G'day India!

Last year Nestoria expanded below the equator for the first time, into Australia, of course, and also Brazil.  In 2011 Nestoria is going into India . 

In order to make it happen some of the team got to visit India, more specifically Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, where they met with our new partners 99acres, iProperty and Makaan, and learned valuable lessons about the Indian real estate market and the unique ways people live and do business there.  Naturally they also took the opportunity to learn a little about the local people and the local scene.  J2 reported some of the things he's learned from his first-hand experience of India when he announced the India launch on the UK blog:

We have now learnt that you shake hand with your right hand, we know that Indians never say no and that in Mumbai without a moped, a car, or a truck, you're nobody. Above all, we'd like to remind you all that if the menu says 'spicy food', in India it really means spicy. And even if the menu says the food is not spicy, the fact is that it will still be hot, hot, hot!

If that sounds like your kind of place then here's what you could trade into:

In beautiful Jaipur you can get a a three bed, three bath penthouse, built less than five years ago for RS59.9 lakhs, which works out to A$130,121 today.

Or in Mumbai you can get a flat in this new build with its own fully equipped gym and sauna, located near the building site of a new international airport for Rupee 54,20,500, which is A$117,750.

As usual the team have done their best to get things right from the start, but in such a different market of course there are going to be new things to learn, so we're aiming to evolve with ever evolving India.  This is the time in these welcome posts that I usually invite you to give us feedback if you have any, both on the new Indian product, or on Australia.

Nestoria Australia for iPad, by Boilingpoint Software

We love it when people use our API and come up with things that we might not have come up with ourselves.  So, it makes for a nice Monday morning to come in and discover that someone's used it to make an iPad app.  It's called Oz House Prices for iPad, and it's by Boilingpoint Software, who have designed it as an easy way to keep track of house prices and other trends in the Australian housing market.

It lets you: view monthly average housing prices suburb by suburb, and compare them against each other or averages across the states.  As well as location, you can also filter properties by the number of bedrooms they have. 

I, sadly, don't have an iPad handy to try this out on, so I have to rely on the preview, but if you do have an iPad and take this app out for a spin please let me know how it goes here.

They do provide you with a number of screen shots though:

If you'd like more inspiration and information on how to use our API to make cool things, check out our App Gallery.

Innovation for the new year

To kick off a year with the right innovative attitude, Nestoria's just signed up to Mapize's Open Innovation Map.

What you're looking at above is a mapped visualisation of individuals and organisations working in the field of open innovation.  The 'open' bit in the name comes from open source. 

They've divided the players up into three groups:

• Iderators, who are start ups and researchers etc., people coming up with ideas.

• Scouts, who are business angels or venture capital funds, incubators or events or conferences promoting 'Ideators'.

• Open Innovators, who are 'Major Corporations implementing an Open Innovation strategy and willing to grow an ecosystem and network of Ideators, or if you are a Public body (city, government related initiative, etc.) developing an 'Open Data' project needing 'Ideators' to use your Public Data and Open APIs.'

Some big name companies have already signed up to the database, including the BMW Group, Dell, Ford, LG, Nokia, Philips, PepsiCo, Starbucks, Campbell and Colgate.

And the basic idea of this map or visualisation is that these three groups will start to interact – especially now they can see who else is interested in this field, and existing in the physical, or online space around them.  Hopefully it will be a chance for us to meet more people who are interested in the same things we are.  And may it be an innovative year for you also!

Welcoming our southern hemisphere sister: Nestoria Brazil

Until now Nestoria Australia has boasted the listings with the best weather (Ok, so Spain thinks it has the sunshine, but we all know that they'd lose in a battle of the beams.). But that may now change since the launch of Nestoria Brazil.

As well as the sunshine, Brazil has the Amazon (but we have the Daintree?)...

And they invented caipirinhas and churrasco...and we invented lamingtons...

And they samba and we...well sort of do a little groovy side step thing...

Ok, so there might be something in this idea of searching for property in Brazil thing.

Check out this property near Ipanema with ocean views:

And at 5,800,000.00 BRL , it's a snip at $A3,417,685.20.

As with all of the markets we launch in there's going to be a lot for us to learn about how people buy, sell and rent in Brazil, which is why the site has actually been live for a few weeks while we make tweeks and improvements to it. If you can, perchance, read Portuguese and you're having a little dream over the site and you see anything you think could do with improving just let us know through the usual feedback channels.

The caipirinhas that we're drinking to celebrate this launch wouldn't have been possible but for our initial Brazilian partners, who could see the value of Nestoria Brazil before there was even a Nestoria Brazil to see, and our own 'Team Brazil': Francesco Cardi and Anton Abreu, who'll be blogging all things Nestoria and Brazil.

We're going to South America!

Nestoria hearts GeoNames & Scale Camp

Geonames iss an online database of locations and their co-ordinates – something like 10 million places are listed – that we're all welcome to use under a Creative Commons license.  If you haven't heard of it or used it check it out – it's got the basic text search front page, just like Nestoria does, and returns a list of places that could match your search, which you can then check out on a map. 

I knew there was a Perth in Scotland but I didn't know there was an Illawarra in South Africa.

As you can imagine it's a hugely valuable, and free, resource for any site developers wanting or needing map data.  As we're expanding into new, and less reliably mapped territories we're coming to appreciate these sorts of global, open source repositories of geo data even more, which is why we're sponsoring GeoNames to help them keep providing the service. 

They say they're receiving around 11 million web service requests each day, so that's quite a lot of service to be keeping up. 

In addition to hearting wiki style and user generated open source mapping sites and services, this week we're also hearting and sponsoring Scale Camp, which is an informal event (The Guardian who organise it call it an unconference) for people who're interested in scaling and performance.
Some Nestorians attended last year and reported back that they: “learned a few web scalability tricks, shared a few of our own, met some interesting people, and drank some tasty beer.”  So how could we not want to be part of it again.

Older is Better

One of the BST Nestoria interns has been beavering away on our API, and it's now been re-released in all its glory.  [Insert trumpet burst here] Welcome Nestoria API 1.18. 

In the UK turning 18 means the same thing that it does in Aus., more complex features – and you start getting asked for ID, but you actually have some.

By Flickr user ev0luti0nary

The two main additions are response fields that return API response status:

•     * "application_status_code"; and
•     * "application_status_text".

If you know what that means then you can find out the details on the Nestoria API  Return Codes page.  You could also set your imagination onto the spin cycle with it ands see what you come up with – we're always very pleased to hear about people using our API to do cooler things than we can think of ourselves. 

If you don't know what it means, but you have a vague idea what an API is then, the improvements mean that the API results have been brought into line with regular Nestoria results.  So if you've been using an app. which was using the Nestoria API to request listings by location, it will now receive notification of misspelled, ambiguous or unknown locations.

If you don't know what this means at all, then in a nutshell it means that we provide a way for other people to use the information in the Nestoria database to make other cool applications and websites.  There are some examples of what people have done with it in the past in our API Gallery.

Big THANK YOU

Today, on behalf of Nestoria Australia, I'd like to say a special thank you to all the people who gave their time to create Open Street Map Australia.  We appreciate this level of commitment to building better maps on a daily basis, but we're saying a special thank you today because today we activated the OSM option on Nestoria.com.au.  So now, as well as checking out where the properties you're searching for are on our standard map, you can also locate it, and it's surrounds, on our custom made Cloudmade OSM maps. (Cloudmade allows you to create your own designs for OSM maps and integrate them on your website via their API.).

Here's what the OSM version looks like:

...love those big orange highways...  Vs. the standard map view:

I've used Brisbane as an example because that's the home town of OSM Australia's David Dean who the Nestoria Australia blog has already befriended.

But to make full use of this function you can either add the word openstreemap to the front of any nestoria.com.au address, eg.:
http://openstreetmap.nestoria.com.au/brisbane/real-estate-property/sale
vs.
http://www.nestoria.com.au/brisbane/real-estate-property/sale

Or you can use the drop down menu:

So - thanks for all the time you took walking/ biking or driving around making geo notes.  A big YAY for community sourced data!

Bonjour Nestoria France!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Improvements to the API

We say we like people who share data, but sharing should always start at home, which is why Nestoria has an API which anyone can use to do cool stuff with Nestoria's data.  Every now and then the development side of the team have to force themselves to stop writing code and start writing documentation explaining the code, and over the last week or so one of our new summer interns has been tasked with documenting and updating the API – which applies directly to us AU readers, as the Australian metadata (ie average house price info) has been included.  Does that sound enticing to any developers out there?  How 'bout mashing house prices up with CBD proximity and public transport prices to find the optimum financial distance to live from the centre of town?  Or something?

The revamped API documentation system, with more readable layout, will hopefully make it easier to do just that. And a hundred other things you might want to do with Nestoria's information and we haven't even thought of yet.  Then when you've created your masterpiece, let us know about it and we'll include it in our application gallery where we put our favourite Nestoria related apps., also newly added. 

If the thing that piqued your interest most in the above was the fact that we have summer interns then get in touch.  An Australian summer intern during the Australian summer would be popular addition to the office. 

So what does make a great listing then?

Alice Allan from Property Ad Guru recently got in touch with us asking for a guest article giving a bit of advice about what makes a property listing a great property listing.  At Nestoria we believe that everyone benefits from having the best listings, both users and agents – which is why we have 'Nestoria Rank'  – so I was duly volunteered to come up with some tips for agents on our behalf.  If you think you could use some impartial advice on improving your listings check them out, and if you haven't visited Property Ad Guru before you might find even more to interest you: it's got all sorts of tips and tricks around what's new in online real estate from an agent's perspective.