Archives for August 24, 2006

there’s no doubting that maps, imagery, and most recently, mashups are ideally suitable for the real estate industry. So whay the hell are most realtors so technologically challenged and spatially clueless?? It never ceases to amaze me how few of the “professionals” in the real estate biz have adopted or even looked into what technology is available. The clincher for me was hearing from my realtor today how he hates computers, isn’t into maps, and doesn’t have a clue what “zillow” is… oh, this guy has a degree in Geography too… ohmygod!! For examples of some GIS-centric solutions developed for the real estate bizness see the likes of pretty much any county property appraser website, www.zillow.com, http://www.housingmaps.com/ (mashing craigslist & google maps), http://www.forsalebyownercenter.com/maps/ , http://www.ononemap.com (a cool UK mashup), http://nosyneighbormap.com (see info about neighbors) and even this cool app at http://www.mapbuilder.net/ where anyone can build their own mashup! With tools like Craigslist, (for listing) mapbuilder (for building the mashup) flickr (for posting photos) who the heck needs a realtor these days?? To get an idea of just a few of the companies providing GIS-centric solutions for the real estate industry see this archive of news items — http://www.gisuser.com/content/category/1/224/2/

Are you familiar with .mobi (dot-mobi) yet? you know, the TDL reserved for “mobile” domains. Many inn the industry feel its pretty much un-necessary and perhaps even nothing more than another big cash grab, however, with one third of the global population — 2.29 billion people — connected via mobile phones today you can’t really argue with the fact that maybe .mobi isn’t a bad idea after all! If you’d like to see what your favorite website looks like on the latest mobile devices try out this emulator (using the spiffy nokia N70 Symbian smartphone) http://emulator.mtld.mobi/ The .mobi emulator allows you to see how Web sites look by “emulating” a real mobile phone Internet browser. Take note: many websites are not mobile compliant yet so don’t be too surprised if you get errors – most popular portals will have a WAP friendly site that will be detected by your mobile browser. If you have cash to burn you can register your own .mobi domain at http://dotmobi.mobi/registrar – my personal feelings though are that its a waste of $$ why not simply setup mobile.yourdomain.com etc…