Nestoria Blog

The Silicon Milkroundabout is a two day hiring bonanza taking place this weekend, May 11th and 12th....

Wed, 08 May 2013 16:16:41 +0100

The Silicon Milkroundabout is a two day hiring bonanza taking place this weekend, May 11th and 12th. The Saturday is focussed on Product and the Sunday is all about Engineering. Historically the venue has always been in East London, and this year is no different: we’ll be at The Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane. Good news for us, a short taxi ride from the Lokku offices from whence we’ll be hefting some iMacs and such for our pitch.

We currently have a Web Developer role open, so we will be attending on the Sunday only. We’ll be competing with and collaborating with 120 or so other top UK startups who are all looking for the best engineering talent they can find. As part of my tactics when choosing our Tier 2 pitch location I managed to get one next to a Tier 1 “big money" company, my hope being that a) they will bring people over to our side of the room, and b) they will be good fun to talk to. Looking forward to finding out who our neighbours will be.

This isn’t our first Silicon Milkroundabout. We actually attended the very first event way back in May of 2011. It was a hectic but extremely fun day, and that was only 30 companies in total. My mind is boggled by the idea of 120 startups!

We have a pretty good track record though: we did successfully hire at the last SMR we attended, and I’m happy to say that Savio is going to be joining me to see what things are like from the other side of the table on Sunday. He will be our secret weapon - as a previous job-seeking attendee of the Milkroundabout he’ll know just what to say to tempt people over to our pitch. And if that doesn’t work we’ll have bowls of candy or something :-)

Hope to see you there! Please do drop by our table and say hi, and if you’re interested in becoming a Web Developer for Nestoria get in touch!

Nestoria Interview - Luke Razzell - Wiiv

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 11:26:00 +0000

Today we continue our blog interview series with a discussion with Luke Razzell, a London based entrepreneur who likes the team here at Nestoria works in the realm of aggregation. Luke is the founder of Wiiv, a service that helps address the issue of “cloud sprawl" by making it quick and easy for you find your files across several web-based services.

As well as co-directing and designing Wiiv, Luke directs design consultancy Weaver Digital, where he works with startups and established brands to create amazing digital experiences in complex business areas. He counts playing the piano and speaking Japanese amongst his interests.

Thanks for speaking with us Luke.

1. What is Wiiv? What problem does it solve? Who is the target audience?

Have you ever cursed as you trawl through old emails and nested folders for those files you need for a document, presentation, task or discussion? Or wished you could get a simple, intuitive overview of a project across the various cloud services you, your team and your collaborators use?

If you work collaboratively online, you probably don’t have the luxury of spending your work time on non-productive tasks. You already have way much to do as it is!

Surely the cloud was meant to simplify collaboration, not make it harder? Yet as the cloud continues to expand - and fragment - with ever more storage and productivity services, online collaborators are finding the cloud’s promise of simplifying their workflow to be an elusive one.

That’s where Wiiv comes in.

Wiiv makes keeping track of your collaborations easy by showing you previews of your files and associated information from across all the cloud services you use - on one page. Our powerful search features let you home in on stuff related to specific people and projects. And then we make it easy to get right on viewing, sharing or editing your files. Simple.

Creative directors, project and product managers, sales people and creative freelancers, marketers, consultants and investors - these are all roles that involve managing huge quantities of information and files across an increasingly diverse range of cloud services.

Wiiv can save these people precious time daily!

2. It’s ironic that services that were supposed to make it easy to always have access to our digital content (gmail, dropbox, etc) necessitate new tools to help us solve “cloudsprawl". What has the initial feedback been from users?

Initial feedback has been most positive. Users have universally praised Wiiv’s simplicity and ease of use and validated our over-arching value proposition.

At the same time, we know that we will have to deliver on our promise of comprehensive cloud service coverage (we’ve started with Google Mail, Drive and Docs) and super-fast search to get people to look at Wiiv as a core tool in their daily workflow rather than the promising curio the initial beta undoubtedly is.

There’s also an irony in the fact that getting people who most need Wiiv to even give it a try is challenging due to the very fact they don’t have the time to spare!

We hope that continuing to meet and exceed the expectations of our initial, core userbase will lead them to advocate Wiiv to friends and collaborators.

3. You come from a design background. What advantages and disadvantages does that mean for you as a founder?

The obvious advantage is that we don’t need to hire a designer - and that business and brand/product design strategy is integrated seamlessly.

A disadvantage is that I easily get distracted from business-level matters (business planning, networking etc) by my near obsession with designing an amazing product. So I am currently disciplining myself to step back from the product and get out networking rather more. I always return refreshed and with new insights that would never have emerged from poring over Illustrator or even our daily team discussions.

4. The stereotype of the internet entrepreneur is the 20 year old

American whipping up a prototype in his university dorm room. You’re launching Wiiv with years of professional experience and as a new father. What are the pros and cons of being an “older" entrepreneur?

I do feel that “normality gap", sure. Although I am relatively new to the tech industry, as I was a piano teacher until the age of 35 (five years ago).

I do sense a strong imperative to do something amazing professionally while I have the chance. That imperative only seems to increase with age…

My father is an inspiration to me with regards to taking on new challenges at an older age than most. He lost everything in the ‘89 property crash (he was a housing developer), then restarted an academic career that he’d abandoned more than a decade previously. He was 50 at the time. Fast forward to today and he’s past retirement age but still working weekdays and weekends on his sociology research and getting published in all the top journals.

So doing a startup aged 40 (albeit while bouncing a four month-old on my lap!) seems relatively easy in comparison. And I’m continuing to consult to other companies as Wiiv bootstraps (please form an orderly queue at weaverdigital.com!) Oh and having three super-bright twenty-something year olds in the Wiiv team helps keep me feeling young (though it sometimes makes me feel old instead!)

Many thanks Luke. Here at Nestoria we can very much appreciate the challenge of trying to build a clean and simple interface on top of diverse aggregated data. The simpler the service is for the end user, the harder it is to build. Good luck!

You can keep track of Wiiv’s progress by following @wiivco on twitter, while you’ll find Luke himself @weaverluke.

Nestoria Interview - Anton Chernikov - GoodPeople

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:13:00 +0000

Today we continue our interview series. And while we always seek out digital innovators, today’s post is a bit special in that our interviewee got his digital start here at Nestoria. It was only a few years ago that Anton Chernikov joined our team as a product intern. Since then he’s gone on to launch his own online business: GoodPeople.

1. What is GoodPeople, what problem does it solve?

Right now money is tight. Charitable giving in the UK has dropped by £800million since in the recession. There has been a 10% reduction in headcount within the third sector (charities, non-profits and social enterprises), and the majority of the government spending cuts (£3.3+ billion) haven’t even started. To survive, charities and social enterprises are going to need to access new forms of talent and expertise. And that’s where GoodPeople comes in.

GoodPeople.co.uk makes it easy for charities and social enterprises to connect with the right people. Think of our site as a LinkedIn for Good. Our mission is to build community that is driven by a genuine desire to collaborate, to care and to help." Check it out… www.goodpeople.co.uk.

2. What has the response been to the launch?

We soft-launched by sending out a few small (3x300) Mailchimp campaigns just over a week ago and we are now closing in on 400 registered users. The response has been very positive. We have learnt a lot, especially in terms of the user-experience. We can’t wait to see what happens when we really start to promote GoodPeople properly over the next few months.

3. How did your time at Nestoria help prepare you for becoming a founder?

Nestoria was the first internship I ever had. I got to experience how a real-world tech startup worked. I learnt that building a product is only 10% of what it takes to run a business. Nestoria also encouraged me to use the web to find answers for myself. This is a very important habit to get into. There is always someone out there who can help you find the answer. The challenge is figuring out who to ask and how to ask.

4. What is your advice for today’s graduates as they head out into the future?

I gave a TEDx talk about this and wrote a blog post too… http://tmblr.co/Z_HSltbHdgSc The headlines are…

1) Find your cause

2) Develop skills that will make you indispensable to any team

3) Bury yourself in research and follow the trail of good content

4) Find your tribe and then take it offline

5) Give Before you Take

Building a career used to be like climbing a mountain. You know your destination (the peak) and you work your way up the organisational ladder one promotion and qualification at a time. I don’t think this is how the world works anymore. Today, building a career is more like helicopter skiing. You are dropped on the mountain and you have to find your way down without getting buried in an avalanche or falling off a cliff. There are no tracks to follow. All you can do is point your skis down the mountain and try to dodge the trees and rocks in front of you. The best way to get down the mountain safely is to have a trusted group of friends with you.

Successful careers are built on a strong network of friends and connections. So.. start building yours today.

Many thanks Anton, and best of luck with GoodPeople! If Anton’s answers inspired you, perhaps a paid internship at Nestoria can be the first step on the digital ladder. We’re always on the lookout for motivated, talented people.

Nestoria Interview - Colin Eberhardt - PropertyCross

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 14:27:00 +0000

Back in 2006 Lokku opened up Nestoria API in hope to create a field for serendipitous connections. Yesterday, we got another reminder that this strategy is working.

Granted, Colin Eberhardt is not a new acquaintance. Colin’s pioneering HTML5-based property application for Windows Phone 7 grabbed our notice back in 2011 and not only because it was using Nestoria Listing API.

Only yesterday we’ve heard from Colin about his latest project - PropertyCross. As it turns out the project addresses a problem that we’ve been grappling for a while: selecting a cross-platform mobile framework to use.

We talked more with Colin about the PropertyCross project and we thought to share the news with you.

Tell us, what exactly is PropertyCross project about?

In the past couple of years mobile and tablet usage has exploded. No matter what line of business you are in, you will almost certainly be under pressure to release a mobile version of your existing website or desktop app.

The problem is, the different mobile platforms - they are many and all are different. If you want to release your app on all of the major mobile platforms you have to write it multiple times using the native languages and tools of each mobile platform. This is clearly a costly exercise!

Fortunately there are a number of cross-platform frameworks available that allow you to target multiple mobile platforms from a common codebase. The problem is, these frameworks vary significantly in terms of their quality, how much code can be shared and the end user experience they deliver. Many of these frameworks are HTML5-based, however, there are a number that deliver a fully-native UI, that do not seem to get the same media exposure as those based on HTML5.

PropertyCross aims to to allow developers to compre a range of cross-platform frameworks quickly and easily. This is achieved by presenting exactly the same app, a property finder (which uses the Nestoria APIs!), implemented using each framework for each mobile platform. This makes is much easier to compare these frameworks side-by-side.

* How did the idea for the project came about?

The idea came about for a few reasons.

Firstly, I had previously done some work with jQuery Mobile and had found myself disappointed with some aspects of the end-user experience. My feeling is that HTML5 is a little over-hyped, it certainly isn’t a silver-bullet for cross-plaform development.

I think it is important that projects like PropertyCross allow you to easily compare HTML5 implementations with a native equivalent so that you can see exactly what compromises you will have to make by going HTML5.

Secondly, at Apps World earlier this year I stumbled across another two cross-platform frameworks that I had not heard of before, and since then I have found many more. This is an exciting and rapidly moving area of technology, my hope is that PropertyCross will reflect the broad range of frameworks available.

Finally, I was very much inspired by the TodoMVC project, which helps developers compare JavaScript UI frameworks. Both myself and Chris Price (a PropertyCross co-founder), are contributors to TodoMVC and have used the project on number of occasion when talking with clients and fellow developers.

* Which framework did you find the most useful in your work? What did you take away from the project?

This is a tricky one, I don’t want to focus too much attention on any one framework because I want to encourage further submissions. Having said that, I was pleasantly surprised by the end-user experience delivered by SenchaTouch. For a HTML5 framework it is very slick. I am also keen on frameworks that deliver a native UI (I don’t like compromises!), and Xamarin, which uses C# and .NET code, is a personal favourite of mine.

* Anything else coming out of the pipeline?

PropertyCross went live just two weeks ago, so for the time-being my pipeline is PropertyCross, PropertyCross and more PropertyCross. We have some frameworks that are currently in the works, including KendoUI, RhoMobile and jQTouch. I’m also hoping to present the findings of this project at some conferences over the next year.

* Having worked with our API - is there anything that you’d like us to improve there? (Don’t feel like you have to be nice to us, we can take it!)

I’ve used the Nestoria APIs a number of times, and think it is very good. The only thing I’d really like to see improved is the data, I’d love to see a more detailed description of each property. Also, I generally use Nestoria in technical articles, as most of the readers are US-based, it would be great if you could cover the USA with your property database - although I doubt that is feasible!

While Colin’s wish for more detailed description or the US-based data will have to wait for a while, it is great to see another imaginative use of Nestoria API data such as helping developers pick the right cross-platform mobile framework.

Meet the team: CharlotteFellow Nestorphiles, over the years...

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 16:30:00 +0100

Meet the team: Charlotte

Fellow Nestorphiles,

over the years we’ve had a lot of feedback, positive and negative from the users of Nestoria, for which we’re very thankful. One topic that comes up again and again is the question “Who makes Nestoria?" As a result we’ve decided to start an interview series with the members of the team, so you can learn more about the people behind your favorite search engine. Today we kick things off with Charlotte Phillips.

1. Charlotte, What do you do at Lokku?

I’m the HR Manager at Lokku, so am responsible for hiring really great people, making sure we make the most from their many abilities, and generally keeping things running smoothly, people-wise.

2. Why do you enjoy it?A business (and a product) can only ever be as good as the people who work for it, and Lokku has a terrific team (but don’t tell them I said that…). Lokku combines focus and professionalism, with a fresh spirit of individuality, and there is a palpable and contagious sense of common purpose among everyone who works here. It really is a great place to work, and I feel very fortunate to be part of it.

3. What did you do before Lokku?I’ve worked in HR for many years for technology and media companies, big and small, but have always particularly enjoyed working with startups and small businesses going through periods of growth and transition, and seeing first hand how the right people and decent HR practices contribute to their success. This is why I now work on a freelance basis, providing HR services to London startups.

4. If you could change something about Lokku what would it be?That’s a tough one. It would be good if I could wave a wand to induce everyone to do their own washing-up (sadly they’re all too busy innovating, I’m told). Oh, and Marc Tobias (our developer over in Germany) would come over more often armed with my favourite brand of chocolate, Ritter Sport Yoghurt. If anyone knows where I can get that in the UK, do let me know!

Many thanks Charlotte.

As one of the founders of the company I’m sometimes asked what I would have done differently over the last few years. I always answer the same way, I would have hired Charlotte sooner.

Look forward to more team member profiles coming in the weeks ahead.

The 2nd Life of my Mac Mini - Nestoria Interview with Mark Simpkins of Ministry of Stories

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 11:30:22 +0100

Recently my Mac Mini, which had possibly been around since the very dawn of Nestoria, moved on to other things. It ran well, and when we were contacted by Mark Simpkins from the Ministry of Stories about donating to their worthy cause, it seemed like the perfect pasture to put it out to. Based in East London, the Ministry is a creative writing and mentoring centre for peeps from 8 - 18, founded in 2010 by Nick Hornby, Lucy Macab and Ben Payne. It runs writing workshops and projects for school groups and keen individuals and is a great place for old machines to end up, especially since my little fella probably has some start-up stories of its own to tell.

As a follow up, and to help spread the word about the cool work that the Ministry are doing, I got in touch with Mark, a freelance Cultural Engineer, and the Ministry’s Chief Technical Advisor, to find out how our old Mac Mini’s fitting in.

What’s in store for my old Mac Mini post-Lokku?

Well, we are trying to get a wonderful installation piece running on it. It was written by a multi-media artist back when the Ministry started, basically its a Monsters Helpline that you can listen to in the Hoxton Street Monster Supply shop. The problem was it was running off an old eMac which is too big to have set up in the rather limited space in the shop. Once we get it resaved to work on an intel chip we will have ths running nicely in the shop.

Monster Supplies is the Hoxton shopfront the Ministry is run behind - it sells all sorts of interesting stuff, including stationary supplies and tinned fear…

What are the Ministry’s main challenges?

Well, continually the main challenges are around funding and community engagement. It works in the local community, all the schools that attend workshops are local schools. It is very much embedded in the community in which it is located.

From my point of view, there are opportunities for more digital engagement, more tools and ideas to be explored but we do not have a volunteer army of geeks to build and run such ideas. That is what I would like to get going.

Hint hint, Nestorartu…

What’s your part in the Ministry as Chief Technical Advisor? And how did you get involved?

It is a volunteer role and my job is to really help out with anything technical. When the Ministry started this role was performed by Nathan Mathias. He was there installing the network as well as overseeing the website being built. Nathan left to join MIT Civic Media Lab so the Ministry advertised for someone to help cover the kinds of things that he did for the Ministry. I applied and got the role.

What part does technology currently play in dealing with the challenges you mentioned, and what part might technology play in future?

At the moment technology is used in creating an online space for the Ministry, the website, the presence on social media. We dont use the technology in workshops much yet. Part of this is the fact that it needs more technology to make sure all the kids have access.

We are looking at some online tools that might be useful in facilitating creative writing and still plan to run some kind of hack day in the future to see what ideas the geek community can come up with.

What are some of the other ways that you personally push for a better future using technology? And what inspired/ allowed you to see these sorts of possibilities?

I have been playing around with some small projects, around social media and the cultural space. Sharing on interest in art for example. I have always been interested in art and technology and recently the ease in being able to create something and deploy it quickly to the web has meant that ideas can be quickly tested. I have been very lucky in that I have been able to work at a number of creative institutions and organisations, at the BBC or more recently working with the UK Vogue team exploring how the magazine might work on the iPad. Not everything works but it is the fact that you can try things out quickly using the cloud that makes this a very exciting time.

What are some other ways you’d like to see people using web technology to push forward? And what about some slightly as yet out of reach possibilities which some of the kids from the Ministry might come up with?

I want to see more art. I want to see more linking together of ideas and systems, I sometimes feel that the rush to commoditise the users signing up to a service that we build can be rather depressing. That should not be the primary driver to what we do, we should have some kind of social responsiveness in what we do, so it’s less technology wise more a societal way of thinking about how we design and build systems. Not that everything should be free and open. We work in a capitalist system so livings need to be made, but the drive to huge IPO or similar should not be the ‘only’ driver in things.

Hopefully the Ministry will be able to engage some of the young kids to think about new ways of involving us in stories. We have been using games as a way of engaging kids, so hopefully we will contribute to a whole new creative generation who will think of interaction and how we communicate as much as just telling stories.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

I’d like the geeks and technologists out there to think about pro-bono work, sharing ideas around creativity and learning. There are some great things that will come out of this, and I hope that in London, we can create a geek culture that actively lifts culture and community using the underlying technology that we use everyday.

And thanks again to Lokku for donating the Mac Mini to the Ministry, it is things like this that add to the rich texture of the whole Ministry experience.

Very much our pleasure, Mark. Thanks again for chatting to me about this.

W3G on Wednesday 24 OctFellow Nestormaniacs, as a loyal blog...

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 11:53:00 +0100

W3G on Wednesday 24 Oct

Fellow Nestormaniacs,

as a loyal blog reader you’ll know that we here at Nestoria love open data. As such I’m delighted to announce that we’ve been helping organize W3G, a free, one day (un)conference themed around ‘Is Open The New Black? … Or “How To Dress Appropriately In The Age Of Open Data”‘. The event is on Wednesday the 24th of October at Google’s Silicon Roundabout Campus. As an “unconference" the discusisons will be driven by the attendees, but there will be a few keynote speakers including Tom Steinberg (a past Nestoria interviewee) of mySociety. It’s sure to be a great day of debate and geobeers, and we invite anyone with an interest in the geospatial scene to attend.

If you can’t make it on the 24th, but are interested in all things geo, please check out #geomob, the quarterly location based service developer events we sponsor . The next #geomob is on Thursday 22 November, we hope to see you there.

Ona final note, just in case you thought we weren’t nerdcore enough, we’re also sponsoring the London Perl Workshop for the 6th time. So there, now who’s awesome?

Best in Show (Nestoria Interview)

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 10:23:00 +0100

Here at Nestoria HQ we regularly sit down together for a Tech Talk where we learn about impressive, new things that are going on with the site, or the industry. Sometimes one of our team speaks and sometimes the office is graced with guest speakers. Two of our most recent guests being the impressively new and talented Ainsley Escorce-Jones and Tom Hartley. In fact, at 18 and 17, quite a few of us were slightly green about just how new and impressive they are.

These guys recently won the ‘Best in Show’ application at Young Rewired State 2012 - using the Nestoria API to create an app. called SmartMove. Their app. is designed to help people decide where to live, based on a breakdown of the communities they’re considering joining.

Post-Tech-Talk we tried them out on the interview process, so here are their comments on their project and on us:

Firstly, what’s SAP YRS 2012? And how did you come to be part of it?

Ainsley: SAP YRS 2012 was a week long hackathon hosted by Young Rewired State, young programmers were assigned to centres and then given from Monday to Friday to produce an application using any form of open data they could find. I actually first read about it whilst reading Ars Technica on holiday and thought that it would be quite enjoyable as I’d never really written anything with people my own age or attended a Hackathon. So I registered on the site and was assigned to the centre over at Profero, a creative agency in Camden along with Tom.

How long did you think about SmartMove for before you got involved with the competition?

Tom: We actually hadn’t thought about the idea at all. The team first met each other on the Monday, and we spent all morning brainstorming. We came up with a couple of ideas, and eventually settled upon the idea of creating an app which helped people find an area they’d like to live in. Many of the other features we added, such as giving the user detailed information (crime breakdown, percentage of population unemployed, etc.) on an area, were thought of later on during the week.

What functionality, if any, is it missing that you’d like to be able to add? And what other datasets would you have liked to include, but that aren’t available (yet)?

Tom: After using the app, testers felt that allowing them to create a shortlist of houses they’re interested in (for later review), would be a really useful feature. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to complete this during the week. However, I’ve been working on it recently, and it will hopefully be present in the version we release on the App Store.

Regarding additional data, I thought it would be pretty cool to include broadband speeds, so that users could choose a house based on the quality of the Internet connection (This criteria was close to the whole teams hearts!). However, we couldn’t find granular enough data on this for London.

Nice thinking, certainly very relevant to us too… What were some of the other ideas you saw and liked at Rewired?

Ainsley: I think the other finalists at YRS 2012 all had really cool applications, my personal favourites were Postcode Wars which was a really cool bit of fun that I could see spreading virally, as Google Wars were once upon a time, it was a simple idea but executed really well and was pretty engaging.

Another personal favourite was an application which sadly didn’t win any prizes (did recieve a special mention however), it used historical images from the Manchester Image Archive and produced side by side comparisons of images from the past and current images using Google Street view, you can find more information on it here.

I know Tom was really impressed with "Way to Go" which was an application which allowed disabled people to find places that they could access and also rate them based on accessibility.

What did you learn from SmartMove?

Ainsley: Developing the backend and API for SmartMove was a pretty enjoyable and sometimes challenging experience, probably most of the issues came from parsing all the various data sources in their different formats into something that I’d be able to work from and also the understanding the quirks of the Geospatial features of MySQL.

I think the main thing I learnt developing SmartMove is how different the dynamic is working in person with a team. I’m used to doing Freelance software engineering online, but being across the table from the frontend developer you’re working alongside was a refreshing change, although it’s nice to work from home and be able to focus solely on what you’re coding, being able to coordinate and work on new features in parallel and get instant feedback on how things were shaping up was excellent.

Tom: From a technical perspective, I learned a lot about working with the different APIs which Apple provides for displaying and annotating maps (which I had not used before), however the greatest thing I learned was the value of teamwork. With Ainsley working on the backend and feeding me data, I could play to my strengths - designing the front end application - and didn’t have to mess around with any scary databases. This dramatically reduced the time it would otherwise have taken to create the app..

What did you prioritise on the front end in this project? And is this different to your normal priorities?

Tom: For SmartMove, rather than working from the ground up by creating individual elements and composing them to form an application, I worked downwards from a higher level. This was very beneficial due to the fact we only had one week to create the app - I could ensure that at each stage of development I had a working app., and just add features one by one, until the night before we needed to present it, where I imposed a hold on new features and concentrated on fixing the few remaining bugs.

Furthermore, I focused a lot less on code quality and organisation, and a lot more on just ‘getting it to work’. This provided short term benefits in terms of quicker development times, however it has come back to bite me recently, so I’ve been working on refactoring some of the uglier code.

Always a tricky question, but do you guys have any ideas about how you’d monetise SmartMove?

Tom: We considered several different approaches to monetization, however we felt that all of them were detrimental in some way. I felt that advertisements would detract from the overall polish and quality of the app.. The whole team agreed that they’d be much happier to see 1000 people using it for free, than 10 people using it for 70p each. We therefore decided that we will release the app for free initially, and if it turns out to be popular, we may attempt to arrange deals with some estate agents, whereby they pay a fee to have their results displayed more prominently in the app..

And how ‘bout any bright ideas for Nestoria? What could we be doing that we’re not? (Don’t feel like you have to be nice to us, we can take it!)

Ainsley: I think the Nestoria API is what tipped the balance in favour of developing SmartMove over any other app knowing that the house listing data was available convinced us that we’d be able to make a pretty complete house-hunting experience in a very short period of time we had.

I think what Nestoria is doing is great and I really like that you guys decided to do a fully open API, without the need for any sort of payment or even API keys.

I don’t really think there’s much I could suggest in the way of new features of the Nestoria API, although I think your PHP library was missing bathrooms in the options last time I checked, I added the two lines for it, for use in SmartMove however which can be found here.

Big cheers to the guys for playing with our API and of course congratulations on the win. And best wishes for the future… Maybe see you again in a few years time…

Nestoria Interview - Ian Osborne - SMEStorage

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 15:26:00 +0100

Fellow Nestori,

after a long hiatus we return to present you another installment in our interview series with online thought leaders. This time we had the chance to visit with Ian Osborne, CEO of Vehera, which trades as SMEStorage. SMEStorage provide a variety of solutions to offer a single, aggregated view across many different cloud services.

As regular readers will know, we love all things aggregation, and so we’d thought we’d learn more about aggregating “the cloud".

1. Why is a cloud aggregation service needed?

Modern day companies store their data in a variety of information sources. This can be in traditional storage mediums such as SharePoint, DropBox, Box etc but there are many others such as Email systems, Project management systems, SaaS systems, CRM, and even mediums such as Skype or other instant messenger systems are responsible for a lot of corporate information. Having this information in disparate sources make it not only difficult to manage, but increasingly difficult to govern, share disparate data and search. The SME solution provides a solution to these problems.

2. What are the challenges of a start-up trying to interface with the giants of the online/tech world like Amazon, HP, Google, etc?

Actually the larger providers understand the importance of an eco-system so we have nothing but good things to say about the partnerships and help they have given us.

At a tech level the also understand the importance of an API and how important this is to a ‘Cloud’ ecosystem in which everything is connected to everything else in some form. The bigger challenge is normally to do with that old bugbear, ‘standards’. For example, our Cloud File Server product interfaces with public storage clouds, such as those you mentioned, in a secure fashion but the vendors all support this in different ways. As an example Amazon supports a secure token passing mechanism with secret key generation for connecting to their Object Storage platform, S3. Google on the other hand supports a security standard called OAuth, whereas some vendors may only support username / password combinations, so having to supports all these different authentication mechanism can be challenging. Similar challenges exist at an API connection level, and we believe the industry would benefit as a whole if there was a standard storage API and authentication API for example.

The biggest challenge of interacting with the giants of tech can be having to compete on keywords and online advertising in general. They obviously have deep pockets which drives keyword and general online advertising up and makes it more difficult for smaller tech companies like ourselves to compete. In that respect social media, relationships with key online blogs etc is the way in which firms such as can extend our reach.3. In the business world, companies increasingly face a conflict between the desire for security and control while their employees want the convenience of consumer services like Dropbox. Is SMEStorage a possible solution to bridge the gap?

That is a good question and one that is topical. Recently IBM banned the use of consumers services and there has been a lot of discussion as to whether SMB’s should follow their lead. The SME Cloud Appliance is a means to continue to use Cloud Services whilst at the same time enabling IT to retain control. You can read more about this on our blog at: IBM Bans DropBox. Here is why you don’t need to follow suit.

4. How do you see cloud availability changing consumer/employee behaviour?

Consumers have probably never had it so good. They get what they want on demand from a service based infrastructure that is either free or is on demand, so a user can “turn it off" if they perceive they are not either receiving value or good service. In many ways this is the antithesis of the perpetual software model in which payments were made up front and the “power" was in the hands of the software vendor. Today the power is definitely in the hands of the consumer.

Employees are pushing their IT departments to give them the same ease of use and value that they are able to get from consumer services. This is a challenge to IT as their primary motivation is not ease of use but rather security and control. It’s interesting that the driver for iPad adoption in quite large enterprises, for example, is not from lower level employees, but being driven by senior executives within the business who are putting ease of use and flexibility above security concerns, something they have probably never done before, and making this a challenge that the IT department has to figure out.

Many thanks Ian. Lots of food for thought about the rapidly changing IT landscape. We well know the challenge of merging and managing many disperate data sources and trying to present the result in a simple, useable way. It’s not easy, but when done well it can provide immense value. Best of luck.

Readers can stay on top of SME’s progress by following them on twitter.

Try Nestoria News, our new real estate news aggregation...

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 16:33:50 +0100

Try Nestoria News, our new real estate news aggregation service

Fellow Nestorianos,

we’ve just gone live with a new experiment on Nestoria UK. Today we’re launching Nestoria News, a service that scans the UK property twittersphere and finds relevant property news (and nothing else).

In the exact same way that we invented Nestoria as a way to help you quickly and easily sift through hundreds of thousands of properties and find your dream home as quickly as possible, our new News service hopes to reduce the noise of twitter and instead leave you only with the relevant signal. If all goes well we’ll successfully answer the questions “what are the important stories in the UK property world?". By following @NestoriaNewsUK you get a continual stream of all the UK property news.

Our hope is that this solves one of the major issues with twitter - often I’m interested in only one topic that a person tweets about. His or her tweets about the property market are very interesting, his or her tweets about breakfast are typically less so.

To set expectations, Nestoria News is an experiment. It’s a chance for us to learn. Like any experiment, we hope it goes well, but it may not. We’ll have to see how it develops with time. No doubt the details of the service will change as we learn from you, the users. But what won’t change is our focus on simplicity and clarity and helping you get the information you need as easily as possible. Despite all the rough edges, we think it’s strong enough now to be released into the wild. We look forward to your feedback.

The service has a few features. We envision the main way to consume the data is as a Twitter stream (did we mention you should follow @NestoriaNewsUK?) Nevertheless, there is also a very simple web page:

Right now we offer users links to the various articles (of course attributed and linked to the source), but also a page where you can see the twitter discussion around each article. Also you’ll find a list of what our algorithms deem to be the 20 most important property tweeters in the UK. In the near future we’ll be expanding that list and also making it more clear how we determine who the most influential tweeters are.

If you are interested in the UK property market please take Nestoria News for a test drive.

One final note, @nestoria remains the account to follow to stay up to date on the Nestoria team, our property search product, and the various partnerships we announce (more news coming soon on that front). If you aren’t yet following us please do so.

Two more infographics from Gartoo.es and Nestoria.de

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:42:00 +0100

In the latest addition to infographics, we’re sharing two more examples dealing with the rate and location of vacated properties - one focused on Spain:

and another in Germany:

Enjoy!

Sponsoring WhereCampEU 2012

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 21:47:00 +0000

Fellow Nestordammers,

I’m delighted to announce that for the third year in a row we will be sponsoring WhereCamp EU! After London in 2010 and Berlin in 2011, ths year’s event will be in Amsterdam on April 28th and 29th.

As always “camp" events are fairly free form, so it’s hard to know exactly what to expect. But if past years are any guide there will be lively discussion, some interesting demos, and (just perhaps) a geobeer or three along the way. The pace of innovation in online cartography continues to accelerate, there is so much to discuss. Several members of the Nestoria team will be in attendance. We look forward to seeing you there.

Many thanks to the orgaisers and other sponsors for creating what is sure to be a great weekend. The best way to stay up to date on WhereCamp EU is of course via the twitter feed.

On a final note, if you’re interested in all things web and geo but unfortunately can’t make it to Amsterdam, consider joining us at #geomob events in London.

New year, new features

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:53:00 +0000

Fellow Nestoriaks,

Over the last few weeks we’ve not just switched map providers, but also rolled out an array of new features designed to improve the property searching experience.

1. Geotargetting

If you visit our sites in a modern browser, you’ll see the option in the search box (as shown here on our Italian site) to search by letting your browser tell us your location. If you click it and share your location with us, your browser turns your location into longitude and latitude, and your search is launched. It’s a nice example of letting technology do the work for you.

2. Banning listings you dislike

For some time users have asked us for the ability to block or ban certain listings. We do our best to filter all terrible listings from the search results, so that you never even see them. Unfortunately though, we’re not perfect (yet), and more importantly there are many things that we just can’t know - like availability or personal taste. So now we give you the ability to block any listing that you don’t like from the search results. Click and you’ll never see that listing again. So go crazy, start banning up a storm. But remember - with great power comes great responsibility.

As you can see in this screen shot, the banning button appears on each listing when you move your mouse over the listing.

3. Saving listings

Another much requested feature is the opposite of banning: saving. It works exactly as you’d expect, click the save button on each lsiting and it will go to your save list. To save you’ll need to sign in (so we can remember you when you come back).

At the upper right of each page (screenshot below from our German service) you’ll now see a small bar which shows you how many listings you’ve banned and saved (once you’ve signed in). It also has a button that when clicks reveals your save list, gives you the option of logging out, and the chance to reset your ban list.

On a final note we’ve also fine tuned the appearance and functionality of Nestoria on the ipad. It’s a start but you can expect much more from us in the coming months on the mobile front.

Please let us know what you think about all of these features and how we can go about making property searching simpler.

Why (and how) we’ve switched away from Google MapsFellow...

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Why (and how) we’ve switched away from Google Maps

Fellow Nestoria fans,

this week we went live with a significant change to our service - in most countries we’ve moved away from Google maps and are now relying exclusively on OpenStreetMap maps served by MapQuest.

Before I dive into the why (and the how for all our neogeo mapping freaks amongst our readership), let me say that Google maps remains a phenomenal service that is continually adding amazingly innovative new functionalities. The boom in online cartography witnessed over the last years was kicked off by the launch of Google maps, and I can still remember the light bulb going on in my head when in early 2005 I saw housingmaps.com, the first Google maps mashup. It was clear I was looking at the future. A little over a year later, in June 2006, we launched Nestoria. So I am the first to recognize the unequaled contribution Google has made and continues to make in unlocking the potential of cartography for the world (and technology in general).

In 2006 I had another “ah-ha" moment as well, though. I met Steve Coast, the founder of OpenStreetMap. He explained the idea - a free and editable map of the world made by user contribution. A map that would not just allow me to get the final rendered output, but also the actual data underneath. At the time, looking at Steve as he showed me the GPS device he was using to map the details of our meeting (which took place in a little cafe in Soho across the street from the John Snow pub), the idea of creating a viable map via volunteer submissions seemed preposterous in the extreme. But I watched as OSM grew and grew from those humble beginnings. Now, less than six years later, that map powers Nestoria thanks to millions of man hours of contribution by individuals and organizations that recognize the power of open data.

So, why have we switched? There are four main reasons

1. The maps are equal or better

OpenStreetMap’s great strength is that anyone can contibute. Since the project started over 500,000 people around the world have signed up to do just that, often going into insane levels of detail. Fixes can be added and reflected in the maps very quickly. It is a fundamentally different model than the traditional “only an expert from the government can come make the map" model. People can map whichever features are important to them (paths, pubs, buildings, etc) and escape the car centric focus of many mapping services. All of this data is then made freely available for all to use. Increasingly government agencies are realising that it makes more sense to cooperate with and benefit from this new approach to data gathering and maintenance.

Thanks to the hard work of all of these volunteers, in many places of the world, particularly the European countries we were focused on, OSM maps are of equal or better quality than any other widely available mapping service.

2. It’s another visible way for us to support open data

Our service does nothing more (and nothing less!) than aggregate data from many different sources and present it in an easy to use format. We benefit greatly from open data, and as such we want to do our part (within the limited resources of a start-up) to help the open data movement. This is why we sponsor OpenStreetMap conferences and recently donated to OpenStreetMap’s humanitarian efforts. This is why we feature the work of open data advocates on our blog, and also why we make our own data available via our API and other tools. We are a company that believes in open data.

3. Google introduced charging for map usage

Earlier this year Google announced that they would begin introducing limits to the use of Google maps by commercial websites. The good news is that Nestoria has grown nicely since our start in 2006. The bad news was that our size meant that we were well over the free usage limits Google announced.

In November I was contacted by a sales person from the Google Enterprise team. I had suspected we might be over the limit. Obviously no one looks forward to a new cost for their business, but I approached the talk with an open mind. Google Maps is a great service, and we had benefited greatly from it. As a businessperson, I know there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and so I was open to paying Google a reasonable fee for their continued service.

Unfortunately Google’s sales process was not good. Having agreed to a time for a call, the sales rep missed the appointment with no warning, instead calling me 45 minutes late. It was quickly obvious he had done no research whatsoever about our service, what we do, or even where (in which countries) we do it. He was unable to explain the basics of the new charging regime - for example, what exactly is a “map-view", telling me instead to “ask your developers". Finally he quoted a price to continue using Google Maps (just on nestoria.co.uk, one of eight countries we operate in) that would have bankrupted our company.

Google’s excellence in technical services was definitely not matched by its salesmanship. The experience was disappointing, and I say this as the founder of a site that has often been featured by Google in promotional literature for our innovative use of Google maps. Having always envisioned that we would someday move to OSM, this was the nudge that pushed us over the cliff.

In the interest of fairness I should also mention that Google has been a great supporter of OSM in the past, donating funds for hardware for instance, and hopefully they will continue to be far into the future. Google remains a great supporter of opensource software with initiatives like their excellent Summer of Code initiative.

We’re very thankful to Google for all the innovation they encourage and for allowing us to use their maps service for free for years. The decision to introduce charging is theirs to make and we can’t argue with it. Despite this though, I have to question some of the logic they presented regarding their reasons for introducing charging now. Google claims charging is needed to ensure the long term commercial viability of the service, but is belt tightening really needed at the same time as Google announces record revenues and profits?

More importantly though I wonder if the decision really achieves the desired outcome. While us moving away from Google Maps will reduce some fractional amount of bandwidth costs for Google it also means our team of engineers will be spending our time working with, and innovating on, other geo technologies. While on the one hand Google spends a lot of effort trying to court developers, decisions like this turn them away. Especially combined with the subpar sales implementation I experienced, this seems to go completely against the ecosystem model that has enabled Google Maps to flourish, which is disappointing.

4. The tools are ready.

Despite all of this, we would not have been technically able to make the switch unless there was a solid set of tools and services around OSM that made the switch possible. I’ll go into these in more detail in the technical part of this post, but let me here once again publicly thank all the developers around the world who have worked hard over the last few years to create the modern neogeo tool chain from scratch. Also let me explicitly thank the companies like AOL’s Mapquest and Microsoft’s Bing who are actively supporting OpenStreetMap.

Before I dive into the technical minutiae, let me say that all of this isn’t to imply that OSM maps are perfect. No map ever is. But it all added up to a compelling sense that now was the time to switch. Nevertheless if you see problems, please tell us (via twitter or the feedback link on the page you are using). Or, better, please get involved with OSM and start contributing.

Now, in the interest of encouraging innovation (and thanking those who made this move possible) let’s move on to the technical fun of HOW we actually switched map providers?

When we realized it was time for us to make the move we faced one big decision - should we use someone else’s OSM tiles or should we render and serve our own? We called in an expert to advise us. OSM expert, and former Nestoria blog interviewee, Andy Allan runs OpenCycleMap, a rendering of OSM data designed specifically with the interests of cyclists in mind. He was kind enough to come to Nestoria HQ and spend some time taking us through the pros and cons of rendering our own tiles. Rendering has the advantage that you can make the map look exactly the way you want. When done well this can produce phenomenal results, a good example of this is Michal Migurski’s recently announced terrain layer, but unfortunately it’s no small technical undertaking, especially when we’ve also got a property search engine to run.

We concluded the only viable path was for us to leave the rendering and serving to experts and use someone else’s OSM tileset. At this point the more astute of you may be asking why we dont just use the tiles from openstreetmap.org directly. That’s unfortunately not an option due to OSM’s tile usage policy. As a volunteer run organization, OSM doesn’t have the technical or financial resources to serve tiles for us and the whole world. Luckily however several companies have stepped in to fill this gap - CloudMade has for several years offered an OSM tile layer for all to use. In 2010 MapQuest released a similar service. While we are longtime fans of CloudMade (we use their tiles on our Where Can I Live? service), for their global infrastrucutre and speed we decided we’d prefer to use MapQuest’s OSM tiles. But now the question was how to get the OSM tiles on to our pages.

First of all, if your website is using a map I strongly advise you to consider using Mapstraction, which, as the name implies, is a javascript mapping abstraction layer. You write your code using Mapstraction methods and can then switch between anyone of 10 or more supported mapping services. Even if you plan to stay with one mapping provider this can make sense as they create new versions (as Google did several years ago when they released version 3 of their service requiring a different syntax than version 2). The good news is we’ve been using Mapstraction since the very beginning of Nestoria, in fact we funded the initial development - this was the topic of my 2006 meeting with Steve Coast and others. Five years later Mapstraction continues to flourish, with an active community of developers. At this point in the project (mid-Nov) Mapstraction offered two different services for loading OSM based tiles: CloudMade and OpenLayers. Cloudmade would mean using Cloudmade tiles. OpenLayers was an option, but not a technology we had much experience with. Meanwhile over the last few months I had been hearing a lot of buzz abouta new mapping library called Leaflet. Leaflet is also from the folks in the CloudMade team, but is newer (thus benefiting from all the lessons learned in building the original CloudMade map library) and is opensource. Leaflet allows the user to request any tileset, configuring it to query MapQuest was trivial. Everyone can contribute and in the six months or so since Leaflet launched almost 150 developers have forked the code. Lots of people are submitting patches, the pace of development is rapid, and the documentation is excellent.

Unfortunately, there was no Mapstraction plugin for Leaflet. And this is where the magic of an engaged and vibrant open source community once again enters our tale. The very day I pondered whether to dive in an write a Leaflet plugin, Ben Welsh submitted exactly what we needed to github for all to use (and modify). It worked almost perfectly. A few minor tweaks (and submitted patches) later we had an OSM map on Nestoria. Many thanks Ben!

So, there you have it - OSM to MapQuest to Leaflet to Mapstraction. If anyone out there can top that neogeo chain I’ll be impressed. Please let us know what you think or if you have any questions.

BTW - if all this has raised your interest in all things geo (and you’re in London), please do come to the next #geomob event on 16 February where I’ll be giving a talk about our move away from Google Maps.

UPDATE: in the comments below paulmaunders points to this very good post where he lays out the options his firm, Fubra, considered under similar circumstances.

Happy Holidays

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:56:22 +0000

Best wishes to one and all.

Bon Noel, Buon Natale, Frohe Weihnachten, Merry Christmas, Feliz Navidad, Feliz Natal to all of our partners and most of all to all the users of Nestoria worldwide.

A season for givingFellow Nestofarians, 2011 has been a...

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:29:00 +0000

A season for giving

Fellow Nestofarians,

2011 has been a difficult year for most developed economies, and the only certainty 2012 offers is more uncertainty. It’s easy in such times to get overwhelmed and lose the bigger picture. The holiday season is a good chance to break the every day schedule and instead reflect on how lucky we all are. In this spirit, this year, rather than sending our clients and partners Christmas gifts, we’ve instead donated on their behalf to a project we believe has the potential to improve the lives of millions: the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT).

Diligent Nestoria followers will know that we’ve been long-time supporters of OpenStreetMap, but you might not know of the great work HOT has been doing. The project focuses on getting the humanitarian and open mapping communities to work together in two ways.

Firstly, many parts of the world don’t have easy to use (ie digitally shareable), accurate maps, or the existing maps are out of date due to natural disasters. HOT helps coordinate efforts to rapidly focus volunteer mappers to address this need - both via fieldwork with GPS devices, but also from across the world using satellite imagery - after a disaster. A great example of the effectiveness of a global community of volunteer mappers diving in to help is this visualization made by ItoWorld of the response to the Haiti Earthquake a few years ago.

What’s so inspiring about this is that it lets people 1000’s of miles away from the disaster immediately and tangibly work to help improve the situation on the ground.

Secondly HOT works to stimulate open mapping via advocacy, training and outreach literally across the world. Here’s a great presentation about some of the training work HOT has undertaken in Indonesia.

This very week HOT has been activated to help map health facilities in Libya.

We’re proud to be able to support HOT and their mission. If this post has inspired you please get involved with HOT, more help is always needed. It can be as simple spending a few hours tracing satellite imagery. HOT operates a task server with a list of projects that need help. Please get involved. Hopefully we’ve interested you enough to follow HOT’s progress via their twitter feed. If you’re in London, we’re hoping to have someone from HOT present at one of our upcoming #geomob events.

In closing, happy holidays from all of us to all of you. We’re looking forward to a great 2012 (That being said though 2011 isn’t over just yet - we’ll have some more OpenStreetMap related news to share in a few days time).

Nestoria India partners with the Hindustan TimesFellow...

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:13:00 +0000

Nestoria India partners with the Hindustan Times

Fellow Nestortonians,

over the last few months we’ve favoured our twitter account as our way to keep you abreast of new developments. But, with the year winding down we thought we’d take the next few days to once again go “long form".

Today I kick things off with some great news - we’ve just launched a new partnership between Nestoria India and the Hindustan Times. Nestoria will power the property search of the Hindustan Time’s new property section.

Founded in 1924, the “HT" is a titan of the Indian media scene, and one of the largest English language newspapers in the world. Since we launched Nestoria India earlier this year, we’ve been hard at work fine tuning the service, learning from users (many thanks for all of the feedback), and adding new partners - we’re very pleased to announce this partnership.

We look forward to helping welcoming HT readers to Nestoria and helping them find their next home.

More soon ….

Nestoria Interview - Anna Powell-Smith

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 12:57:00 +0000

Hear Ye, Nestorcommunters! A few weeks ago now it came to our attention that someone had done something new and cool with the api. The person behind that cooless is Anna Powell-Smith, who ran up a train times vs. house prices graph. It turns out that as well as being a coder, writer and data analyst for hire, Anna is a long-standing volunteer for mySociety, the UK’s leading developer of democratic and civic websites. She’s also worked for the Open Knowledge Foundation, the open data campaigners, and for start-up ScraperWiki. And she made the Domesday Book freely available online for the first time. Which is pretty cool, so this month she’s our interviewee. Thanks for sharing your time, Anna, and the rest of you - enjoy!

How would you describe your work and what would you say your main work interests are?

I’m a front-end web developer, running a little agency, with particular interests in civic coding, open data, online mapping and data journalism.

Can you talk us through also how and why you got into coding - I get the impression that there’s an interesting story there?

It was Napster! I was at university studying English when I installed Napster and was blown away. I thought being able to share music with people like that was just amazing, it really made the world a better place - not because it was free necessarily, but the technical achievement of P2P and the software. After that I knew I wanted to learn to code. It was a bit of a challenge as I didn’t know anything about computers, or anyone who was into them. However I went back and did an MPhil in computer science and slowly taught myself how to be a developer.

Cool! Can you talk us through the why and how of your recent train times vs. house prices graph? Did it reveal what you thought it would, or were there some surprises?

My partner and I started house-hunting on the basis that house prices would get dramatically cheaper an hour away from London, outside the commuter belt. But then we realised we didn’t know if that was true, so I decided to use Nestoria to find out, because it has the best API of any house-hunting site. Working with the API was really a pleasure. It was quite satisfying to see from the graph that house prices do start to fall off more steeply once you get to 60 minutes from London, pretty much what we’d predicted. If you visit London a couple of times a week, the sweet spot looks to be around 90 minutes - too far for even the most hardcore daily commuters.

I was surprised by the bump in house prices at around 4.5 hours from London - it definitely shows that Edinburgh has its own economy!

Google tells me that you’re very involved in open data projects - can you talk about some of the projects you’ve been involved in recently - particularly ScraperWiki, which sounds very cool.

I’ve worked with the Open Knowledge Foundation, who are brilliant campaigners for open data and a rapidly growing international movement. I worked on their OpenSpending project, which aims to track government spending all around the world, and has just been awarded funding by the Knight Foundation.

And I worked on the early days of ScraperWiki, which is a start-up building a community of journalists and coders freeing up data.

Can you also talk us through the basic genesis of ScraperWiki. And give us some examples of some revealing scrapers?

ScraperWiki was set up by Julian Todd, who is a one-man coding powerhouse crossed with an investigative journalist. He set up PublicWhip, which scrapes the voting records of the UK Parliament and turns them into structured open data. So Julian had the original idea of a code wiki, and Francis Irving, the CEO, has turned ScraperWiki into a fully-fledged start-up. Coders like it because they can share and run code easily, and journalists like it because it helps them find data.

One story ScraperWiki exposed was about corporate sponsorship of all-party groups in Parliament - a coder found that corporations and interest groups channeled more than £1.6 million to MPs and lords in one year by sponsoring these groups, and the Guardian reported it.

Are there any datasets that you’d love to have better access to or that you’ve struggled to find and would like to work with?

Oh, so many! I’m interested in land ownership, and am regularly frustrated by the Land Registry’s ownership records not being open. And about half the land in Britain is not actually registered with the Land Registry at all. That’s a really important dataset for transparency.

Fares data for trains would be great, too. And as a house-buyer, I’d love to get proper comparisons between asking prices and selling prices, although it would be a hard one to do properly. One for Nestoria, maybe?

My dream dataset is Nikolaus Pevsner’s guides to architecture. They’re in copyright, but I’d love to build a location-aware app to show you what Pevsner wrote about the buildings nearby.

Thanks for the property related suggestion - I’ll put to ‘the people’m the architecture app sounds really cool - I’d definitely use that. Do you see an opening up of data availability or do you see privacy concerns shutting off information further?

Wow, that’s a big question! In the UK, there are some great data releases going on at the moment - from live bus timetable information to Land Registry house sale prices. And there are lots of interesting start-ups being built on open data, like Nestoria, and OpenCorporates. So in the short term it’s quite positive, but I think the open data movement needs to focus just as much on the long term, because the political environment could always change. We need to make sure we get proper governance and legal protection for open data.

And one more thing - have you come to any conclusions about where you’re going to move to yet?

Heh! Yes, the scraping exercise definitely helped a lot - we like Stroud, Sherborne, Castle Cary and Macclesfield. Now I just have to work out how to use Nestoria to find the perfect house…

Here’s an old rectory in Stroud that looks nice…

Thanks very much for sharing your thoughts with us - and good luck with the house hunt!

If you want to hear more of Anna’s thoughts you could follow her on Twitter.

Nestoria's first infographic

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:14:00 +0000

Nestoria aims to present the most useful information about properties in the simplest way possible. As a part of that mission, over the coming months we are going to create a serie of infographics relating current events to the world of real estate. Today, I have the honour to present you our first infographic.

This week, following the recent general election in Spain, we took the opportunity to calculate the average property prices across different districts of Madrid and compare these to the results of the elections.

As a quick scan on the infographic will reveal, a predictable conclusion has been that there is a clear correlation between the margin of victory of Partido Popular (PP), a right of centre party, over the incumbent leftist PSOE, and the increase in the average real-estate price. To give an example,this shows the difference between the glamourous shopping area of Goya in Salamanca with traditionally working-class area of Villaverde.

Our results also reveal other interesting trends. For example, we have found that UPyD party’s voting record shows no correlation with housing price. While this party did not win, it seems to have achieved its goal of appealing across different segments of Spanish society. You can find more conclutions of this first infographic in Spanish here and also more information about what is Nestoria data.

We will keep you all updated about future infographics and we hope you find them useful and enjoy them. Don’t forget, we are always willing to listen your suggestions or feedback!

Public information of the Spanish government in Datos.gob.es

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:01:00 +0000

The Spanish government has launched the site Datos.gob.es which organizes and manages the Catalogue of public information. This means that the access to the public information will be improved and, at the same time, it will help to reuse the public information of the General State Administration.

The mentioned Catalogue includes practical and informative resources for the development of products and services with high social and economic value based on the reuse of public sector information.

Who can use it?
It’s open to professionals, businesses, institutional managers and any interested citizens in general.

How does it arise?

Datos.gob.es is part of the strategy of the Avanza2 Plan and Aporta Project which contribute to promoting openness and reuse of public sector information. Its aim is to rise awareness of the importance and value of this activity.

Who drives it?

It was born under the impulse of the Spanish Ministry of Territorial Policy and Public Administration and the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce, Government of Spain.
Being a direct management responsibility of the Ministry of State for Telecommunications and Information Society, attached to the last of these departments.

For more information visit datos.gov.es