A Fuller View

I am a little bit slow posting about this news from UK based Multimap, which is now part of the Microsoft family - Multimap is now tightly tied to Live Search in the UK - which is cool! Here’s some details from the official blog:

First things first, Multimap is now the lead consumer mapping experience for Live Search in the UK, and we’re proud to welcome all the UK users of Live Search Maps to Multimap.com. It may have been a while since you last used Multimap.com, but we hope that you’ll find all the great features that you’re used to, plus much more.

For those of you not familiar with Live Search Maps, and the Virtual Earth platform that powers it, check out the fabulous Bird’s Eye images, which are now available on Multimap.com. Unlike normal satellite and aerial imagery that is taken from directly above, Bird’s Eye images are captured by low-flying aircraft and are taken from a 45 degree angle, facing north, south, east and west directions to give a unique perspective.

Read the full blog post here OR better yet use the new and improved Multimap directly. I’ve always found Multimap to be one of the best UK focused mapping sites and was always an early innovator. Its great to see that they are improving the product and taking back ground from Google maps.

Today is a sunny, mild and bluster spring like day in London. We had a big rain storm blow through last night. For what ever reason I’ve been thinking about summer and holidays. Which reminded me about this travel piece I read in the Guardian ages ago about a company that rents VW Camper Vans - Seven Degree West - that have been fully kitted and sound way cool. Maybe this is just the ticket for our summer holiday. I hope that VW vans become available all over the world for holiday rentals and to inspire the beach bum in all of us.

This news - see Facebook ’sees decline in users’ - about Facebook in the UK brought a small wry smile to my face. Maybe I started a trend by quiting Facebook last month in an effort to find more time for “real social networking”!? I need to put together a definition of what I mean by real social networking - but in a nutshell what I mean it is networking offline in the real world with real people by phone or face-2-face.

Back to FB - I know the drop was only 5% which could really just be a case of a long and bad holiday hangover. Who knows? Or maybe there just is too much competition for out limited attention (see attention economy for more of an idea of what I mean) in the social networking space. I liked this table the BBC had on the top 10 social networking sites in the UK - BBC in at No 5, nice.

I am a few weeks late noting this news - that OpenAds raised $15.5 million in series B funding. The round was led by Axel Partners. That’s a significant round and only 6-7 months after raised $5 million in series A funding last summer. The company is London based, so I will see what I can find out any inside info about the companies’ plans not that they have a bigger bank account. With all the consolidation in the on-line ad technology space over the past 18 months - I can see a lot of opportunity for the open source strategy. Apparently, OpenAds have a new hosted service that is in beta - interesting.

There was an interesting piece in the Technology Guardian section last week about 192.com images that are very very sharp and have better resolution than Google maps (currently at least). The 192 image set is London only so far. This does indeed raise privacy concers and is related to the video I posted yesterday and ties into the wider discussion around online privacy - SEL has good post here.

I have mixed feelings about this - as sharp images are useful and can even be fun, but I can see the privacy concerns. In the UK, however, most people are probably photographed or on CCTV many many times a day anyway… It would be interesting to hear other people’s views and comments on this topic - so please comment if you have time.

Well, its only the middle of the work week and there has been a lot of interesting stories and posts already. More stuff than I can keep up with. Here are some of the tidbits I think are interesting…

No, Google Won’t Buy the NYT. But Google.Org Could - I like this mini-post form John Battle’s search blog. I completely agree, lets put and keep the best news organizations in a trust. Living in the UK you sort of take it for granted, but I gotta say the BBC rocks and papers like The Irish Times and The Guardian also very cool and not run to make a profit for share holders.

Search Stocks & The Stock Crash: GOOG, YHOO & MSFT - this post is over on SEL. My opinion is all 3 of the majors are solid. I’ve got to think ad dollar$ continue to go into search during a down turn year, but that probably display gets hurt… This means Google could fair a bit better overall but they still have to finish the DoubleClick deal and they are still way over valued. I would sell GOOG short, hold YHOO or buy if it dips under $17 and buy MSFT all the way its cheap :-). Disclaimer: do NOT trust my stock tips. This is just fun.

The parent company of WordPress - Automattic - secures B round funding - this report from the NYT. Great news. I love WordPress! Related to this is a post by Greg Sterling - Harnessing Blogs for Local - this one has got me thinking about new micro-publishing mash-up business ideas… More on that after a few more beers.

Enteprise search provider Endeca closed funding from SAP and Intel - this over on TC. This interesting in light of the MSFT FAST deal and the Sun MySQL deal. Doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but lets see what happens with Endeca. I keep wondering when will someone do a “redhat” version of open source Lucene?

Internet Trumps Print Directories in Britain - this post again fro Mr Sterling based on a neat report from UK based welovelocal. I Love it, lets recycle all those print directories! Save the trees.

Publishers’ vertical search can rival Google, says AOP forum - not sure I agree, but I have to say job well done to my buddy Simon Baptist who gave one of the presentations. My sources tell me he did a great job. Nice one!

After reading about the recent moves (or see below) in the US property site space I went over to Compete.com to compare some of the UK property sites.

Rightmove and Primelocation appear to be battling it out as the 2 big UK players. While start-up Globrix has quickly gained on Zoomf another start-up in this vertical - both of these I’ve written about before (see Zoomf Facebook post or Globrix investment post for more on these 2) . Note: this is only based on the sample size from Compete, but I would guess it gives a reasonable view.

Rightmove vs. Primelocation (Jan ‘08):

Globrix vs. Zoomf (Jan ‘08):

Follow-up Note: Here is an excellent comparison of all the UK property portals:

http://www.estateagencynews.co.uk/north_articles/bnorth0807.asp

And this from Primelocation:

What this [the comparison on estateagencynews] doesn’t tell you is the change in market share. Although we are clearly second place to Rightmove, Primelocation was the only portal to gain market share during 2007 which we primarily attribute to our television advertising campaigns (according to Hitwise).

Nothing new here, just some pieces and links that are interesting:

• Prediction markets at Google - Battelle post and PDF report link
• AltSearch piece on Google
• New UGC Local site in the UK from Greg Sterling
• AOL stuff - history (SEL), brand strategy (GS), how to fix/sell to YHOO (Silicon Alley Insider)
• CNET in trouble (TechCrunch)?
• Australia censorship (Scoble)
• 2nd Click post by Tacoda founder (AOL) and related 3rd page/2nd Click on Evan’s Ink

I got this via email today… So, simply here is the complete PR:

Next generation property search engine offers new free promotional opportunities for agents; site launch backed up by massive national advertising campaign in Jan 2008

Next generation property search engine Globrix (www.globrix.com) launches its BETA test site today, offering estate agents across the UK a way of breaking free from the conventions of traditional online listings sites. Globrix will enable agents to include their properties on the site automatically and for free, meaning they can promote the properties on their websites to a national audience without the costs and hassle traditionally associated with online listings.

Globrix will take a new approach to property search. Rather than charging agents to list properties on a centralised site, Globrix works like an internet search engine such as Google, automatically indexing the properties on agents’ websites in a searchable database. When a user searches on Globrix they are delivered links to relevant properties on the estate agent’s original site. In this way Globrix can deliver estate agents valuable web traffic direct to the properties on their website easily and for free.

Globrix is also bringing a new user experience to the property search market. Whilst traditional property listings sites have offered the ability to search by area, price and number of bedrooms, Globrix gives users a massive flexibility in the way they search:

• Price – rather than specifying a price bracket and being restricted by that throughout their search journey, Globrix users specify their price bracket using an intuitive slider control.
• Mapping – As well as searching via a traditional search results list, users can also view and search for properties matching their criteria on a map, meaning they can look for matching properties outside of their core search area.
• Filters – Once the initial set of search results has been delivered, users can filter the list of properties they’re looking at by a broad range of criteria such as property type (e.g. house, flat, maisonette etc), number of bathrooms and bedrooms, outside space (garden, roof terrace, balcony etc), keywords (Victorian, conservatory, wooden floors etc), stations (train and tube) or tenure (freehold or leasehold)

In addition to the free listing available on the site, Globrix is also offering a limited range of paid advertising opportunities for agents on the site. Agents can purchase location keywords, for example to secure a ‘Property of the Week’ slot for a particular area or a ‘featured agent’ banner. The site will also carry limited banner and contextual advertising for related property services such as mortgages, insurance, home decor, and retail. The limited advertising inventory has been designed to give maximum exposure to advertisers with minimal disruption to the ease of use of the website. Further value will be delivered to agents through the regular publication of a wide range of statistics around user’s search behaviour, showing how house hunters are using the site.

The site is launching in Beta today and properties are being added every day with near-total UK coverage expected by early 2008. Backed by national media group News International (who own The Times, The Sunday Times, The Londonpaper, News of the World, The Sun and their associated websites), the site will benefit from a massive UK marketing and advertising campaign intended to take Globrix into the top tier of property websites by number of users within months.

Agents can be automatically listed on the site using Globrix’s web search technology, however, the site also welcomes data feeds from agents in a broad range of formats (Rightmove format, xml, RSS, webservices etc.) Agents interested in being listed on the site or in buying advertising should contact sales@globrix.com.

Daniel Lee, CEO of Globrix, said: “On the rest of the internet it is free to include your website on a search engine so why should property sites pay for the privilege?

“We’re looking to create a service that offers the best to both agents and consumers. For agents we’re offering free inclusion and links directly back to their websites, for consumers we’re offering an impartial search service backed up by an easy-to-use interface and cutting edge search technology.

”With the backing of a partner like News International we’ve got access to the resources and expertise to build a significant audience in a short period of time. We want to work with agents to develop Globrix as a resource for them to access this audience in the most effective way they can.”

-ends-

The new UK based property search engine Globrix has recently move from private beta to public. This site looks like it has the potential to shake up the online UK property market or at least how consumers search online. One to watch. Note; I am hoping ot get an interview with the Globrix CEO line up for Jan and will do a site review in early ‘08 as well.