Nestoria Interview: Iain Dooley, Working Software

Ed Freyfogle, one of Nestoria's fair founders, recently shared a link to a blog post entitled:  “How we didn't launch in 482 days”.  Most startup posts – not that that's what this is, it's just what I assumed before I'd read it - rave about how they put everything together in a weekend etc.  But this post was about the slow and steady attitude to growing and developing your internet business, and how a tempered pace can actually be seen as a good thing.  This lesson is relevant to a lotta folks, so it seemed appropriate to delve further into the story of the poster and find out more about how he came to these conclusions. 

His name is Iain Dooley.  He founded Working Software instead of writing a thesis for his Mechatronic Engineering/ Japanese course at the University of Sydney, and now lives on the central coast of NSW with his partner and 1 year old daughter. 

Here's more about what he does:

How would you describe your company and the work you do?  Do you consider yourselves a 'startup'?

Startup is a weird word. I would never describe Working Software as a startup for the same reason as I would never describe myself as an entrepreneur: they're both annoying buzzwords that have been co-opted to mean a whole bunch of different things most of which seem to be distractions from the type of work required to create a successful business.

Working Software is a small business that has traditionally focused on providing a range of IT services primarily in the area of web based application development in PHP that has varied in size from 1 to 5 employees (there are currently 2 members of the team other than myself). We are working to build passive revenue streams through the development of web based software, most notably Decal and 8Centsms.

What are some of the major projects you've worked on?

The biggest single project we've externally consulted on was an SMS communications platform for radio stations (Melbourne readers who listen to SEN 1116 may know it as the "SMS machine") of which 8centSMS is a spin-off project. More recently, Decal CMS is the longest running, most complex project we've worked on.

Before those I worked freelance on a range of small to medium website projects and a bespoke document management system for an international student residence organisation.

Which of these do you consider to be the main 'prong' of your business?

There are 3 reasonably distinct "strategic business units" right now: Decal CMS is where all our "web consulting" work goes. We're really trying to get back to our roots with that, focusing on being able to deploy reasonably priced, professionally designed websites for fixed prices using our own product. The reason we're doing that rather than, say, flipping Wordpress sites for a few hundred bucks each is that, along the way Decal CMS matures and we're using that process to (partially) fund the development of Decal into a product that will be available as a DIY hosted content management system suitable for a range of skill levels from the non-technical small business owner/blogger that wants to setup a website themselves, to design and marketing agencies with in-house dev teams. We also have plans for building a marketplace for people to build and sell plugins, or "Accessories" as we're planning on calling them (since Apple recently sued Amazon for the use of the word "App Store"!). Ask me again in 5 years if that worked or not ;)

8centSMS is a launching point for any "communications" based work - mostly promotions/campaigns work including premium SMS and web competition entry. 8centsms.com, as well as being a web SMS gateway for personal use, is like the public face of what is essentially a stream of consulting work focused on marketing, promotions or communications. There are a few products emerging from that work which are built on the 8centsms.com platform such as an email marketing tool which allows you to create pages in Decal and send them out from 8centsms.com although we haven't really launched anything yet. It'll probably be another year at least until we have a product ready for general consumption but a couple of our clients have already started using early prototypes.

Then there's the straight up and down, by the hour, consulting work which goes a fair way to paying for the costs of developing Decal. This is your basic guns for hire type scenario where we can provide development services in a range of languages, onsite technical support, hosting, system administration, all that jazz.

We're actually in the process now of incorporating a couple of different companies to provide equity to the various team members involved and formalise this structure a bit more (up until now Working Software has just been a Sole Trader operation with employees and contractors).

How long have you been working on this project?  And what have you learned about the process of creating and developing a product during the process?

Haha, sorry my previous answer didn't lead particularly well into this question. I guess the "main prong" from a product perspective at this stage would definitely have to be Decal so I'll discuss that.

Decal technically dates back to 2006 but it's really only since November 2009 that we've been focused on it. I'd say there are two primary things I've learned.

The first is: relax, the market is huge. Of course this doesn't hold true for all markets, but just think about it for a second: if I told you I want to build a company that does hosted content management systems, wouldn't you say something like "you're an idiot. That marketplace is utterly packed and there are so many free solutions that you can't possibly compete". (I wouldn't say idiot...)

Well, there sure are a lot of competing products, but at the same time the market is just immeasurably large, and we need such a small portion of that market in order to be profitable that I'd say that the chances of being a sustainable business are significantly increased.

Not only is the market huge and growing, but people change all the time. They get sick of what they're using for one reason or another, they go looking for something else, they find you, you do your best to retain them as a customer for as long as you can. So what this really means is that all the stress and pressure you place on yourself to launch immediately for fear of "missing the boat" is bullshit. No-one cares that we didn't launch Decal last year. No-one cares that we're only launching a subset of what we consider to be the eventual goal of Decal.

I think this is a phenomenon that is greatly intensified in the web development sector. As others launch competing products and stories fly past you on a daily basis about which companies have received $X,000,000 in funding it seems as though you could never possibly keep up, but "launch day" is just the first day of the rest of your business.

The way I've started thinking about it is this: if we had managed to successfully launch last year, wouldn't I still hope to be in business at this point? Then, if we had launched last year, wouldn't I expect that some new competitors would have emerged by now? And wouldn't I be concerned about the threat from those new competitors and therefore be driven to innovate to retain my market share, however meagre that market share may be? The answer to all of those questions is yes, so it just seems so silly to me now that I was really hung up and stressed out about launching "on time" when there was no real deadline. Of course you need to release a product as quickly as you can but deciding how and when to launch probably shouldn't be driven by your fear of missing the boat in an ever changing market place.  Basically, first mover advantage is nonsense.

That leads me on to the second point: releasing software. Your software needs users. Software without users is a theoretical exercise. Decal is probably different from a lot of other "web startup" ideas where it looks like people were sitting around throwing darts at a wall full of buzzwords to come up with something they can put online and see what happens. Decal has been developed at every stage for Working Software clients, so we've always had users for it and the features have been largely driven by that, and by our own needs as web developers.

I think this is a great way to build software (and I'm not the only one *cough* 37 signals *cough*) - to scratch your own itches. Decal has two groups of users: the end users that manage the content, and the people who deploy the websites (developers/designers). Because we were running out of time and money, our focus now is on releasing a product purely for the "end users". It's not our ideal product, but releasing SOMETHING that we can sell and that will be useful to people (we hope!) is more important than holding onto it until we're sure it's perfect and it does everything we want it to.

So whilst I'm certainly not in the camp that can proudly proclaim to have "launched a startup" in his spare time over the weekend using the latest trendy web application framework, I've always been very focused on figuring out how we can pare back our expectations of the product to get something into the hands of the public. It doesn't have to be perfect, but it should be robust and reliable and I believe that so long as it shows a promising trajectory, people will start to take notice and come along on the journey with us towards the product we eventually hope to build.

What are some of the main hurdles/ challenges you've been faced with?

Well, Decal is a really challenging project because we're solving a problem in a unique way that involves a lot of R&D. That type of work is so unpredictable that the traditional notion of estimating time or having deadlines becomes sort of irrelevant. I guess you could say the biggest challenge has been trying to build a product and make money in the face of such uncertainty. If you imagine that the entire process is like a fruit tree always growing and developing. You have to cultivate the tree, but every now and then you have to hunt down some
fruit, pick it off and say "alright, we can sell that, put it on the truck". You have to learn to recognise those bits of fruit that you think you'll be able to sell in order to continue cultivating the tree.  (Nice analogy.)

Do you think your location in Australia has made any difference in the development process?  Apart from being able to work in your backyard...

The Working Software Team in 2010

Haha well actually I think there are two main advantages to being in Australia: one is that we have an excellent social security system. It seems counter intuitive but I think that "socialism" in that respect is fantastic for fostering business innovation. A lot of innovation happens in very small businesses and I've heard it said before that small business plays an ever increasingly important role in the Australian economy (no doubt eclipsed by mining though ...)

If I were living in the United States, for example, then health care would be connected to my job. I'd be far less inclined to take risks, especially given the birth of my first child and having to support a family. Since we're guaranteed a basic level of healthcare and, if worse comes to worse, housing and unemployment benefits, the risk factors are dramatically mitigated and I feel secure in being able to try and build a business which might in turn provide employment for many people for years to come. So that investment in people and society is, I think, a very important part of Australian culture and something we should consider sacred.

The other advantage is in having a very understanding and lenient tax department. I've been very cash strapped for the past year or so and the ATO have been fantastic in letting me pay things off via special arrangements (although I think this may have been leniency to keep things running during the rebound from the GFC, needless to say I'm not taking it for granted :)

Some of the drawbacks include a drastically tighter market for early stage venture capital funding (although that may be a blessing in disguise!), a much smaller market of early adopters compared with the U.S and fewer options for accepting online payments.

Do you use anything, or contribute anything to, the Open Source community?

I run everything on open source software (FreeBSD and CentOS operating systems, MySQL database, PHP) and a few years ago I attempted to take the web development world by storm with my revolutionary PHP framework RocketSled which was launched to the sound of crickets chirping and never heard from again. To be fair I didn't really keep up much of a release cycle. We still use RocketSled in production now but I'm not planning another release.

Since then I've been kind of preoccupied but there are a few little bits and bobs coming out of the work that we're currently doing that might be suitable for open source projects so when we get the chance we'll publish those.

I was involved in the inaugural Google Summer of Code and released a piece of software I called Koto which was a rapid application development tool that bound a Ruby interpreter to the QT framework. I could never work out how to use autotools though so the install process was pretty prohibitive. To my knowledge one other person apart from my project supervisor installed it - a German guy who blogged about it with the title "That's real RAD!". Unfortunately I can no longer find that blog anywhere :)

 Do you think the best developers are 'sharers and collaborators' or lone wolves?

I don't think you can judge how good a developer is by either of those characteristics. Well ... I should add that I don't really care for the term "good developer" because "good" there is pretty ambiguous. As a small business owner I'm interested in developers that make my business money. More than any other skill a developer may possess, communication is the most crucial. The ability to read, write and understand, research and learn independently are the most valuable skills.

That being said there is always value in peer review and "coding outside the vacuum", so to speak, but I wouldn't, for example, not consider hiring someone because they didn't have an active github account displaying all their various open source achievements.

When I hire, the two most prominent things on the job ad are that I need someone with impeccable English skills, and someone who knows their way around a Unix command line. If you find someone who knows Unix you can be sure they're an independent learner and good at reading instructions so that's a very good start!

What keeps you inspired?

Building things is pretty fun. When you actually see something start to come together it's exciting. The part up until that point can be mentally devastating. I think I agree with my 2nd year Mechatronics Professor Steve Scheding who said "I hate coding, but I love having coded". I hate building products, but I love having built them.

Money is also a particularly strong motivator for me. I want to build a profitable business but preferably do it with a product or service that I'm proud of.

And what products/ apps. or ideas do you love and wish you'd come up with yourself?

To be honest almost everything I see I have come up with in some form, and I don't think that's particularly unique. Web developers all have a backlog of about a billion ideas that they'd like to build some day.  As for things I didn't think of before I saw them, like Twitter for example, it's hard to be envious. I mean, it would be sort of like getting jealous of someone who won the lottery. It's so improbable that you'd stumble across something so simple that would turn into a global phenomenon that it's just not even worth bothering to think about really.

And lastly is there any product, site, or app. that you'd love to see that technology hasn't quite created the possibility for yet?  If so can you tell us about it and what it would do?  (If you're concerned about giving away great ideas, then feel free to say something quite far out.)

One idea I had a couple of years back was to setup Premium billing (similar to SMS) based on IP address for selling online mobile content. This would require mobile operators to provide an API that allowed me, as the content provider, to map an IP address back to a mobile account and then send them a billed message. Apparently Indian mobile operators pass the user's mobile number in the web request headers so maybe someone could launch that service over there.

If no-one's done it by the time Decal and 8centsms.com either succeed or peter out into oblivion maybe I'll give it a shot :)

Nestoria Interview: Stephanie Ayanian, Geospatial Revolutionary

If you want to bring a message to the masses what do you think might be the best way to do it?  Probably in cinematic format, right?  Either for web, TV or the big screen. 

So if you think it's important that people should consider how digital mapping technology is changing the way we think and do things, then a series of short films covering the ins and outs of the field is a good way to get people thinking.  Or that's the idea the folks behind the Geospatial Revolution Project settled on. 

To learn more about this mission to bring the latest adventures in geospatial space to the masses, the Nestoria AU blog spoke to Stephanie Ayanian, the producer of the Geospatial Revolution film series at Penn State Public Broadcasting. Her background is in feature documentary and fiction film making, so her skill-set is a bit different to our usual interviewees.  But film is a uniting interest for a lot of us, and her last project, Liquid Assets, was awarded the 2009 American Association of Engineering Societies Journalism Award, so she's very good at what she does. 

What is the Geospatial Revolution?
The Geospatial Revolution Project is an integrated public service media and outreach initiative about the world of digital mapping and how it is changing the way we think, behave, and interact. Geospatial technology has been around for years, but we are now in a unique position to share the revolutionary ways that it is impacting all aspects of life, from how we can use it in our personal lives, business, government, etc.

What are some of the key themes and instances dealt with by the project?
Geospatial information influences nearly everything. Seamless layers of satellites, surveillance, and location-based technologies create a worldwide geographic knowledge base vital to solving myriad social and environmental problems in the interconnected global community. We count on these technologies to:

• monitor climate change
• map populations across continents, countries, and communities
• track disease
• strengthen bonds between cultures
• assist police departments in protecting safety
• enable democracy   
• navigate our personal lives

This is the first episode:

Why was it created?

The mission of the Geospatial Revolution Project is to expand public knowledge about the history, applications, related privacy and legal issues, and the potential future of location-based technologies. We created it as a public media initiative at Penn State with input from faculty members at the university.
And what are its aims, and what practical reverberations are you hoping the project will have?
We want the series to be screened in the classroom, in the board room, in the living room. We want people across the globe to understand how these technologies are impacting their lives and how they can become a part of the revolution.

What have you personally learned while being part of the project?
I have learned that geospatial technology is really behind many of the technologies that I interact with on a daily basis. If it weren't for location-based technologies, we wouldn't know where we're going or where we've been. There is an overwhelming amount of data and information available, and it takes many people and a lot of money to keep this technology at the cutting edge.

Third episode:

What are some of the interesting things you see happening at the convergence point of mapping and web technology?  
One of the exciting stories from the series focuses on the convergence of mapping and web technology. Geospatial Revolution Episode One, Why We Need It, focuses on crisis mapping and global response during the earthquake in Haiti. We are also seeing a lot of interactive mapping on the web to explain the earthquake in Japan.

And what are some of the large scale implementations you foresee that might have a big impact on our future?
We don’t believe we can speculate on this.

And what about when you add social to the mix?  Is that something that you're including in your examination of our relationship with space and maps?
Social networking is briefly discussed in the series, as it is a way that many people are experiencing the technology.

And what are some of your views on what sort of innovations might happen in the future of the geospatial space?
We don’t believe we can speculate on this.

++++
I’m Elaine Brzycki, project manager and funding executive for the Geospatial Revolution Project, and I just wanted to add a couple of comments to Stephanie’s responses.  Since the first episode was released, the Geospatial Revolution videos have been viewed in more than 170 countries worldwide.  Geospatial organizations, educational institutions, and governmental agencies are using the videos for training and workforce development. 

The Project also provides free learning materials for K-12 teachers to use in the classroom as well as in informal learning environments.  This summer, we will be creating a box set with all the videos and the learning materials.  Schools may want to purchase the box set to include in their libraries. 

It may be of interest to know that The National Geographic Society, one of our outreach collaborators, will be posting the videos to its new, updated Education Programs website within the next month or so, to help reach teachers worldwide.

Fans can follow the project on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/geospatialrev and Twitter @geospatialrev.

Nestoria Interview: Susan Wareham McGrath

Lots of people who don't live in Australia think they might like to.  Which is reflected in the fact that some of the people who use Nestoria Australia aren't searching for Australian properties from an Australian IP address.  So what sort of added difficulties might non-Australian citizens encounter while house hunting?  This is actually quite a technical question, which it's been put to an expert on your behalf, in our latest Nestoria Australia interview with Susan Wareham McGrath, Registered Migration Agent.

Thanks for sharing your expertise, Susan.

 You spend a lot of you time helping people move to, and settle into, Australia – would you say that this process is becoming easier or harder?

 In one way it's becoming easier as there's more information than ever before on the web, which makes it possible to research Australian properties, costs of living, proximity to local facilities and the immigration process itself without leaving your home country.

 But although there is more information available than ever before, people should be aware that it's very risky to try to arrange your own lease or purchase, especially from overseas.  There are significant legal implications involved in all Australian property transactions, so it's always wise to obtain advice from an Australian qualified legal adviser before signing anything.  On that note, many people are under the impression that purchasing a residential or commercial property in Australia will strengthen an applicant's case to have a visa granted.  This is not true and people should be very wary of anyone who tries to sell them property on that basis.

 What about since Julia Gillard has been the PM?

 The body that sets the requirements for non-residents purchase in Australian property, the Foreign Investment Review Board (FIRB) has not made any major changes to its requirements since Ms Gillard became PM.  Outside that, there have been some natural market fluctuations during that period, caused both by global economic conditions and internal fiscal policy, such as interest rate increases, but nothing that has made it more difficult to move and settle in Australia.

Is finding somewhere to live high up on people's settlement lists?

Yes, it is one of the most significant decisions that immigrants need to make.

What advice do you give people about finding the right place to live?

It can be difficult to find somewhere even when you live in Australia, and this difficulty is greater when you are conducting your property search from overseas.  I suggest they rent a property temporarily to give them time to assess their chosen area before investing their hard-earned money in purchasing a property.  Wherever possible, I also suggest that they do as much online research as they can before deciding on their preferred location.  Some of the things they could consider might be the availability of public transport, schools, places of worship, shopping centres, medical centres and hospitals, as well as the distance they might have to travel to find work, and of course, property costs and the general cost of living in their chosen area – some suburbs are much more expensive than others.
 
Are there any special challenges faced by ex-pat house hunters?

Yes, ex-pats wishing to rent property in Australia sometimes find it difficult to obtain a lease, as they don't have a track record of tenancy in Australia. This situation has become particularly prevalent over the past year or so, due to the tightening of Australia's rental market.
 
And what about buying or building a property? 

Sometimes, for a number of reasons, people have to immigrate before selling their overseas property.  Until the overseas property is sold, so they can access the funds required for a deposit on their Australian property, they're not able to purchase a home in Australia, which is a frustrating situation for them, particularly as they have to negotiate the overseas sale remotely, which can be a challenge in itself.

What's the current situation regarding purchasing an Australian property if you're not a permanent resident?

Through the Foreign Investment Review Board, the Australian Government has imposed certain restrictions on foreigners purchasing property in Australia. They can:

• purchase vacant land, but must commence construction on it within 24 months
• purchase new apartments (i.e. apartments that have never been occupied), where the developer has permission to sell up to 50% to foreigners
• can purchase an existing home in an Integrated Tourism Resort (ITR) such as Hope Island, Sanctuary Cove, Royal Pines; and
• people on any temporary visa that allows a stay in Australia for at least 12 months at the time they acquire the property, can purchase an existing home to live in, but not for investment purposes - if they depart Australia permanently, they must sell the property

In some of the above cases approval from FIRB must be sought. In the second point above, the developer will already have obtained such approval.

How has technology changed the way the immigration process works?

It's made it much easier for potential immigrants to source information, both about their options and the immigration process itself. In terms of the process itself, some of the more significant technology-based changes include online lodgement of applications, online assessment of medical tests for visa applicants and their electronic forwarding to DIAC, the use of Skype and email which not only makes the immigration process more efficient, but also allows immediate communication with clients all round the world regularly, and at little or no cost.

What about social media?

I keep my followers up to date on Twitter, regularly post about immigration matters on Facebook and participate in a number of Australian immigration groups on LinkedIn – social media is yet another way that technology has improved the immigration process.

Susan Wareham McGrath is a MARA-registered Australian immigration agent (MARN 0601990) and Australian jobsearch consultant to immigrants and overseas applicants. She is also a blogger and social commentator, particularly on issues that affect women, immigrants and visa applicants. Susan is based on Queensland’s Gold Coast, but works with clients all over the world, via the internet, Skype and email. 

Nestoria Interview: Simon Elvery, Creator of Websites

The latest interviewee for the NA blog is Simon Elvery.  He's introducing himself, so let's get right into it.

My name is Simon Elvery and I create websites (mostly) as part of the team at Left, Right & Centre, a design studio in Brisbane, Australia, but often just for the hell of it. I've been more or less obsessed with the internet since the mid '90s when I created a startlingly ugly GeoCities 'Homestead' in a neighbourhood I've now forgotten. Times have, thankfully, moved on, and today I'm an advocate and practitioner of modern, standards based web design who is constantly excited about the possibilities. I have a neglected love affair with photography (and I challenge you to find me a web designer who doesn't). I'm much more likely to be awake at 11pm than 7am.

My colleague came across you because of your project 'What do you Suggest', can you talk us through what this is, what it does and why you came up with it?

What Do You Suggest uses the concept of a word tree to allow exploration of the language people employ when using the Google search engine. For any given word or phrase typed into the Google search box, Google provides a list of suggestions about what we might actually be looking for - What Do You Suggest simply uses that data to let us explore the suggestions in a different way. Since it was first launched, I've added the ability to explore the differences in the suggestions Google makes depending on the user's location or language preferences, which for me at least, added a whole new layer of interest.

I came up with the idea after playing with Web Seer, which uses the same data to make comparisons between two search terms. I wanted to build something which used the Google Suggest data in a new way and use it as an excuse to play with some of the newer web technologies.

How much time have you spent playing with this since you built it?  And what are some of the interesting things that you've learned about your fellow humans in the process of using and building it?

I've spent many hours playing with it, and so have many others. Some of the most interesting things were discovered quite early on when I noticed how many people search for phrases like 'how to kiss passionately' – something I'd never thought to Google.

Shortly after it went live I started collecting data on which branches of the suggestion tree people followed, and I now have almost a year's worth of data. Once I've collected the full year I plan to release a spreadsheet of all activity on the site just in case anyone wants to explore it. Stay tuned to my blog if that sounds interesting to you.

It does thanks.
What do you think is going to happen in search in the future?

I think search engines are in a bit of trouble at the moment. Google dominates to such an extent that they're basically running a monopoly; other search engines try to imitate their every innovation and because they're so dominant they're the only target spammers are bothered with. I've felt for a while that Google's results are becoming less and less useful, and I'm not alone. A number of people whose opinions I admire have noted the same decline in Google's utility (well summarised here). Whatever happens in the future of search they're going to have to regain the upper hand in their battle with spammers to avoid irrelevance. At least part of the solution to that problem is social, and Google (at least) knows it.

Your latest personal project is 'All the places I go'.  Can you give us a run down of what that is, what it does and why you decided to embark on it?

Put simply, I'm attempting to record a complete record of my geographic location throughout 2011, and I'm using All The Places I Go to document and analyse the data I gather. I come up with my fair share of strange ideas, and most of them get kicked around in my head for a couple of weeks before being forgotten or abandoned, but for some reason this one stuck.

After a week or so of letting the idea float around in my head and looking for similar projects it wasn't getting any less interesting, and the
possible uses for the data were growing. I tentatively floated the idea with my wife and a few friends and received mostly mild encouragement and bemused looks, so naturally I decided it was worth pursuing. One of the things that hooked me quite early on was the realisation that with a complete set of time/location data, anything with an accurate time attached to it could be put on a map. You might be surprised at the number of micro-events which automatically have timestamps attached to them (every purchase, phone call, text message, email, trip on public transport, tweet...the list goes on).

Have you found it at all challenging to remember to collect this data about yourself?  Are there any situations where you've been tempted to cheat?  And have you learned anything about your habits so far?  I'd be scared I'd find inefficiencies that I'd want to address - but that's me...

I've found it relatively easy to collect the data so far. I started testing collection methods in late November and quickly settled on simply carrying a GPS logger with me at all times. I deliberately started early so I could make collection a habit and reduce the likelihood that I would forget once the project started properly.

I think the biggest surprise in the numbers so far is the distance I travel on an average day. I work within walking distance of my home, so without a long daily commute I was expecting quite a short distance for the daily average, but right now it's sitting at over 30 kilometres (That's down a fair bit since the beginning of February and I expect it to keep falling).  Many people have also been surprised to see how little time I spend at work on an average day - unfortunately, that low figure is easily explained by some annual leave I took in January and it won't last. Regrettably, I don't have the luxury of a 4.5 hour work day (and it's already at over 6 hours if weekends are excluded).

Beyond that, nothing has surprised me to any great extent yet, but I've got a lot of data analysis work still to do.

What are some of the other ways you're thinking you'll be able to use this data?  And do you have any ideas about expanding it onto a larger, grander project or do you like keeping it personal?

Now that I've got more than a month of data to play with, I'm really looking forward to creating the ability to compare different time periods. One of the things I'm doing already is using my travel speed to estimate how much time I spend walking or riding as compared to driving. I'd really like to see my walking/riding time trend upward throughout the year.

I'm also looking forward to incorporating some of the other personal data scattered all around the web.
I won't say the thought of a grander project hasn't crossed my mind, but for now I'm happy just experimenting.

And while we're on topic I have to ask: how personal is your relationship with the web?
How personal do you think it's going to get between individuals and the web?

I suppose you could say I have a very personal relationship with the web in some ways - it certainly knows a lot about me - but the interesting relationships are with people not technologies.  It's fair to say that many people already have very personal online relationships. There are very strong and lasting relationships formed online all the time, and it's only getting easier to find others with similar interests. Add location data to that mix, and it's a good recipe for many and more personal and professional relationships having their genesis online. I love that I can maintain a list of people I'd like to meet and relatively easily create an alert system to let me know when they might be travelling to my city.

A heatmap of Simon's action around his home between the 1st and the 11th of Jan 2011

Have you also been tracking your intake of good coffee and how that may impact on the other factors?  Just a thought...  You might be able to get someone who sells coffee to sponsor you...

Unsurprisingly, I do track my coffee intake (and a few other slightly less obvious metrics about my life) using Nicholas Felton's excellent Daytum.

That's a genius site!  Thanks for pointing that out.
What are some of the interesting things you see happening at the convergence point of mapping and web technology?  And what about when you add social to the mix?  And do you have any views on what sort of innovations could happen in the future of the geospatial space?

Some of the most exciting web/mapping innovations right now are being released by Microsoft. I think these innovations are being overlooked by many due to Google's entrenched dominance in the space. I'm almost always disappointed by how Microsoft seems to wall up their innovations making them less accessible and standards based than many developers would like, but there's no denying they do some incredible things which are well worth checking out.

Any suggestions for real estate specific innovations?  I have to ask...

One of the things I get really excited about is the increasing availability of government data online. There is huge scope for new innovation in this area, but one real estate related piece of work already released is the excellent Planning Alerts (I believe there's also a UK equivalent).

And lastly is there any product, site, or app. that you'd love to see that technology hasn't quite created the possibility for yet?  If so can you tell
us about it and what it would do?  (If you're concerned about giving away great ideas, then feel free to say something quite far into the blue sky.)

I'm looking forward to the day personal high speed mobile internet access is ubiquitous. Imagine the possibilities.

Nestoria Interview: Scott Manley, star gazer and DJ, with an interest in social search

A couple of weeks ago I spent a bit of time, outside of office hours of course, looking at lovely data visualisations.  I found a few that were quite relevant to what we do at Nestoria, but there was also one beautiful visualisation that was more relevant to all of mankind, but less relevant to Nestoria specifically.  It's a visualisation of asteroid discoveries made in the past 30 years, shown chronologically and adding to the spinning heavens. 

Here it is if my explanation isn't clear enough.

Of course after seeing this I wanted to ask Scott Manley, who's the man behind the visualisation, about the whys and hows of his project, so I took the liberty of expanded my remit to interview interesting and Nestoria relevant sorts to interviewing sorts that are interesting and relevant to us as earthlings as well.

Here are my Qs and his As:

I came across you via your beautiful data visualisation of asteroid discoveries over the past 30 years.  Can you tell me how you came to make it?  Both the reasons behind it's creation and how you did it in practical?

The video goes back to my student days in the late 1990's when I was fascinated by asteroids and trying to make a case that there was a potential impact threat which needed to be assessed. Telling people that there are thousands of asteroids regularly crossing the Earth's path is one thing, showing them a picture is much more effective, so I created a site http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/neo_map.html which would update with the locations of all known objects. Back then, we knew of less than 50,000 asteroids, but we were pretty sure that there are perhaps a billion or so substantial objects in the main belt.

Anyway, the site ran mostly automated, with the sysadmin at Armagh maintaining it after I moved to California. Last year I found someone posting a decade old video to youtube and decided that it was time to do better, so I dug up the code. There's actually 2 versions, the old one is written in TCL/TK and uses a canvas widget to build the image and then dumps it as a postscript object, this is nice because it provides high level drawing primitives and the resulting image scales nicely for printed publication, it did however take about half an hour to render an image.

The newer version (dating from 1998) is a lean bit of C code, it doesn't have any graphics library, it has a framebuffer in memory which I dump to disk and then shell out to ImageMagick to convert to a final image. This is much faster, fast enough that I could render hundreds of frames and make a very basic video, but it was a far more primitive system, the drawing essentially consists of setting the pixel at coordinates x-y to colour RGB. Over time I've had a few requests from people for various videos and had to add features to the rendering like lines, motion blur and 3d transforms, however it's always been a process of iteration rather than replacing the whole thing with a 3rd party rendering engine like Open GL, If I can make that leap then it's possible we'll see this kind of thing at speeds approaching realtime.

The actual asteroid data came from Ted Bowell's project at the Lowell Observatory, they compile a file with the most up to date orbital elements of every observed minor planet, this kind of vizualization would be a whole lot harder were it not for this data. One thing that's missing is the discovery date, and this information wasn't conveniently available in one place, instead I identified a couple of sources and wrote a perl script to crawl the sites in question and merge the data into the asteroid database.  For some objects with provisional designations there was no discovery date information readily available and so the script guesses the discovery dates based upon the temporary designation.

Now I had all the data, rendering the movie took a few hours and the first versions of the movie weren't quite right, so I'd tweak the settings and try again until I arrived at the final version which you see on youtube.

What did you personally learn from creating this?

First thing I learned is if you're uploading a video to youtube you probably want to make it private until you're sure it's ready. The first version uploaded had no audio, and ran at 60 fps, I primarily uploaded it to check what youtube would do to the video encoding. I knew that all those tiny dots moving in different directions represented something of a pathologically hard case for most encoding systems and I feared it would be unwatchable after youtube got its hands on it.

Well it was watchable enough that it's just passed 800,000 views, it got popular very quickly and there was no chance to replace it with a polished version. The best I could do was add some audio using youtube's audio swap, and I was really lucky to find 'Emergence' by Trifonic, they were local producers from San Francisco and when I put the sound next to the video it just seemed to go well together. Oddly enough there was a scientific explanation for why the music seemed to work well with the video.

Remember I had to scrape all those sites for discovery dates and make guesses for others? When I ran my first test renders I noticed that the discovery rate seemed very bursty rather than smooth, I hadn't expected this and at first I thought the discovery dates were subject to some sort of bias that was being introduced by my scraping or guessing. I tried fixing this in a number of different ways, but couldn't eliminate it.  It wasn't until after the video had been up a few days that a smart person pointed out that there was a pulsing in the discovery rate that was most likely due to the Lunar cycle. When there's a full moon the moonlight makes it harder to see faint objects, so the discovery rate rises and falls on a monthly basis. The video was running at 1 day per frame, 60 frames per second, which meant that the pulsing in the discovery rates was almost 120bpm (beats per minute), and sure enough the music I'd gravitated to was recorded at 60 bpm, with the piano motif driving along at 120bpm.

It was a rare moment where by astronomical experience aligned with my DJ experience.

Genius!  What a nice moment.
Once I'd seen your asteroid video I started poking around and came across the animations you created of what it might look like if an asteroid came close to us, and hit us.  Is this a sort of public service broadcast, or is animation the natural end result when you start visualising this sort of data?

Well, I'm a big proponent of educating the public about the potential dangers due to celestial hazards, it's more like the reverse was true, the images and videos came about as an educational tool to help people visualize just how busy the solar system actually is.

It's very easy to take simple physics and figure out the energy released in the impact of even a small asteroid is quite staggering, this is simple high school physics - a 2000meter object moving at 20km/sec contains the same energy as 800billion tons of TNT,. The consequences of an impact could end life as we know it on earth, as the dinosaurs discovered 65million years ago. However we are not the dinosaurs, we have awareness of science now, and we can recognize the danger and moreover we have some pretty good ideas on how to avert such an event should we know about it. There have been big impacts throughout Earth's history that have had terrible consequences for the inhabitants of the planet, we're the first species that has come along with the ability to do something about it. But before you go and design your asteroid diverting rocket you have to know where everything is, and truthfully, we'll probably find that there's nothing likely to be a threat in the next hundred years of so, until we look though, we won't know.

I noticed that you're also involved in web search.  Can you let us know what your interests and goals in search are and how you got into this field?

I work at Topsy.com, we're providing a realtime search engine which indexes data from the social web, because we're aware of the social networks we factor in the influence and expertise of the participants when ranking  content.
Personally I'm forever fascinated with the data that is being shared and how the sharing dynamic can inform us about the quality and relevance of web content that's being discussed.

Thanks very much to Scott for enlightening me - hopefully, Nestorialings, you'll feel the same way I do and are glad I veered slightly off topic.

Nestoria Interview with Amanda Graham from Seniors Housing Online

Seniors Housing Online joined us as a partner soon after we launched but never got a formal introduction on the blog.  While rectifying that it seemed like a good opportunity to talk to owner, Amanda Graham about the specifics of working in real estate in their target market, and the changes Australia's ageing population might have on the industry at large. 

I asked Amanda to begin by giving us an understanding of her own background and the background of the company.  Here's what she had to say to us.

I trained as a lawyer initially and at first I worked with juvenile offenders in the children’s court then moved to work in government on law reform and developing social policy, and completed a Master of Business Administration. This took me to working in politics, for a state Premier, several Government Ministers and Sydney’s Lord Mayor as a policy adviser and Chief of Staff.  This work included responsibility for Ageing services, so I was well aware of the challenges for government in caring for an ageing population, especially around accommodation needs.
 
Can you also talk us though where the idea for Seniors Housing Online came from and how the business has developed?
 
The practical side really hit home when I had to search for accommodation for my own father, and I became extremely frustrated at the absence of a website to help with this process.  It seemed such an obvious area to apply the benefits of an internet search! to  Like many people assisting older family members, my (co-founder) sister in law Catherine and myself were busy working full time, had children of our own, and lived over an hours’ drive away from dad – making it all very difficult.  We looked at the real estate websites and asked ourselves “why isn’t retirement property on there, or why hasn’t someone set up one of these for aged care?”
 
It turned out that the aged care and retirement property industry was incredibly fragmented, and as it was not marketed through real estate agents, it was not being captured by the real estate websites.  In addition, at that time the developers/ managers of these properties relied mainly on local newspaper advertisements and most did not have any online presence at all.  But as consumers we found it almost impossible to locate suitable retirement property, especially when we didn’t live in the search area – I was reduced to using the yellow pages, ringing dozens of places during business hours only to be told they were the wrong type of place, they had no vacancies, they were the wrong price range or even (incredible but true!) “could I please ring back on a Thursday morning between 9.30 and 12 noon when the relevant staff member would be there..”  Needless to say there were no photographs available either and I had to waste numerous weekends setting up appointments and driving for hours to inspect totally unsuitable properties before I could even get together a shortlist to show dad.  It’s a sensitive time for an elderly parent and there was no way I was going to upset him by taking him to inspect unsuitable places, sight unseen.
 
Catherine and I knew that many other people must be sharing our experience, and it really didn’t need to be this difficult.  The funny thing was that initially the retirement property and aged care operators all shook their heads and said that the sector was not ready for internet marketing, and anyway old people didn’t use computers so there was no point!  They didn’t seem to think about the people like us who were typically helping their elderly parents, which is who we had in mind when we first set up the website.  And the consumers very quickly proved us right – they loved our site immediately so the biggest challenge early on was persuading the property managers to list with us so we had the content.
 
Interestingly, when the site was first established the majority of visitors were family and friends of older people needing retirement accommodation – but now older people searching online for themselves massively outnumber them and we’ve adapted the business accordingly. Older people have definitely adopted the internet very quickly, with many in their 70’s and 80’s relying on email and joining Facebook, often so they can view their grandchildrens' photos etc. But there’s still a lingering stereotype about older people not using the internet, which really underestimates the huge online potential in targeting this demographic.
 
As you've mentioned above, Seniors Housing is a property portal with a specific market.  Can you  talk a bit about how you've developed your site so that it best suits your demographic?
 
As more older people use the website for themselves, the focus of the business has shifted from higher needs “aged care” accommodation for those in their 60’s and beyond to younger retirees and downsizers in their 50’s looking for larger, more modern “resort style” independent living properties offering a holiday lifestyle near beaches and golf courses. Aged care is now a much smaller part of our market, and the biggest market is the “baby boomer” generation, who have very different expectations and lifestyles to that of their parents. As they hit retirement age, they are now transforming the retirement property market as well as the whole concept of retirement and this is reflected in the range of properties featured on the site and the search functionality.

Parkland Villas - Woodlands

We’ve recently redesigned the site and people can now search for waterfront retirement properties, golf retirement properties, beach-side retirement properties, pet-friendly retirement properties, retirement villages and many more lifestyle preferences like this. The regional search options recognise that people are often prepared to move to a new area to attain the sort of holiday lifestyle they want in retirement, and to release extra cash from the sale of their family home.  They can also filter search results by the level of care available (if needed), price and number of bedrooms.
 
What sort of design and functionality choices have you made that you think are specific to your market?
 
Our market is a niche property market, so we’ve adapted the best real estate website functionality and enabled people to search various types of retirement property categories, including independent living, low care and high level aged care, as well as buy(or entry cost) and rent (or weekly cost).  There is a wider range of legal occupancy arrangements commonly used in the Australian retirement property sector than in the general residential real estate market, and aged care services are often provided under a complex formula based on means testing, so we’ve had to incorporate all this into the search functionality in a way which makes sense to consumers and keeps it simple. And we’ve enabled search filtering for a wide range of lifestyle choices including golf retirement properties etc. as described earlier as well as specific property features like lift access or no steps.  As people in this market are often searching for retirement property outside their local area, the photographs, plans and google maps location for each property are especially important features too.
 
The site is really unique in the capacity it offers for consumers to tailor their own search to meet their specific needs and personal preferences.

Aveo Peregian Springs Country Club
 
Do you think people still feel there's a stigma about retirement living?  Do you think the retirement lifestyle has changed over the past few decades?  And do you think that people are fully aware of the changing nature of
this sort of a lifestyle?
 
There’s a big difference between retirement living and aged care services, and I think people still confuse the two. One is about lifestyle and the other is about healthcare services. Retirement lifestyles in Australia have changed enormously in recent years, reflecting the demands and expectations of the baby boomer generation. People are now looking for luxury, a holiday lifestyle and quality of life when they finish work, or as they gradually exit from the workforce - the whole concept of “retirement” is more transitional and not so clear cut as it once was.
 
Now there’s an acceptance that it’s just a different stage of life, that people live much longer with better health so there’s plenty of time to enjoy life more without the responsibilities of working to pay off the mortgage and support young children.  Just as 40 is the new 30, 50 is the new 40 - Australians aged over 50 now commonly work part time; undertake courses to learn or study; travel more regularly both nationally and internationally; take up sports and focus on keeping fit and healthy.  This generation has more accumulated wealth and disposable income than younger consumers, they are accustomed to the finer things in life and have no intention of downsizing their quality of life in their later years.  They certainly don’t consider themselves to be “old”!
 
In Australia, there is a higher level of home ownership than in many other comparable developed countries and in the past twenty years the residential property market has boomed, delivering high (tax free) capital gains. So selling the family home is a common way to help fund that lifestyle. It’s become very popular to downsize to a villa or apartment in early retirement and release cash as well as reduce the burden of home and garden maintenance. Many younger retirees look for a “lock up and go” property so they can travel regularly, or want space to park their boat or caravan.  And there are many new retirement property developments which cater specifically to this “over 50’s” market and their lifestyle focus.  As people get older, if their health declines they may have the option of buying in-home support services or moving to accommodation offering a higher level of aged care support.
 
Finding a home is always stressful, but it must be an even more stressful decision for older house hunters.  Do you think there are adequate accommodation provisions for Australia's ageing population or do you think the situation will become more competitive?
 
Yes it can be very stressful particularly for the older generation of retirees, who tend to want to stay in their long term family home for as long as possible.  For many it means they struggle with maintaining the home for years and then eventually they are forced to move after a fall, declining health or the death of a partner.  This scenario is very traumatic for all concerned and it is usually the adult children who step in and assist with these decisions.  By this stage high level aged care is more likely to be needed and it may be difficult to find a place.
 
In recent years, increasing demand for aged care services due to an ageing population has seen governments fund more in-home aged care, to enable people to “age in place” and receive more support services in their own home as they become more frail.  This is a more cost effective use of limited public resources and frees up facilities with high level aged care places for those most in need.  It also means younger retirees downsizing to lifestyle properties can access more support if needed without having to move house later on.
 
Retirement villages have been popular in Australia for many years – these are purpose built communities with common facilities, comprising mainly of independent living villas and apartments, but often offering higher levels of care on the same site.  However many of these are older building stock which do not meet the expectations of younger retirees, prompting the recent development of many new villages with larger more luxurious villas and resort style facilities such as swimming pools, bowling greens, gyms and restaurants.
 
There is a mix of not for profit and commercial developments and in the past few years it’s moved from being an extremely fragmented industry following considerable market consolidation, as larger groups buy up independently owned and managed villages.  With consolidation, marketing activity has become more professional and centralised as the larger groups recognise the importance of advertising online and gearing up to cater for the imminent retirement of the baby boomer generation.
 
While there’s adequate housing stock available to cater for the younger retirees looking for lifestyle property, the real challenge lies in funding sufficient high level aged care as demand increases for limited places with an ageing demographic.

Runaway Bay Village
 
Do you think the Australian Government should be more pro-active in this sector?  Or do you think that this is the changing nature of the Australian housing market, and it will become less common for people to leave whole properties to their kids, having instead used the equity in them to help fund their retirement?
 
There’s a major policy debate going on in Australia at present about what provision is made by government to fund aged care services for an ageing population, and how much should be paid for by individuals as a private cost, and how this can be managed equitably. We’ve currently got a system of accommodation bonds in place, which is often based upon the value of the family home, and there are also complex asset tests around the aged pension and government benefit eligibility. There’s broad acknowledgment that demand for aged care services has outstripped the capacity of the existing arrangements to fund the services required but no clear consensus on the best way forward. With a minority government in power only with the support of independent and greens MPs after recent elections, there’s unlikely to be the political will to make the sort of hard decisions needed but which are likely to alienate a significant proportion of the electorate.
 
Australia has had compulsory superannuation in place for some years too, although at present these retirement savings are insufficient to privately fund the level of aged care services needed. Meanwhile more retirees are selling the family home to release capital to fund their retirement, or else using reverse mortgages or shared home equity products to subsidise their retirement lifestyle. So yes, it’s becoming much less common for people to leave whole properties to their kids, and when the baby boomer generation has spent their home equity they’ll still be dependent on government services to support their final years, so the national government needs to take a responsible long term view about how to manage these costs and build consensus around this issue.
 
Not all of your target market have a reputation for being web or techno. savvy, can you think of any technology - be it a website, an app. or a product - that has, or could make this process a lot easier for them?
 
Most people start to need reading glasses in their 40’s, so two things which immediately spring to mind are larger fonts to make things easy to read as eyesight declines, and voice technology to avoid reliance on visuals and keyboards.  Things like small keypads on mobile phones are a particular problem for an older demographic.  Also for frailer older people, emergency call pendants and similar technology has been really important in enabling longer term independence, so updating and integrating these benefits into other products and making them cheaper and more accessible would be fantastic. Even some of the electronic diary applications would be great to manage medications and appointments and probably could be tailored for this market.
 
And if you could invent some kind of site or technology or app. etc. for property, and there were no limitations on its powers, what would you think would be the ultimate property tool/ product?
 
Real estate websites combined with google earth have revolutionised the real estate industry and really empowered consumers.  Anything which enables the consumer to more accurately research and assess a property online is great – eg. if google maps could show a 360 degree view of the property including the surrounding landscape from any angle and bring up the most recent sales prices of neighbouring properties, and of course the ultimate online democracy is to cut out the middle man (or woman) by directly connecting buyers and sellers with full access to relevant information.  Also when buying and selling property the whole legal process of searches and transferring title is very cumbersome and expensive so there must be a technologically better way to do all this online!

Thanks very much for sharing your thoughts with us Amanda.  There are certainly some appealing properties on SHO - the images I added I found searching for sites that are near the beach.  And if there was a way to make the transference of property titles cheaper and easier then you'd be helping out the whole market – so that's a fantastic suggestion...  Any one out there have any suggestions on how it could be achieved?

Nestoria Interview: Zain Memon from TenderMaps

Zain Memon has one of the best personal websites I've ever seen. 

If you can't read it clearly, his one line of text reads: is a 23-year-old coder and entrepreneur from San Francisco, CA. 

Armed with little more than that information – and the knowledge that he was one of the people behind a mapping project called TenderMaps, I decided that he would be worth questioning for the blog.  The two other pieces of information I had about him at that stage were that he was/ is part of Y-Combinator project Movity - which is a site that helps you decide where to live based on the finer details of what the location you're considering is like - and that on LinkedIn his job title is listed as Director of Corporate Espionage at Trulia.  (Trulia purchased Movity, so that may be another small clue.). 

There's also a small photo of him there:

Here's our exchange:

I came across you because of your involvement with a project called TenderMaps, can you give us an introduction to the project and explain your part in it? Thanks.

Places look very different in our minds than in the maps we carry in our pocket. Anyone who has ever scribbled a map on the back of a napkin can attest that places are defined not by their streets and highways, but by the way people move through it. We want to take those napkin maps and combine them to see a map of a neighborhood as defined by the people in it.

So, we hit the streets with the most accessible data collection method we could think of: paper maps and markers. We asked people about their neighborhood -- the Tenderloin in San Francisco -- and their hand-drawn responses are what you see.

I did the back-end work of taking paper maps and converting them into transparent tiles with scribbles on them. Sha Hwang, who did the front-end work, took those scribble tiles and put them on the slippy map.

Can you also explain the technology behind getting the hand drawn maps off the page and into the system?

Our paper maps are printed in grayscale, and the markers are colored. Each of the paper maps has a small QR code with the location coordinates of the map (generated from Stamen's Walking Papers). We scan each paper map into an image and programmatically "lift" the drawings off it, and then place those drawings onto a our web map in the locations we got from the QR code.

Do you think this sort of low tech version of Open Street Map has legs or would it only work for small communities?  I think it's really interesting that it's sort of doing almost the opposite of what projects like Map Kibera are doing in less developed communities.

Imagine how beautiful TenderMaps would look for an entire city. I think the goal is definitely a little different than projects like Map Kibera; rather than focusing on what the cartography looks like, we're trying to think more about how people see it.

Did you ask the 'sharpie jockeys' questions about themselves as well to get at more of the ethnography of the maps?  And if so were there plans to incorporate this into the filters?  'Cause that struck me as one of the most interesting things about this project - that it allowed social and geo to come together in a more personal way.  

Yeah, you can see more information about each sharpie jockey as you drag the slider at the top. Filtering by their self-reported details is actually a really good idea -- for example, see which streets are heavy on those grandmas looking for a deal.

Here's one of the hand drawn maps from the project.

Following on from that question did you have grand ideas about what this project could lead on to?

We've gotten a lot of really interesting feedback on how to tease useful trends out of this data. For example, you could see the paths that most people take home at night, to avoid finding yourself on a dark empty street when walking home from a bar. I also mentioned above that it would be cool to grow this into a hand-drawn map of a large metro area.

Can you talk us though your background in mapping and geo?
What are some of the interesting things you see happening at the convergence point of traditional cartography and the web?  And do you have any views on what sort of innovations could happen in the future of the geospatial space?

Sha has coined the term "NoGIS" to describe the work of mapping technologists like myself who don't have a traditional GIS background (as a nod to the NoSQL movement away from traditional databases). Software like Mapnik and Polymaps have done so much to make it easy for even inexperienced developers to make large GIS applications without the steep learning curve of ArcGIS and CAD software. That's the direction I see our field moving towards: map technology built explicitly for the web, rather than traditional mapping concepts ported to the web.

Did you discover any similar/ or other interesting mapping projects while you were in the process of creating TenderMaps?

I got to try ModestMaps for the first time while creating TenderMaps, and I'm surprised at how versatile it is. I use it pretty much every day now. TileStache is another toolkit that changed the way I approach GIS projects. And of course, none of TenderMaps would be possible without Walking Papers.

I have to ask - your job title on LinkedIn?  What's the story with that?  

If I told you, I'd have to kill you.

(Well, fair's fair.)

And lastly is there any product, site, or app. that you'd love to see that technology hasn't quite created the possibility for yet?  If so can you tell us about it and what it would do?  (If you're concerned about giving away great ideas, then feel free to say something quite far into the blue sky.)

My one wish right now is better SVG/Canvas support in IE. It's coming in IE9, but that still means half of our visitors can't see most of the awesome stuff we're doing for at least a couple of years. I would be positively giddy if someone wrote a tool that somehow transparently added SVG/Canvas support to IE, maybe using a Flash layer or something.

Thanks Zain.  I'm sure you're a mystery man to watch.

Nestoria Interview: Lindsay Warner, 2010 Harcourts Australia Auctioneer of the Year

Last week's mini-dissection of the Australian housing market's penchant for an auction left quite a few of the topic's stones unturned, so the Nestoria Australia Blog has tapped into another expert source to find out a bit more.  That source is Lindsay Warner, 2010's winner of Harcourt's Auctioneer of the Year award.  This is by no means the first time Lindsay has been recognised for being handy with the hammer, in 2005 he won the Golden Gavel, the award reserved for the top auctioneers in Australia.
Thanks for sharing your award-winning expertise, Lindsay.

Auctions seem to be far more popular in Australia than they are in other housing markets, do you have opinions on why this way of selling seems to work so well in Australia?  

There is no doubt auction in Australia is very popular howeve Australia can be broken down into regions or states and auction are more popular in some areas than others.  Auctions are most popular in Qld, NSW, VIC and SA.  These states all have a culture of auction, however there's still a difference: in Victoria I understand approx 60% of properties in the greater Melbourne area are auctioned, whereas in Adelaide this figure is only about 20%.  For the company I work for is rises to about 25 to 30%.  In states such as Tasmania and WA auctions are more unusual.  In WA this appears to be because the legislation does not create a major difference between auction and private treaty and in Tasmania it's currently similar, but is gradually moving towards more of an auction culture.

Where auctions are very popular in the greater city areas, the percentage of auctions decreases as you move into the regional and country areas for “normal” residential properties. However auctions remain the most common and popular method of sale for deceased estates, mortgagee sales and unique properties which may attract a strong amount of interest.
I do not fully understand the legislation for other countries and how the legislation specifically compares between auction and private treaty sale, however in a majority of Australian states, the auction process allows for a cash unconditional contract which is not subject to “cooling off”, finance, building inspection or any other condition which may not be in the best interests of the vendor.

I'm also interested in how you think the trend has developed over the years?  

Over the last 20 years, during which time I've been involved with the industry, the percentage of properties auctioned in the Adelaide metro area has varied from about 10% to about 40%, depending of the Real Estate cycle.  When it's been a buyers market, e.g. 1988 to 2001, the number of auctions has reduced because there is a lot of properties on the market and there is not a lot of upward movement in prices.  During a sellers market, there is high demand, reduced choice and therefore the auction process helps establish new bench mark prices.

New real estate legislation was put into place in most states of Australia in about 2005, to put an end to undisclosed vendor bidding.  This caused some confusion to both agents, buyers and sellers and auction numbers were reduced.  During the last 2 years or so there's been continual education of agents, vendors and purchasers on the auction system and how it works, which has meant another increase in the number of homes going at auction.

Irrespective of the real estate cycle, the auction clearance rate (percentage of homes sold on a cash unconditional basis) on each given weekend remains a thermometer of the market, giving almost immediate feedback of market activity and pricing.

Do you think there are any other differences between Australia's property market and other international markets?

In 2006 I undertook a world tour and looked at the real estate industry on most continents.  From what I saw, it does not matter where you live, the principle of real estate does not change.  People still need somewhere to live and depending where they are in their own life cycle they require a home for shelter either for themselves or their family.  There will always be growing families, downsizing families, deaths, divorces, bankrupts, marriages, work movement, holiday movement etc. which requires some form of accommodation. Geographic location does not alter this requirement.

Do you think that technology has had a big impact on the market?  (My parents just sold their house by auction and their buyer came in from intestate because he'd seen their house on a website.)

There is no doubt that facebook, google, ipad and other technologies are changing the way real estate is marketed.  There are many examples of buyers moving from interstate and overseas to buy properties and generally the first contact they have with the home is via a search on the internet.

I recently sold a property in Phillipps St, Somerton Park to an ex-pat couple living in Darwin, who saw it on the internet, had their brother bid at auction, and ended up buying the home without ever coming to South Australia.  They intend to rent it out and then move into it when they return to South Australia sometime in the future.

Generally purchasers are not going to travel a significant distance to buy a home in a place they are not familiar with.  As noted they are an ex-pat moving home or moving because of work. But, a savvy investor either commercial or residential may be on the move looking for opportunities far and wide.

We also receive a significant amount of enquiry from overseas students studying in Australia who are feeding information back to family in Asia who will invest in real estate here.

As well as conducting auctions yourself you also train other people on how it's done.  Can you give us your top points for future Auctioneers?

To be a successful auctioneer requires a “passion” for the real estate industry because you have to enjoy what you are selling but more than that have an understanding of what vendors and purchasers are thinking during this time.  Most people attending an auction only see the auctioneer at the front of the crowd saying “lets bid”, but as well as requiring knowledge regarding the legal issues surrounding property exchange, there needs to have been a substantial amount of activity and information gathering leading up to the date of auction. 

There has been a series of discussions:-
Discuss with vendors the benefits of auction
Discuss with purchasers the benefits of bidding at Auction
Discuss with vendors the setting of Reserve
Discuss with purchasers how to bid at Auction
Discuss with vendors what happens on the day
Discuss auction day strategy with the auctioneer

An auctioneer has to have a finely tuned 6th sense as to what is emotionally going on behind the scenes with all parties involved plus a solid legal knowledge of Real Estate requirements.

And what's your advice for sellers considering selling by auction?

Always remember that an auction does one of two things:

1.  Sells the property or

2.  Makes it saleable.

Remind vendors or potential vendors that an auction is a process and the property can sell in:

Stage 1     Prior to the auction,

Stage 2     At the auction or

Stage 3     For a market driven price based on the results of Stage 1 or Stage 2.

There is no doubt a vendor (and agent) wants a property to sell on the day for a “record price” however this can lead to an emotional roller coaster for the vendor (and the agent).  Yes it may sell on the day however always remind the vendor it is a process that needs to be conducted thoroughly and professionally.

And what about on the day?  Do emotions often run high?

I cringe when I watch a reality TV shows on Auction.  It highlights the tears and pressure that a vendor may go through, however this normally only happens when not enough time has been spent on education and information.

As agents and auctioneers we are involved with auctions on a regular basis.  Our Vendors Are Not.  This is quite possible the Only Auction they will be involved with In a Lifetime, so ensure you spend the time and educate them What is going to happen and When and Where you need them to be at what time.

The following is an example of an instruction you need to give sellers on the day of auction:

1. Required at the house 10 mins before the opening up for a quick chat

2. Go for a walk in the park or down to the local coffee shop to relax

3. Return to the house 10 mins before the auction for a final briefing

4. Its OK to stay in the house or be in the front yard for the auction but we need to know where you will be. (Do not wander off for a smoke or a chat with the neighbours)

5. If having a meeting before, during or immediately after the auction, we only want the vendors (No family, No best friends, No “well meaning” advisors).

6. If the property sells (No alcohol until the contract is signed and No party poppers).

7. Vendors sign the contract after the purchasers so they need to wait (somewhere else) for at least 15 to 20 minutes after the successful purchasers have entered the home until they get to sign.

8. Ask them if they wish to meet the purchasers (they don’t have to or may not want to)

Do not take anything for granted.  Keep your vendors Informed and Educated to the process and Maintain Control.  You are the professional they have employed to make it work on the day.  Do you job.

What do you see happening to the Australian housing market in the future - I don't just mean will values go up or down, I also mean what sort of changes can you envisage in the way we buy and sell our homes?

Australia has to be considered the lucky country with a generally great climate, many natural resources and multicultural communities that are welcoming to other cultures etc. My biggest fear at the moment is that our real estate is too easy for a “foreign” individual or companies to buy.  There is a growing trend for foreign countries and companies to buy our agricultural land, and this is due to an obvious need to supply product to outside of Australia and Australian interests.  This will present very obvious dangers to selling “the farm”.  Residential properties are also relatively cheap compared to overseas and therefore selling homes to non Australian citizens may increase prices and make it very unaffordable for our fellow Australians.  As much as I disagree with legislation for legislation’s sake, I feel that foreign ownership of real estate in Australia should be strictly controlled.

I also see both state and federal governments treating the taxes associated with real estate sales as a major cash cow.  The stamp duty on a reasonable priced home is substantial, let alone the costs associated with a $million properties.  To have to pay anywhere from $30,000 to $200,000 stamp duty on a residential property appears significantly unfair.

And lastly, if you could invent one piece of technology that would help you do what you do, what would it be?

As previously discussed technology is a significant part of our present and future, considering when I started in Real Estate just 22 years ago, computers, faxes and mobile phones were all but non-existent.  I strongly believe that no matter how much technology you have, the best personal and business relationship you have is based upon the quality of face to face contact.  The best performing practitioners in our professional are also the best at creating long term personal relationships.

However, as I think about one piece of technology that would help me do what I do would be a “hindsight” machine which allowed me to have all the “hindsight” at my fingertips as necessary to overcome all of my personal and professional shortcomings.

I love your idea about a hindsight machine.  I wonder if we ould build a hindsight predicting app. in the mean time?  Thanks again for sharing your thoughts in the Australian property market, Lindsay, and congratulations on your win.

 

Nestoria Interview: Niki Scevak from Homethinking

Niki Scevak is the founder of a real estate website called Homethinking.  But his real estate website does something a little bit different to most of the real estate sites that we're familiar with: instead of helping you find the perfect property, it helps you find the perfect real estate agent or realtor to then help you find the perfect property.   So we're obviously quite interested to find out from him what it's like being involved with the industry from that point of view.  And the best way to find out is always to ask, so we did, and his answers follow. 

Thanks very much for speaking to us, Niki.  To start with can you give us your, undoubtedly, much clearer description of Homethinking and what it's about?

Sure, we aim to help home owners find the right Realtor to sell their home with and we do that by showing the agent's past sales history and customer reviews about the job that they did. We're like a Yellow Pages for Real Estate Agents.

And of the inspiration behind it - how you came to see the gap in the market for it?
The inspiration actually came when reading a book by Michael Lewis called 'Moneyball'. The book is essentially about the manager of a baseball team in Oakland, California who has a small budget relative to teams like the Yankees or Boston Red Sox. To compete he devises a framework of statistical measures to work out who is a good baseball player and who isn't and, for a while earlier this decade, the team punched well above its weight.
So I thought what other industries could this same approach be taken and that lead me to Realtors and real estate, where there is a wealth of data to base decisions on.

And how did you get started with your model, did you get backers, or do free trials with agents for example?
The company raised an angel round of finance but we are now a profitable and growing company. We also tried many different sales methods to reach agents but one very quick lesson is that there are tens of companies all reaching for a Realtor's pocket and all asking for 'just $30 a month'. Instead we try to give as much value away up front to establish our credibility in the Realtor's eyes and then a percentage of those become happy customers who buy and buy again.

Did you always have the same additional features, like the Neighbourhood comparison for example, as part of the site, or are these elements that you've added since the launch in response to users requests or just site development?

The neighborhoods component of the site was an experiment that did not really take off. The premise was that to help people move to new cities it would be useful to know which neighborhoods were most like the ones they were coming from. For instance, that Gramercy Park in New York was like Nob Hill in San Francisco.  Unfortunately, it never really found it's audience but we still leave the app up there.
That's a shame – I think it's a really cool idea and I would have thought people would have been interested in that.  Just goes to show that you never know!

Which section of the site do most users gravitate to?
Our core is helping home owners find a Realtor. We have the neighborhoods and mortgage sections but very much our core Find an Agent section is our most trafficked.

You're based in Sydney but your site looks like it's largely for the US market, can you talk about why you opted to launch there and what's that meant for you since?
I lived in New York for a little over 5 years and then moved to Paris in 2008 to see if I could run a US business not from the US and the business has continued to grow and prosper. And then last year I moved back to Australia where I was born.
Homethinking is completely a US site and a US company, it's just that I am based in Sydney.

One of the more recent ventures that you're linked to is Startmate, which will be more relevant to our technologically minded readers, can you give us a bit of a run down about what it is and why you set it up?
When I moved back to Sydney one of the things I missed the most about New York was the vibrant startup community there. I've met a lot of good people in Sydney and caught up with old friends but it just seems there needs to be a lot more people starting startups. The talent and skills are here it's just the attitudes are slightly different, which is the easiest thing to fix.
So Startmate is a mentor-driven seed fund that helps companies build their business. We provide a small amount of seed funding but the value is in the set of entrepreneurs we have as mentors. The program is similar to y-combinator or Techstars in the US or Seedcamp in Europe.

What are the differences between the Australian start up market and other global markets?  What about launching in Australia - do you see there being any major differences in audience that need to be taken into account?  (I ask this because lots of people think that because we speak English we can just use the UK or US version of any site and that's not always going to be the best option.).
The Australian market is small compared to others around the world so Australian startups think in a more global context from the very beginning. That's slightly different to US startups that enjoy a large local market in which they can prove their business and then expand internationally.

Do you have some favourite Aussie start-ups that you want to recommend to us here?
Two University friends - Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar - started Atlassian, which aims to be to developers what Adobe is to designers. They are by far and away the most successful but the companies the most interest me are probably the most unknown and at the very beginning of their journey. To me, the discovery of a business is what is much more exciting than scaling upon something that already works, and so that's what makes me so excited about Startmate.

And lastly is there any product, site, or app. that you'd love to see that technology hasn't quite created the possibility for yet?  If so can you tell us about it and what it would do?  
One area that absolutely fascinates me is conversion rate optimization, or the process of testing different landing page designs with the eye to measuring the improvements in conversion. At some level it's about technology and measurement but very quickly it becomes about creativity and design and making that process more accountable. So anything to do with that field is always fascinating to me.
Interesting field – it seems like the best design is still part science, part skill and part gut instinct.

Thanks for sharing a little bit about what you do with us, Niki.

Nestoria Interview: Steve Chilton - OpenStreetMap expert/author

This month the Nestoria UK blog spoke to Steve Chilton, co-editor of the recently published book:  "OpenStreetMap - Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World".   Australia's OSM community might not be quite as big as the UK's yet, but I'm hoping that what he had to say may inspire a few more people to get involved.  So here it is re-edited for an Australian audience, but you can read the whole interview on the UK blog.

Steve manages the Educational Development Team within the Centre for Learning and Teaching Enhancement (CLTE) at Middlesex University, and is also one of the University's Teaching Fellows. By training Steve is a cartographer, having originally studied at Oxford Brookes, and is a research cartographer at the University, and Chair of the Society of Cartographers.  Steve has mapped large sections of Enfield/North London for OpenStreetMap, as well as many other places in the UK and abroad in his travels. He is the main designer of the look of (and additions to) the mapnik layer of the default slippy map.  Steve co-edited the English version of this definitive OSM book with Frederik Ramm and Jochen Topf.

Steve, thanks for talking with us (well, the UK blog readers and us by default). On to the questions!
The global OSM community has grown rapidly over the last few years. Nevertheless, newcomers often complain of the high barrier to entry. Does your book attempt to address this?

The book doesn't specifically set out with that in mind. To quote from the jacket blurb "The book explains the community, the data model and the software behind the endeavour. It enables you to use OpenStreetMap's ever growing body of geodata in your own projects." Expanding on this, there are sections within the book that cover how to use the two main map 'renderers' (Mapnik and Osmarender), with simple worked examples that explain everything in a stepwise manner. There is also a chapter that takes you through the basics of mapping practice. Some examples from within the book are also available on the accompanying website http://www.openstreetmap.info/ , where you can also see the full contents, plus a sample chapter - it is actually the 'Mapping practice' one just referred to. It is my hope that people within the project will soon apply their abilities to addressing the perceived high barrier to entry that you mention.

As a long time OSM contributor, what are some of the things that have surprised you the most about the project? What do you see as the biggest challenges ahead?

Well, when I first heard the other Steve C presenting his vision for OpenStreetMap at a Society of Cartographers conference in 2005 I was very sceptical, and thought to myself "well that will never happen". Well it did happen and it is now a big player in a seriously changing geodata landscape. All sorts of things surprise me about the project. Maybe I shouldn't be (knowing my own situation), but I am constantly surprised by the commitment some particular individuals make to the project. The mapping hours that folk put in are just amazing, as are the software development pathways that we have seen - all in people's 'spare' time remember. There have been a couple of supernovas that flared up and then disappeared, but many of the major players have been prominent from quite early days.

There are several challenges as I see it. Obviously there is the one of getting more comprehensive global data coverage. Then there is the maintenance of the existing data. Will the currently active mappers want to do the less 'exciting' mapping and routine checking that needs to be done to keep the data with its present currency of information advantage? Conversely, will new project members come along who love that aspect and develop new ways of ensuring it happens? Developing a really basic entry level portal for people to add or edit what they see in a non-techy environs is a challenge we must face too I feel, and also more simple data export/conversion capabilities. The planned change of licence from Creative Commons to ODBL has also created some serious potential divisiveness. Managing this process and any possible forks in the project are another big challenge that has to be faced.

In the past few months there have been more and more announcements of companies embracing OSM, be it start-ups or megacorps like Microsoft. How do you predict this will impact OSM, as a data repository, as a web service, and as a community?

I have said elsewhere that my ability to predict the future is about as good as Thomas Watson's of IBM was way back when, but I'll have a go. The interest in OSM shown by the likes of Microsoft and Mapquest recently is only to the good in my view. At the time of these two events I did predict the possibility of some head hunting of major players in the project with either software or project management skills, and to some extent we have seen a little of that already. But I firmly believe that there is such a large pool of fantastically skilled people in the project that I am confidant others will step up to the plate in any situation where this might happen. Also if I may cite the example of Mapquest, they do seem to have taken a pretty altruistic approach, and there seems to be areas of mutual interest between themselves and OSM. We have already seen that in the UK the freeing of some OS data last April has NOT had a dramatic effect on mappers or on data importing in OSM.

Having said that the project will have to make decisions as it goes along about what data is appropriate for the OSM database and what might not be. There is already discussion about keeping data in the DB for things that are no longer there (demolished buildings, dismantled railway lines, etc) - as this has real value for people studying historical geographic data. The availability of OSM data though Mapquest and Bing gives another possible source for people to access the data in mapped form. I think there will increasingly be an opportunity for people/companies to provide customisable map output using the data. Cloudmade already have this, up to a point - but the styles are not portable, the Mapquest ones are already. I would also like to see a major commitment from the members of the OSM community to engage with both the major map and data suppliers, and also governmental and other organisations - in both cases with a view to future possible collaborations.

You're not just a man of letters, but also a man of action - a few years back you headed into the "field" to map Antigua. Tell us a bit about your adventure. What opportunities and challenges are there for OSM in the developing world?

Antigua? I was SO naive and under-prepared for that. Knew it would be hot, but just took my un-reconstructed European mindset with me. Assumed I would just hire a bike, ride that around all day, mapping all the streets/names and POIs/addresses as I went, and cover the whole island in a week. Well - no bike hire to be found, too hot to map for more that about 3 hours in any one day, hardly any streets had nameplates and virtually no house numbers, or even names for POIs such as roadside cafes, etc. Also, I had some good contacts who seemed to promise geo-data from various local govt department sources. All saying yes/soon and stuff, but in the end not coming away with any. But lovely friendly people everywhere I went, including an amazingly laidback TV studio when I managed to swing a breakfast time slot for being a newsworthy novelty visitor - announced as "world renowned cartographer Professor Steve Chilton". Still living off that story! But seriously, there are immense opportunities for OSM to make a real difference to people's lives in the developing world. You only need to look at the effect that the OSM project furnishing up-to-date geodata in both Haiti and Kibera recently has had to see that.

Many thanks Steve for the interview and for your contribution to the OSM community. We highly recommend the new book for anyone looking to quickly grasp the key concepts and technologies behind OpenStreetMap.

Those who are interested should follow Steve on twitter (and of course you can follow all Nestoria interviewees via our twitter list.)