Tales from the Techside

Earth to RE, can you read me?
The teams have divvied up.
On one side you have a mishmosh of broker websites, the occasional MLS public website (all hail the HAR experience, and curse having to discuss endlessly how to recreate it on 1/100th the budget), some good (some bad) IDX vendors, and ROOST. Representing billions […]

In a recent meeting with the guys from CRT, Mark Lesswing explained to my boss and several other key people in the local market about developments in the RETS standard and a recent decision by some of the biggest 3rd party data aggregators to agree upon a data sharing standard. Loosely named GTZY (or GITZY […]

Quick micropost here. I am curious to know if anyone out there is doing anything with Faceforce?
Picture a utility to integrate your social network (facebook) with your Customer Relationship Management. Like LinkedIn, it simply piggybacks off an existing data source, to create your ‘network.’ Instead of using email addresses as LinkedIn does, […]

So the blogosphere has been lighting up with references to the recent launch of Roostsm. It has been quite interesting to read the reactions to the product on many levels.
Having played some small part in helping to bring this product to market, I though I would make an effort to give a description of the […]

This is one of those times I get to use this as a platform to appeal for insight. Rather than me providing information I would like to recieve perspectives on how your association, mls, company etc. is handing auction properties. If you don’t feel comfortable leaving a public comment then leave your comment and just […]

This is undeniably cool. It is not like most of us haven’t experienced a web conference on some level… but not something on this scale. According to their website announcement:
“Singularity is the first large-scale online web conference in the world. Singularity is over 100 of the world’s top web visionaries, developers, designers, […]

Since he will almost certainly not publish my follow up comment to his intro post, I will publish it here.
First of all, proclaiming your blog as great doesn’t make it so. Secondly, we hardly need a self-congratulatory vitriolic venue to vent our frustrations at anyone… that is what yelp and other professional resources are […]

The National Association of REALTORS® put out a provocative new website last week. http://www.housingmarketfacts.com/.
I will address the ‘bad’ first.
It is barely a ’site,’ and can much more accurately be described as a launch page with a few paragraphs of new content and then a number of links to existing NAR services through their […]

This industry amazes me sometimes.
When I first traveled to a native fishing reservation off the northwest coast of BC in 1980 for the first of what was to be many glorious summers, I was immediately struck by the curious cultural echo. The music that I was really into 3 years before was popular there […]

Pretty cool.The Eye-Fi card won the Last Gadget Standing competition at CES 2008. Wi-fi meet memory, memory meet wi-fi.
I’m still not sure what I might want to do with it, but I am sure I can think of something. Direct applications for real estate are a bit narrow. Sure, you can send your pics of […]