What our older siblings are up to
The first week of the new year is a bit of a limbo week. A bit too early for getting the teeth stuck into new projects 'cause not everyone is back from their holidays yet, it's a good week for reflection, so a good opportunity to report on Nestoria Australia's older siblings, Nestoria UK, Nestoria Germany, Nestoria Spain and Nestoria Italy.
Nestoria UK is the oldest at three years of age, and is growing at the same healthy rate most three year olds do, despite 2009 being a difficult year for the property industry. This year Nestoria UK gained several new partners, including some you might recognise: AOL and Gumtree, was a sponsor of several relevant technology events including the London Perl Workshop and the UK Scale Camp - is it wrong that we often end up sponsoring the drinks? - and launched the test site 'Where Can I Live', which is a tool that helps you choose where to live based on transport and commuting. If you've ever experienced a London tube you'll know the true value of this idea, but it will potentially be a godsend in Australia's major cities as well.
- 'Where Can I Live'
The API got some attention and Nestorfans responded to this well, by using it to build more cool things, including some nice iphone apps – we like that a lot.
Nestoria Germany and Nestoria Spain both turned two, so there was a lot of focus on making improvements based on feedback from local users. Germany said “Can you increase the size of the images in the lists? and can the API have the ability to search by number of bathrooms?”, and Nestoria said “Ja!” In 2009 the Nestoria Germany search was also made available on several other sites, including GoYellow, the German Yellow Pages.
Nestoria Spain welcomed several new partners in 2009, and Nestoria's experimental side, Lokku Labs, tested out a Spanish full text search facility and tried out the 'Where Can I Live' feature on Barcelona and Madrid.
Nestoria Italy celebrated its first birthday by building up the numbers of listings and improving coverage, signing off on several new important portal partnerships. Commuters in Rome and Milan were also given the “Where Can I Live' treatment.
The team also bonded in Bilbao and learned some bushcraft skills just in case the property market totally collapsed and the team had to revert to their humble hunter/ gatherer roots.
- The Nestoria team 'Making Fire'
