Bloggers covering the Inman Connect

Are you neither at the Inman Real Estate Connect in San Francisco this week?

No problem, thanks to a number of believes you will be able to get a grip of what is  happening over there.

Here is a summary of sources where you can find info.

What is Real Estate Connect?  (website)
This is the main event in the USA (global?) if you interested in the use of IT in the residential part of the industry organized by Inman News. (For the commercial part Realcomm is the place.) For the 2007 event in San Francisco it will draw upwards of 1500 attendees. There are two of those events per year. The upcoming one will be in New York early 2008.

Focus for Connect SF 2007 (website)  
The focus will be;

• Are you tapped into the latest technology that can help your business grow?
• Do you know what the best and brightest are doing to be successful?
• Are you ready for what the future holds for the real estate industry?

"Make sure you're "connected" and have the most up-to-date information on what you need to make your company a success by attending Real Estate Connect SF 2007." You find the (the impressive) program in PDF version here.

Videos from the event
Inman TV will air a number of videos from the event.

Starting of with "Glenn Kelman Keynote at Bloggers Connect". A great video about the behind the scene experience regarding 60 minutes.

Photos from the event...
...is found here, here and here.

Want to 'gather' with other people about Connect SF?
Check out there LinkedIn and Facebook groups.
Quite a few people also updates their Twitter for example here and here. 

Bloggers reporting from Connect SF
Below are some of the blogs I've found covering the event.

Blogging systems
Is doing a tremendously work blogging, check this one out.

1000watt
5 observations after the first day.

Bloodhound
Greg is always worth reading, here a some notes from him on the Inman event.

BHI
For example, summarizing the key note session.

Future of real estate marketing
Joel, who is also running the show, has started to summarize the event. I'm sure there will be more to come.

Zillow
Reporting from the Blogger Connect and much more.

Oodle
A post about Re.net bloggers.

Realty Thoughts
A number of postings, for example one about the key session and NARs new strategy.

From killer app to major Web platform

Found a great article today at CNET about taking the step from killer app to major web platform.

Report from Realcomm (or "where are the blogs?")

I have only managed to find three reports from the Realcomm conference in Boston earlier this month.

One from founder Jim Young, where he states it to have been "the best ever".
Then an article from ITworld and one from eWeek.

Are you aware of any blogging about Realcomm 2007?
Trying to get an overview of what went on at Realcomm using blogs has been quite hard... to say a least. Have only found 2 (?) post about it.

A pre-post from one of the speakers, Marc Krejci.
One post from AdvantageWorks.

I assume it will be much easier to follow the upcoming Inman Connect SF 2007 conference. They even has a two day pre-conference for the bloggers. They also have LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter projects running.  Finally, they have a "10 things to do before Connect".

Needless to say, but it seems that the residential part of the industry is way ahead of the commercial part when it comes to being early adopters.

Raising the bar of web development

For anyone involved in web projects it's interesting to follow the development of services that are really raising the bar of what has been done before. I believe there are two interesting areas to follow right now; Web Office and Application Creation.

As a coincidence two different blogs today have put together overview of those.

Web Office
Those are the ones aiming to (in the long run) compete with Microsoft Office, for example Googles Docs & Spreadsheet and ZoHo. The Read and Write blog has a great overview in this post.

Application creation 
Not an application itself, rather a platform to build your own application without programming skills. Read more about it this post by the Techcrunch blog.

Visiting New York

 No matter what you do, there is always a need to look at your business from a different perspective. One way to do this, is to change environment and see how business is conducted elsewhere.

For this reason Datscha has spend a couple of days in New York meeting up with excellent people to hear their story and exchange experiences. It has been indeed rewarding and in the upcoming week I will write some posts about it.

It is also very rewarding to show the Datscha service to someone not used to doing business in Sweden since it normally 'blow their mind'. Firstly, due to the fact that so much information could be gathered about the property market. Secondly, their is no equivalent to a web-based DCF module over here.

And who doesn't enjoy such a positive reaction?   ;-)

Realcomm anounces the Digie Award winners

Earlier today the winners of the Realcomm "Digie Award" was announced. Jim Young and his team have once again narrowed down the winners in 19 categories. As always an impressive work. Add to that 4 "Digital Impact Awards".

You find the complete list here.

My side of the story
Since most of the winners (fair to say all) are unknown to someone in Sweden I've a hard time to comment on any of them. That  excludes the winner of "Most Innovative Technology - General" category, which is Microsoft windows Vista.

Since most of the winners (fair to say all) are unknown to someone in Sweden I've a hard time to comment on any of them. That  excludes the winner of "Most Innovative Technology - General" category, which is Microsoft windows Vista.

In my point, the most innovative has been the growth of Office 2.0 applications, like ThinkFree and Zoho, showing that the web could be used in a much more powerful way than most people believe. 

Realcomm
Realcomm is the event to visit if you are interested in the impact of IT in the real estate industry. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to the show this year (been there three times, for example in 2005). However, some 1 500 other did.

During the last year I have learned about the Inman Connect events (haven't visited any of them) and I my understanding is that the former is more on the commercial part of the industry, and the latter on the residential part.

How to survive a major development

My blog activity has been low for a longer period (quite an understatement) due to a massive work load since we (read Datscha) had a major release on the 20th of may. Not just a release or upgrade, we're talking about a complete new platform.

Anyone being through such a technical project know the scale of it. Below is a screenshot from the Property Analysis module, where the user is able to calculate the value of a commercial property using a cashflow model. (If you're interested in testing our service, just drop me a line.)

The release has been a great success, both technically and from a user perspective. Being the Product Manager through such a project is for sure mental roller coster. One of the most challenging aspects, in the later stage of the project, is to keep track of bugs and enhancements that are needed to be done prior to release.

Too many MS Excel spreadsheets
Like in the property industry there seems to be too many Excel spreadsheets also in the IT industry. To use Excel to track bugs works fine in a smaller project, but it will quickly be cumbersome in a larger project. Instead use a 'Bug and Issues tracking software'. Over there years have tried a handful an no one comes even close to Jira from the Australian company Atlassian. Through it's simplicity and well designed interface it's almost fun (?) to work with.

Screenshots save time
One great feature in Jira is the possibility to easy attach a screenshot to an 'issue', which indeed helps the developers to understand how the, for example, enhancement is supposed to work. So the next step is to have a solution to easily take screenshots and to add a note or highlight a specific part. A great solution for this is SnagIT from TechSmith.

The simplicity to take a screenshot of a smaller part of the screen, add a note and put in an issue has saved us hundreds of hours of communication. In other words, a better product in a shorter time.

Properazzi - A pan-European property search

Looking for properties in Europe, but having a hard time to figure out the worth of money? Then Properazzi will be a great starting point.

Officially launched today (after two years of technical development) the Barcelona located company has listen 1,8 million properties in 45 European countries.

Properazzi uses a crawler-based search engine technology to find listings at 1000s of estate and publisher sites across Europe.

Money worth over the border
According to Tom Dibaja, Outreach Specialist at Properazzi, they "don't at this stage aim to compete against national property portals. We’re more focused on property search more transparent, and making the maximum amount of information available to consumers. I think that once these features are more developed, many people buying a house in Sweden, for example, would like to know what their money would be worth in, say, the other Nordic countries, or even other parts of Europe."

I believe this a great idea. It's hard to figure out what are the national real estate portals if your are looking outside of your own country.

A look at Sweden
The Nordic region is for quite obvious reasons (I've to admit) not a primary region in a starting phase. However, Properazzi does have listings even in Sweden.

Even a red house with white garbles! (The very trademark of a house in the Swedish countryside.)  The listing currently are mostly from non-Swedish listings sites.

Founded by a successful team
In terms of founding Properazzi is venture-capital funded by Mangrove Capital Partners (who were originally behind Skype) and private investor Gil Penchina (eBay, Wikia, etc). Managing director, Yannick Laclau ,runs the business from Barcelona in Spain.

More reading at FoREM, Inman and Renthusiast.

CoStar acquires Propex; great news for believers

For a believer there are few things more rewarding then seeing other believers succeed.

Therefore my first thought when seeing that CoStar acquires Propex (for 22 million USD) goes to the believers behind the scene. People like Paul Marples (managing director) and Colin Barber (founder and commercial director). Both who I've been fortune to meet up with a number of times. True believers in the use of IT in the real estate industry .

My second thought is that the entire market of IT suppliers in the European real estate industry will profit from CoStar's continued expansion over here. The more (market-) money they spend here; the more attention the industry will pay. Which is the greatest thing, having people in the real estate industry starting to think that there may be improvements to be done in the way they are conducting the business. Still It's not about competion in the market place, it's about creating a market.

CoStar    (www.costar.com)
Founded in 1987 by Andrew C. Florance (now days the President & Chief Executive Officer) the company has created the largest researched online database of commercial property information. Their 1 000 researchers have inspected over 2 million properties, mainly in the US. The company is traded on NASDAQ, with $158.9 million in revenues (year-end 2006) and is indeed financial strong with "$158.1 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, and no long-term debt".  More financial data is found here.

CoStar in Europe
CoStar has acquired 15 companies over the last 20 years starting of in Europe in 2003 by acquiring FOCUS, "a major U.K. provider of web-based access to verified commercial lease comparables, available space, requirements, tenants, planning information and photos across the United Kingdom".  Three months ago, in December 2006, CoStar also acquired Grecam, a provider of commercial property information, research and analytics in France. Read more about CoStar in Europe here.

Propex  (www.propex.co.uk)
Propex was formed in 1999 by Colin Barber, and really took of in year 2000 when the 18 largest investors in the UK joined forces in order to increase liquidity, transparency and efficiency across the real estate market by operating an electronic introduction and marketing platform. According to this article from, I assume PropertyWeek, Propex by year end in April 2006 had  a turnover of £1,7 million (3,3 million USD), with a recorded loss. However, the business seems to have increased substantiality during 2006 since the CoStar press release (in February 2007) talks about "... approximately $5 million in annual revenues...". Find out more about Propex seeing this video and reading. Paul Marples, Managing Director at Propex,  is from now also CoStar Group's senior strategist for developing an international investment sales platform.

Source: thanks Andrew Waller (Remit Consulting) for making me aware of this deal.

Google Apps is not about features

The 22th of february could be remembered as the G-day, the day Google released their Apps Premium service including already avaliable products. However, in this package they are free of ads, larger storage and tech support. See more coverage at TechCrunch or Cnet.

The most interesting point for me isn't a feature comparison with the Microsoft package (there is still a long way to go), which has been around since 1989, but more the fact that more and more business are moving to using the Internet as a platform for their business (and that Google starts charging for their services). Listen to a number of large business on their view of G-Apps.

One aspect often raised is if it's secure enough to have ones data on, for example, Googels servers. Find out more at those Zdnet blogs entries, the first  and the other.