This Weekend's Weather Forecast

The dark cloud symbol means snow overnight, which I thought the skiers amongst you might appreciate.  Let me know if you want me to make any other changes to this DIY weather map I'm wishing on you: it's a bespoke one created using this tool, which not only lets you create your own weather map, it also lets you present your own weather programme. 

Have a good weekend Nestorfolks.

Neatness Sells

There are all sorts of myths about how to capture the hearts and minds of a buyer, from allowing the smell of freshly baked bread to permeate the house, to painting everything blank canvas magnolia, to asking the neighbours to sync the time they take their noisy dog for a walk with the time of your viewings.  But apparently when it comes to selling feng sui-ing your home is the best tip, as a July survey suggests that the number one thing to turn off Australian buyers is clutter.

realestate.com.au were responsible for the survey of 1,616 people, which found that 56% of Australian house hunters were so turned off by mess and clutter that they'd prefer to strike a property off their list rather than imagine what it might be like after a bit of a spring clean.  The survey broke it down by state as well and found that South Australians are the pickiest when it comes to neatness with the turn off rate rising to 58% in S.A., while Territorians are the most relaxed - but not that relaxed, 53% of them still expect to view a de-cluttered property. 

Hoarders, and lets face it, lots of us have more stuff than we need, can get around this by putting some of their treasures into storage before they start showing the property.  Hopefully you're going to be moving anyway, so it's just a matter of getting ahead on the packing. 

Spring is supposed to be the best time for moving as well as cleaning.  As far as sprucing up your property's appearance on Nestoria, there are a few basic ways you can improve the quality of your listings: 

1.Tell it straight and provide as many details as possible without too much cluttered writing.

2.Make sure you have good photos and the more the better.

3.Include as much information about the property as you can within the listing.  Don't leave off the price hoping people will contact you to get it – it makes it harder for people to search by price and they may miss seeing your property. 

Neat house by Flickr user SeeMidTN.com (aka Brent)

How big is it really?

We all know that space is big, yeah...  But not everything in space is quite a big as you think it is.  The moon, for example, has a diameter of 3476 kilometres, but if you cut a slice out from its equator and laid it on top of Alice Springs, for example, bits of Western Australia and the east coast would still poke out the top from underneath it.

We know this because the BBC has just launched a new mini site called Dimensions.  This is another way to seriously waste some time on the internet, but as with all the best internet time wasters it opens up your eyes.  In this case to the relative size of things.  This is the route the Mars Rover would have travelled if it set out from the centre of Melbourne:

It's also interesting to know that the Great Wall of China would actually fit into Australia:

But the leg span of the Colossus of Rhodes less impressive than it sounds when you see it laid over the Opera House:

You can also compare the relative size of some recent environmental disasters.  It's harder than you think to totally wipe out Tasmania...

If you have a kid this is school project gold.  Otherwise you're just going to have to pretend to your workmates that it's research of some kind - possibly the distruction of Tasmania...  But it is fascinating.  Another really cool way of mashing up movable maps online. 

Visualising the Australian Elections

An oncoming election is like a great wave of news, gradually closing in on the shore and covering anything else that might be mentioned in a news-related source.  The issues Nestoria is interested in have also been swamped by the election.  Trends in real estate will be altered depending on who's elected, as will trends in freeing up data, and possibly even the appetite for more mashup competitions where people could use the Nestoria API to creat new and cool things...
But luckily Google has come up with a way to infiltrate even this blog with election relevant news.  They've built an Australia Federal Election 2010 map :

The overlays show the current political boundaries – with three margin settings:
Safe 60%/ Fairly Safe between 56 - 60%/ Marginal less than 56% 

It also shows the polling stations:

They've added a list of resources to the bottom of the page, including page reporting current search trends for the Leaders, Parties and Policy Topics:

Interestingly for Nestoria, Broadband is, as far as Google thinks, one of the main policy issues, along with the Economy, Health, Education and Immigration.
Google has also created a Student Voice section, which will supposedly take the political pulse of the nation's future voters, and has links to plenty of relevant Youtube election news and the channels of each of the major parties.

There's also a link to the Australian Electoral Commission's How to Vote page.  If you haven't been following the other news sources this is a really good way for you to catch up in time to make your decision count. 

The people are still saying the same thing

The people have spoken.
And they've kept speaking.
As a tribute to the launch of Nestoria France a poll was started asking people if they'd rather live in Paris or London.  Initially London proved to be the option of choice (between only two choices, mind), but that was because only the people in the Nestoria office had voted.  But now that the poll's been out there in the real world for a while it seems that London is still the most popular.  Although it could be that most of Paris is away for the August.  Or that the French, and lovers of the French, are saying 'pouh' to the poll.

Do we dare open that old Sydney vs. Melbourne debate?  Oh, I think we do...  Vote now...  Winner takes on London.

 

Nestoria Interview: NearMap's Stuart Nixon (Part 2)

If you haven't read the first part of our interview with Stuart Nixon then don't delay: do so now.  

The rest of you will already know that he's the founder of NearMap, but also the person largely behind ER Mapper, and the inventor of the cool sounding HyperPod aerial camera system and HyperVision supercomputer processing technology.  He's also someone we've wanted to hear from for ages, so let's get back into it:

NearMap is linked up to OpenStreetMap, what were your thoughts behind this pairing and how important do you think this kind of community owned and user generated mapping site is?

I've always been a very strong proponent of opening up spatial data.  I remember flying back and forth between San Diego in the USA and Canberra in Australia a dozen times a while ago, while I was on the spatial steering group that convinced the Australian Federal Government to open up much of Australian government data to free use.

OpenStreetMap is a concept we very strongly support.   NearMap explicitly includes rights to derive street map data from our PhotoMaps under the CC-BY-SA license, and we continue to take an active interest in helping OpenStreetMap grow.

Companies need to tread carefully with open community efforts like OpenStreetMap. It is important to help, but not be seen to try to take over or dictate to community efforts.

It's really nice for users to see a site with no advertising! But how does the OpenStreetMap creative commons connection work with the revenue model for licensing the data to government agencies etc. or is it just not a problem because you're adding so much to the content with NearMap's fantastic images?

Our support for OSM is intended to assist people wanting good street maps, rather than for government users.  Government clients license our PhotoMaps. They don't typically use OpenStreetMap data, as government agencies have internal access to their own government street and cadastral data.

Because our core revenue is from licensing our PhotoMaps to government agencies, we are able to provide our map portal to people for free without lots of annoying ads (which I hate too).

Over time, you will see NearMap being used for media market applications, however even there we will continue to give people a nice map portal without lots of annoying in-your-face advertisements.

How do you get all those maps to align from month to month?

The industry standard for PhotoMaps without ground point control is a Root Mean Square (RMS) error of 200cm (2 meters). NearMap PhotoMaps are currently processed to an RMS error of 50cm (0.5 meters). This means that, on average, a point on the PhotoMap will be within 50cm of where it should be.

This is a remarkable achievement, as you can see over these tennis courts (use the TimeView slider to go back over months).

The precision of NearMap’s PhotoMaps is an interesting subject in itself. Most existing aerial cameras use pre-calibration of lens and other distortions to achieve what is known as "metric cameras". So long as the distortions don’t change (for example the sensor is often temperature controlled to ensure it does not change in size), the metric camera approach delivers good results.

As early as 1961, researchers such as D. Brown from the United States Air Force recognised the power of a more recent approach, known as "self-calibration". Here, camera and lens distortions are simultaneously computed during bundle adjustment (which is the process used to orient everything to produce a PhotoMap). For the technically minded, this PDF paper is quite a good summary on the subject.

Self-calibration provides better results, often improving precision by a factor of 10 or so compared to pre-calibrated metric cameas. However, this comes at a price, because many more observations are needed on photos, and processing is considerably more complex and time consuming - especially on large PhotoMap surveys involving hundreds of thousands of photos. NearMap uses full self-calibration to obtain the high precision we require. We developed our own bundle adjustment technology from the ground up, and draw on the multi-resolution capabilities of the HyperPod aerial camera system to make this possible.

As mentioned above, NearMap currently achieves 50cm RMS even in adverse conditions, without requiring any form of ground control data. Precision is important to ensure PhotoMaps align when swapping between dates in TimeView and for our future 3D capabilities. We expect to continue to improve precision, beyond the 20cm or so RMS that is normally achieved with ground control data, as our models show a theoretical capability of 7cm RMS accuracy should be possible from our HyperPods, without ground control points.

Going back to the cameras you use to capture the images – is it these or the way that the site is developed that you think is the key factor to NearMap's success in the future?

Right now, our technology gives us an edge.  But it would be foolish to assume that any company will keep a unique technology edge, especially given the value that online maps offer to media companies.

Over time, you will see many more capabilities being added to our web portal, which will give people a clearer idea of where we are heading.  Right now I'd say people are only seeing 10% or so of our planned portal capabilities.

NearMap's imagery is impressively clear – have you had any Google Street View type complaints from people accidentally photographed in compromising positions? Do you have any way of screening this sort of thing or is it just luck? Is there anything unusual you want that's been reported that you want to let us in on?

Aerial photos are a bit different to Street View.  For a start, the resolution is lower, and secondly aerial images have been around for over 50 years.  So there is a well established understanding of the capabilities and restrictions related to our types of PhotoMaps.
We have worked hard to ensure we address privacy concerns.  We could easily produce higher resolution PhotoMaps, but one reason we don't at present to get a feel for people's comfort level for privacy versus convenience of online maps.

You've obviously had A LOT of experience at the point where technology and cartography converge – do you have any thoughts on what you think the future might hold and what you hope the future holds – without giving away any of your ideas of course!

In one word:  3D

The NearMap technology (cameras, processing, etc) was all designed with the ability to extract true 3D information from the raw photos.  This opens up a whole slew of exiting applications and opportunities.

Stepping back from NearMap and looking at the global changes, I see two very interesting trends.

The first is community involvement.   You may recall that in the early years Wikipedia was sneered at by "professional" encyclopedia users and creators.  Yet this very rapidly turned into respect, and today Wikipedia is widely appreciated, notwithstanding the challenges it has during its ongoing evolution.

So Wikipedia, Facebook, photo sharing web sites, blogs, and now OpenStreetMap all are hints at an ever increasing community involvement, creation and management of knowledge.   The fascinating thing is how quickly they become major parts of people's lives.  Cynics might suggest that communities creating knowledge are simply doing what governments should be doing in the first place. Yet this understates the importance of these changes.   Because this knowledge is created by and for communities, it leads future changes rather than follows.  Another differentiator is that governments often restrict access to knowledge, by charging draconian pricing or licencing regimes that inhibit or even discourage wide spread use.

Once knowledge settles more firmly in the hands of the community, a natural progression is it becomes the source for policy and decision making, and communities by extension will play a more active part in setting these policies.

The second trend is the impact media companies are having in the spatial market.   Historically governments created spatial information for their own needs, and generally begrudgingly or not all distributed the knowledge to wider circles of users.
Media companies, on the other hand, want to give something of value to people, to encourage those people to use their services, thereby opening up revenue opportunities for advertising.

There are many examples of media companies giving value away for free (or mostly free) to obtain a presence which can be used for advertising. Examples include newspapers giving away interesting articles on news, search engine companies offering free search capabilities, directory services, and now of course location based map services.

The sheer value of media markets can be startling to people outside the media world.  For example, in Australia alone (with just 21 million people), the media market will be $30 billion this year.  As this newspaper article notes, the internet media market in Australia is expected in 2014 to overtake free-to-air TV and newspapers to become Australia's biggest advertising medium at $3.8 billion.

The value of these sorts of markets means that media companies can afford to pour tremendous efforts into media applications, with online maps being a notable area that new media companies are busy expanding.

I'm please that NearMap is playing a part in this very exciting process. It will be fun to see how online maps change and grow over coming years.

Thanks so much for answering our questions about NearMap - it's certainly a site that the Nestoria team was very happy to find out about andish you every success with it.

Nestoria Interview: Stuart Nixon from NearMap (Part 1)

The Nestoria Australia blog has been trying to get Stuart Nixon from NearMap to give us an interview since we launched, but the timing coincided with a push in their own product so we've had to wait patiently... until now... but he's given us a lot to think about, so his interview is broken up into two lunch-break sized installments. 

It's a great pleasure to introduce Stuart to introduce himself: 

Since founding NearMap in 2006 and ER Mapper in 1989, Stuart Nixon has been at the forefront of global geospatial imagery media developments.  Stuart is the inventor of the industry standard ECW image format that is used by millions worldwide, architect of the ER Mapper application and the Image Web Server technology that pioneered serving image maps over the web. He also invented the HyperPod aerial camera system and HyperVision supercomputer processing technologies that made NearMap possible. 

Stuart is an Honorary Fellow of the Spatial Sciences Institute of Australia, a recipient of the Grahame Sands award for innovation in applied geophysics, and a founding member of Australia's Spatial Information Steering Group. When he has the time, Stuart has been a sought after keynote speaker at geospatial conferences worldwide.

After spending much of his life living all over the world, Stuart counted up the visas in his passport and realized that having been around the world over 50 times, it was time to move back to Australia.  He founded NearMap in 2006 and sold the company to ipernica, an Australian public company, in 2008.

NearMap looks familiar and is familiar to use, can you talk about the unique features in its look and functionality and why you made these choices, and the differences between NearMap and other online mapping sites like Google or Bing?

The most visible difference right now (without giving away too much about our future direction) is that NearMap is all about seeing what is there now, not what was there a year or two ago.

As Nestoria is involved in real estate, I'll use buying a house as an example:   Suppose you have retired, and want to buy your dream home by the river.   If you use this competitor's map, you see a rather blurry image of a nice house right by the river.  However NearMap shows a new freeway built right next to the house. You can also zoom in further to see more detail with NearMap, as our standard PhotoMaps are 7.5cm resolution, and so are more detailed.

This currency changes the way we think about online maps, as you can go to our PhotoMaps and see a current view.  You can imagine the value this has to online applications where current maps are important, such as real estate.

So how did you manage this?

Despite the confusing names given to imagery maps by different companies, publicly available high resolution imagery maps available online come from aerial camera systems.  Commercial satellites are limited to 30cm to 50cm resolution, where as most cities are mapped at 10cm to 15cm by online map companies (NearMap maps are 7.5cm).  So when you look at maps online, the lower resolution (continental scale) imagery is from satellites, and the higher resolution (city scale) imagery is from aerial camera systems.

Confusingly, Google calls all imagery maps "satellite" regardless of if they are low resolution satellite or high resolution aerial maps, and Microsoft Bing does the reverse, calling all maps "aerial".   NearMap calls imagery maps "PhotoMaps".
The ability to create very high resolution PhotoMaps very quickly is one thing that separates NearMap from other online map companies.   To do this, we needed to invent a range of new technologies, because what we now do on a regular basis was considered impossible just a few years ago.

The first challenge was inventing a new aerial camera system.  We needed something that could fly anywhere in the world, operates at much higher altitudes than normal for high resolution photo map capture (to increase capture speeds and reduce Air Traffic Control work loads), while being very accurate and very high resolution.   Today, a high-end DSLR professional camera is about 28 megapixels or so.   Current aerial camera systems are even higher resolution, typically 200 to 300 megapixels.  Yet we needed to create a 15 gigapixel aerial camera system - quite a challenge.  I ended up inventing a new virtual camera system; your readers can read the details on the US patent web site if they are interested.

This reduced our cost of capturing cities, making it possible to capture cities every month for less cost than it costs most companies to capture cities every year or two.

The next problem was processing.  It often used to take 6 to 9 months just to process photos for a large survey into a seamless PhotoMap.  This is a complex process involving computing the exact position and distortions for each photo, generating high resolution terrain, ortho rectifying images and a bunch of other frankly pretty complex challenges.  I developed a new system called HyperVision, which is a supercomputer based solution which can crunch through an entire PhotoMap for a complete city within a day or so.

The last bit of the puzzle was building our own web storage and serving clusters, which had to be fast, robust and distributed across multiple data centers to handle our growth across Australia and beyond.

So while we are not resting on existing achievements, I'm quite proud of what our amazing team of people have put together.

One of the features I picked out to play with was the slider across the top of the page that allows you to look back in time over past images. How difficult is it to get hold of these older satellite images and what kind of uses do you see this tool having – other than it just being a very cool thing to mess around with. Or is it a function that you see becoming increasingly useful as your own portfolio of images gradually builds up?

NearMap covers 75% of Australia's population on a regular basis and 60% of Australia's population monthly (weather and Air Traffic Control permitting).

That has never been achieved by any company before - indeed, Perth is now the most regularly photographed city in the history of humanity.

What is really neat is using our TimeView to flick through PhotoMaps month by month, to see change over time. As you note, TimeView works for our historical satellite imagery for the world (so for example you can see snow cover shrink and grow through the seasons), as well as for our own detailed PhotoMaps over cities from our HyperPod camera systems.

You can expect to see the concept of TImeView expand into other types of information - we see this as a central point of value to people.

Speaking of which how important do you think that it is that you're updating the maps monthly?

Regular updates are critically important.  I'd ultimately like to update cities every week.

It is hard to appreciate just how important this regular monthly update is until you use it.  It is a bit like the difference between reading a year-old newspaper compared to one published this week.

Nice comparison, Stuart.  Now it's time for readers to go off an play with NearMap for a bit, if you haven't already, but come back Monday and hear what Stuart has to say about NearMaps' friendly relationship with Open Street Map and what kind of maps he thinks we'll be looking at in the future.

All work makes for a dull property search engine...

Just because many of the Nestoria team would be happy to consider themselves a bit nerdy doesn't mean that we don't like fun.  Which is why, every now and then we rise, en mass, from the basement where we work (which is actually very nice), and come out into the fresh air to work together in a slightly different way.

Last year, as a nod to the seriousness of the financial times, the team went native, or the British equivalent there of, and did some survival training.  This year the challenge was a map based one.  A sort of information scavenger hunt if you will.  Which sounds a lot like the work some of us do on a day to day basis... 

The hunting ground was the area around Clerkenwell, and the quarry was all sorts of random sights and the facts and figures that go with them – all hidden from us with cryptic clues, as well as being difficult to spot.  Ed. noted on the UK blog that his team opted to magnanimously come last so that no one else would have to, which they're terming a 'morale-building last'  – this is until he's satisfied with the findings of the recount.  The team that I was involved in also didn't come first – despite several very competitive team members.  This was because we're so brilliant that we skipped a large section of clues which we thought were red herrings and reached the finish line long before anyone else.  Unfortunately this is apparently like correctly answering questions in a maths exam but failing to show any working... 

So, like Ed. I also have to congratulate the team who did win.  Congratulations.

After all the hunting it was nice to have a drink and a meal and then another drink etc.  The 'hunt' gave us all a lot to talk about.  It turns out that my team wasn't the only one with competitive team members, but with tasks like: 'photograph as many of your team in a phone box as you can', there wasn't space to do anything else but have some laughs.

Thanks to Nomsa, 'Voice of the German blog' for organising.

Nestoria Interview Kim Heras

When is a start-up no longer a start-up?  And just because we have older Nestorian siblings does that mean that Nestoria Australia is only a start-up if Nestoria as a whole is?  These are some of the questions that keep some of the team awake at night.  In order to think more usefully about the differences in starting up in Australia vs. other countries it seemed logical to tap into the thoughts of someone who knows more about the Australian specific internet industry. 

Kim Heras (right), Editor of The Next Web in Australia, a publication which keeps a close eye on technology as it pertains to Australia, and Founder of OneEyeDeer, a site that encourages people to share their expertise and thoughts to make things better, seemed like an excellent person to speak with.  Luckily he's answered our questions, so hopefully we'll be able to ponder more productively in the wee hours. 

You're the Editor of The Next Web Australia - what do you think are the uniquely Australian issues relating to technology and the internet?

There are a few key issues in Australia - the dispersed nature of our population and how to service that has often kept us struggling in terms of access to high speed Internet access - though the NBN looks likely to fix that. A Government that doesn't really understand the inherent nature of the Internet as a tool for creating huge disruption across many industries and of course a Government that seems hell bent on trying to provide limits on what can be accessed on the Internet.

From a more general technology point of view, the real problem is that while Australia has excellent technical resources, we tend to be home for sales and marketing arms of international organisations only. As such, there's a mismatch between the type of people we want to produce and the types of opportunities we can give them.

From a tech startup perspective there are too many issues to name but the key thing is that there is a growing community which is banding together to overcome those difficulties and, in many cases, the lack of an ideal environment for tech startups is actually making our tech entrepreneurs more innovative and more resilient than in many other places around the world.
 
Do you think Australia is ahead taking up some facets and behind on others?

Yes. 

Do you think it's good or bad that we share a common language with the UK and UK?

It's good we speak English, not because it's the language of the UK and the US but because it has become the de facto international language of commerce. Australian's don't realise how fortunate we are that we grow up speaking a language that people from all over the world feel that they need to learn in order to compete globally.

Do you think you can do really interesting web work in Australia?

Yes you can do interesting web work here. You can do it anywhere, that's the beauty of the web as a distribution channel. That having been said, to increase your chance of success it often helps to be closer to the opportunities. As much as we have learnt to communicate digitally, nothing can replace face to face interaction. The UK is probably attractive to many Australians because of agreements between our Governments allowing Australians to go over there for extended periods of time and, most importantly, to work. Also, culturally, there are such similarities between the countries it makes the move easy. When you combine those things, i.e. access to a bigger market without too much social risk in moving, it makes sense that Australians would go to London. That having been said, I highly doubt moving to London is a lifestyle choice, especially coming from Australia ;)
 
Do you think Australians respond better to home grown start-ups or do you think there's no difference?

No, Australians respond better to foreign startups. It's not just a startup thing, it's a cultural thing we need to overcome.

How do we rank, in your eyes, against the rest of the world for technological forward thinking?  

For those in the business I think Australians are viewed as being good technically - a good R&D centre but not a country that is effective at commercializing or implementing new technologies. More generally though, I don't think our reputation is that good. I used to teach International Marketing at  University and it was always interesting to hear the Chinese student's thoughts on Australia... a place to get wheat and coal and not much else. I suspect that's how much of the world sees us too. Looking at OneEyeDeer it's clear that you're interested in innovative ideas - do you have any favourite apps. or sites that do something new?  Or do you have any technological ideas that that we don't quite have the technological infrastructure for yet?  (I know this is your bread and butter so feel free to be as blue sky as you like.)

I'm a big fan of the semantic web. I think it's drifted out of our attention a little because of the rise of the Mobile App and Geo-location services as much sexier paradigms. For me, sites like We Are Hunted and Tripit are impressive because they show where we're going to be heading with the semantic web in years to come.

Thanks very much for that food for thought, Kim.

Bonjour Nestoria France!

Nestoria Australia is no longer everyone's little sibling, as this week Nestoria France has gone live! 

So now the French can search for properties using Nestoria's interface, as can anyone who wants to move to France.  Nestoria.fr works in the same way as the other Nestorias, so if you want to see how the French live pop on over to the site. 

If you're not sure where to look, François, who'll be writing the Nestoria.fr blog, has some suggestions: "Paris is a nice city, but to live, English people like Dordogne, I like Brittany, with Nantes and Rennes at the top. Obviously the South East: Nice and la Provence are really nice..."

This property in the Dordogne works out to be only AU$2,304,812.96

As you may have guessed the Nestoria team is pretty competitive, so I've set up a poll asking people if they'd rather live in London or in Paris... So far London is apparently more popular.

But it could just be that I didn't ask the question in French and the French contingent refuses to respond to a question directed to them in English.  Please lend your support either way.  Your city of choice needs you...