have been monthly since July 2009, with growing attendances, which is encouraging.

How would you say the Australian OSM community is doing in terms of the rest of the globe?  And are there regions of Australia where you think OSM is better than professional maps?  Where would you place your home town, Brisbane, on regards other capital cities?

I can only really talk from personal experience in Brisbane, but I’m fairly certain that OpenStreetMap has good coverage in most of the larger cities of Australia, but probably nowhere near the detail that OpenStreetMap has in the UK or Europe. Brisbane’s coverage is pretty good these days, but I think Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra probably have better coverage at the moment.

And what about in terms of other paid for maps?

In comparison to commercial maps, I would say that wherever someone has done a detailed ground survey they are probably the best maps you can get. I’m particular happy with the use of OpenStreetMap for hiking/cycling trails and paths, because most of the commercial mapping providers are not even interested in collecting this data.

There are a few problems that people always site about open sourced mapping, things like how reliable is volunteered information?  How should data be licensed?  How do you expand the number of users to improve the quality? Do you consider any of these problems to be major challenges in Australia?  And if not what do you personally feel are  the big challenges for OSM Australia?

I think the ‘problem’ with volunteered information has already proven to be minimal by Wikipedia, which I doubt many internet users can go a week (or even a day) without using to learn something new.

Of course, I think that OpenStreetMap needs an easier way to quickly revert vandalism edits, but I believe there are some technical problems to making this a one-click process like it is for Wikipedia. However, despite the exponential user growth, I don’t believe that vandalism is a bug problem at the moment. In Brisbane, I’ve only had to revert one case of vandalism, and that user gave up relatively quickly.

I don’t think OpenStreetMap is having any problems expanding its user base, but I’m sure there are still a large volume of people who would be interested in OpenStreetMap, if only they knew that it existed.

One of the major issue for OpenStreetMap in Australia will be how are we going to go about getting all of the roads. As Australia is a large country with a very low population density there are a lot of roads to map, and it is clearly not something that will be completed if people only map their local area (unless we can convince everyone in Australia to help).

While there are some datasets that we could potentially convince the government to release, it is unclear how reliable this data is, with many rural areas reported as having many incorrect details, particular with gazetted roads that don’t actually exist. Some of the commercial mapping providers who care about accuracy pay workers who drive around Australia full-time to collect these details, but it is not clear how OpenStreetMap can collect similar information (and keep it up-to-date) purely through volunteer methods.

What kind of things to you see on the OSM horizon?

I think the best thing to improve OpenStreetMap is to get more people using it. If we can get people using OpenStreetMap maps in their car navigation devices or on their mobile phones they will have the best maps possible in many areas, and when they spot mistakes they can fix them easily, or just pop up a flag to let more dedicated mappers have a look at the problem. However, there still isn’t really any software using OpenStreetMaps that approaches the ease of use of modern car navigation software, but I know people are working on it…

You said you’d heard of Nestoria – do you have any advice for us entering the Australian market?  Or any suggestions about how to improve what we’ve got at the moment?

Make the OpenStreetMaps default instead of Google :) .

I don’t have a lot of experience in real estate websites, but it’ll be interesting to see how Nestoria manages to crack the near-monopoly that the existing main real estate has in Australia. I’ve tried using other real estate websites in Brisbane before, but found that there was nowhere near as many places listed as the main real estate website that nearly everyone uses.

Is there anything else you’d like to talk about now you’ve hopefully got flowing?

If the reader is interested in OpenStreetMap, go and attend a mapping party in your local area (check wiki.osm.org). If your local area doesn’t have any mapping parties, start one!

Thanks again for taking the time to share your Aussie take on OpenStreetMap.

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