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Category: Innovation (page 7 of 8)

March 2, 2010

Dawn In America- Part 3-Can We Educate the Masses (For Profit?)

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Information can be a glow in the  darkness. Traditional higher education models are losing market share to cheaper education delivery systems.    Young people now have the opportunity to learn the very same principles for free that are taught to the people they may eventually hire to run their businesses.  I think this free market trend will eventually overtake the traditional post-secondary education models.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find a fully-funded college education available, competitive with some of the best traditional colleges, in the not-too-distant future.

I can see a future where the ultimate end-users of that education (private industry),  see the benefit to developing accredited curricula, and offering them to current and potential employees, at a greatly reduced cost (maybe for free).  I’m not just talking about an MBA from “Mutual of Omaha University“.  Think “University of the American Way“, delivering bachelor’s degrees to the masses- graduates might receive checks from the alumni association rather than sending checks to it.

Education via extension isn’t a new idea.  This ACC school has been granting degrees, to off-campus students, since the 1940s.  Online education is now a pop culture phenomenon. If this educational delivery system grows like I think it will, how can the real estate brokerage or mortgage lending communities profit?

The idea that education can get cheaper (moving towards free) and more readily available will be an irreversible trend.  No longer can we hide behind the phrase “proprietary information” or “specialized knowledge”.  Consumers may educate themselves about how to get a VA condo complex approved and find that my “specific knowledge”, while helpful, doesn’t permit me to charge a one point premium to my lesser educated competitors.  My specific expertise DOES drastically reduce my marketing costs, allowing me to retain more profit than my competitors.

Information can be exported inexpensively. Imagine holding a webinar online, explaining the benefits of owning a Costa Rican vacation property, to German pharmaceutical executives.  Then, imagine holding a different webinar, to a group of retired Americans in Costa Rica, about investing in mortgages so that those Germans could borrow their money and buy from those properties.  Would that add Read more

February 24, 2010

Swanepoel’s Trends Report is not useless. It makes a dandy prop!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathy’s listing Friday, a classic North Central Phoenix luxury home. I was shooting interiors for her today, and saw this as a part of her staging:

Building the single-property web site for the home, tonight, I realized that in six months or fewer, I’ll be repurposing content for single-property iPhone/iPad apps, as well. I doubt you will have read anything like that in any repackaged regurgitant from self-styled real estate experts, but it’s where we’re all headed.

February 15, 2010

Res ipsa loquitur — wirelessly: Mobile phone use soars.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Via LiveScience.com:

Separate reports out last week show that mobile phone use is soaring in the United States and globally, and data moving across mobile networks is expected to grow dramatically over the next four years.

One report by comScoreMobiLens shows that Americans want to do more than talk on their phones, and they’re willing to pay for it. A total of 234 million people age 13 and older in the U.S. used mobile devices in December 2009. In the past year, smartphone ownership increased from 11 percent to 17 percent of mobile users, while 3G phone ownership increased from 32 percent to 43 percent and unlimited data plan subscriptions rose from 16 percent to 21 percent.

Every month, comScore measures how often people use their phones to send text messages, access the Internet, play games, use downloaded applications, or “apps,” check their Facebook profile, watch videos and listen to music.

In the latest comScore report, all of these activities showed an increase from the previous report period. Though most of the increases are modest because the survey was conducted over a short 90-day period, texting and visiting a social networking site or blog increased more than 2 percent.

The report also reveals users are shifting from the more utilitarian phone operating systems toward more media-focused operating systems that have more functionality. While RIM, the operating system for BlackBerry devices, remained the leading mobile smartphone operating system in the U.S at 41.6 percent, it saw its market share drop slightly along with Microsoft and Palm.

Meanwhile, Apple, which owns a quarter of the mobile market and is ranked second, saw a gain in popularity for its media friendly iPhone platform. Likewise, Google’s Android operating system surged in popularity with the launch of Motorola’s Droid in November, allowing the company to double its market share in just three months. Like the iPhone, the Droid is built for multimedia content.

Separate research released by Cisco estimates that global mobile data traffic has increased by 160 percent over the past year to 90 petabytes per month, or the equivalent of 23 million DVDs. The company projects that this figure will increase Read more

February 10, 2010

Google releases a Buzz which may be a BuzzKill for others

by

Realtor, Urban Jedi

Author website

I’m sure we can all agree that Google is big. Huge in fact. From what I understand they had a Super Bowl add this year. Who Dat? Google Dat! But everything they do is not always a hit. When was the last time you checked out Knol?

Moving along. This morning the buzz around the web is that Google has introduced the Twitter/Facebook killer with Google Buzz. Poor Twitter gets killed ever once and awhile and so is apparently a cat of nine lives on it’s final death bed. Just don’t tell that to the 14 bazillion users out there tweeting at this very moment.

One big part of this domination tool though is Geolocation.

At first look, Google Buzz reminds me of Pownce. A twitter-like social network that came along about the same time twitter became popular and allowed your to share files, photos and other media in your updates. Pownce, of course, with many of the others have fallen by the statusphere wayside or are still being populated with home listing updates via Ping.fm from Realtors trained by geniuses that tell them the more spam they have in their nature, the better their homes will sell.

Back to Google. Here’s a look at all the Buzz from the release video:

I have not been able to log into the Gmail inbox interface yet, but I did have a chance to take a look at the mobile version on my iPhone. Now here’s where it might get interesting despite what Google’s biggest competitors think.

My first look on the iPhone. The top two nav features are “Following”, which is who’s in your network and “Nearby”, anyone checking in around your given location. Which is great considering mobile home page is location aware and features “near me now” already. After giving Buzz approval to locate you via GPS what you find is something that looks like this… and where it gets interesting is in the layers:

Unlike Twitter it’s all about location when your take a look at what’s happening nearby. Comments to each update can be threaded.

Like Foursquare a drop down menu of nearby pinpoints will allow Read more

February 2, 2010

iPad observation #9: I went digging through the heap of festering garbage that is the Vook and came home with an education.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Vain though it may be, tonight I looked in on my own past posts on the Vook. The writing was better than I remembered it, just exactly my kind of fun with words, but I do think I have been overly… forgiving… of this sleazy little… not vampire, even writ small… this skeezy little mosquito of a wannabe undead bloodsucker left over from the last century.

I am told that my swats at that mosquito incite much trashing and weeping amongst the very-publicly-aggrieved in the twitset — expressing, it would seem, the vitally-important necessity of brazenly butt-bussing besieged billionaires — but the plain truth is that I have not derided and denounced the Vook with anything like the rigor and vigor that this kind of epistemological emergency demands. One more way in which I feel myself blessed to have had the iPad to think about, this past week, is that thinking about the iPad and what it can and will do illustrate pellucidly what the Vook can’t and won’t do.

What the Vook actually does is lame and stupid. And while everything it does is fundamentally unnecessary, nevertheless, everything it does is very simple to design and to program. I do not know of anything the Vook does — neither the I-think-discontinued dedicated device nor the inevitable-fallback iPhone apps nor the “simulated” scenes of same found on the Vook.tv web site — that cannot be done on an ordinary web site. Easily. By anyone. With no programming or Javascript, and serving only as the broker in the embedded Flash video client/server transactions. In other words, if you can manage your own WordPress site, you can make “video books” that suck just as perfectly as a genuine Vook.

The sublime truth is, you can undoubtedly make much better Vooks than Brad Inman can, not alone because, if you have resolved to make the effort to Vook what you know, you’re going to make the effort to make your Vook — your gnuVook? — riveting and unassailable. That just by itself is tremendously exciting to me.

Now imagine every passion-driven web site out there re-envisioned as an Read more

January 31, 2010

iPad observation #7: When you’ve built a product that turns whole worlds upside down — what happens next?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve got more to say, but I’m running out of Sunday. Here’s what’s next:

The iPad is the first move in the disintermediation — disintegration — of dozens of well-established institutions in our society.

Vendors of mediocre crap like Windows computers and Android cell phones are done for. Established on-line retailers are finished. Broadcasting in the spectrum is kaput. Best of all, the union-organized ignorami called schoolteachers will be put out of work.

In a circumstance such as I describe, what would you expect to happen?

My answer? Rotarian Socialism.

When the mediocre feel threatened, they pass laws. When the established face disestablishment, they pass laws. And when the ignorant get organized, they pass laws.

If anyone besides me could clearly foresee what a disruptive influence the iPad is going to be, they would already be clamoring for protection from the awful consequences of free choice.

Here’s the good news: Almost nobody can see what is going to happen. They might be myopic, but at least they’re very proud. They will insist — one may hope until it is too late — that Apple cannot be doing what it clearly is doing.

The bigger threat, in the near term, would be the Antitrust Laws, which say that your company can grow as big as it wants, as long as it’s really mediocre like Microsoft. But if you’re growing because you are satisfying — ecstatifying! — consumer demand, the Feds have to come in and bust your company up.

Here’s hoping that everything that matters in this revolution of the mind will have happened before the Rotarian Socialists can marshall their defenses.

And on that note, I will shut up.

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January 31, 2010

OK, OK, I finally get iT!

by

Realtor, Peripatetic Iconoclast

Author website

iPad is the real estate kiosk. I found this leaked video from December. The earth moved for me when I saw the guy change the kitchen cabinet finish. The 3D CAD interior design idea has been around for a while, but now you can put it in HER purse so SHE can redecorate your listing while waiting at the car wash. Then we go viral from the app store. She can then collaborate with all her friends and they all can redecorate my listing. One of them will buy it or redecorate some other house on my IDX site and buy that. Now I see.

January 31, 2010

iPad observation #6: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Oscar Wilde said that, the best kind of philosophy — bonum, verum, pulchrum — the good, the true and the beautiful.

I don’t hate it that we are monkeys biologically, genetically. But I hate it when people act like monkeys. Despite everything else that is going on, last week we caught a glimpse of the fully-human life. The prospect for an iPad-like device to take over education is cause enough to celebrate.

To the unchained human mind!

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January 31, 2010

iPad observation #5: Linking frees slaves, sometimes, but the future of mobile real estate is unknown to attorneys from New York City.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact: I’m pretty much disgusted with the RE.net — which denomination I quarried with my own hands, back in my early days on the apellation trail. By now, just about everything looks to me like hoke, smoke, hustle and jive — smirking vendorsluts and the clueless suckers who can’t stop themselves from pridefully posturing about having procured their own plundering. I know that’s not fair — or not entirely fair — but it often seems to me, lately, that everything I have ever hated about the real estate business is successfully infesting the on-line world.

This will fail, all of it, in the end, and I’ll say why in detail when I get time. But for now I persevere by holding my nose and holding my ground. Whether it is the seemingly harmless simian chatter of net.monkeys desperate to prove their ape-titude to all the other net.monkeys or the craven schemes of hack vendors looking for just one more gullible fool to make their month, I’m well sick of it all. I haven’t looked at a feed-reader in many months, and my Twitterverse consists of my Best Beloved, Cathleen, and Teri Lussier.

The rest of the net, however, is a different thing. I’ve been following Apple tablet posts for months, and The Unofficial Apple Weblog is the only blog other than BloodhoundBlog whose client I have on my iPhone. On and off last week, and in greater earnest today, I’ve been looking for decent iPad posts from the RE.net.

Not hard to foresee, but Agent Shortbus doesn’t get it. Typically insipid kibitzing with no real understanding of the revolution the iPad will bring to the entire universe of commerce.

But, alas, the Shortbus set doesn’t have the vision to come up with a truly idiotic argument against using mobile devices to market real estate. This honor was earned by Rob Hahn, an attorney in New York City who doubles as a vendorslut consultant or a consultant to vendorsluts or some bizarre combination of the two. Realtors follow his musings religiously, apparently because they confuse being an attorney with being a Realtor, and Read more

January 31, 2010

iPad observation #4: Looking for a smart way to connect with your clients in a pull-based marketing world? Update your iPhone/iPad app.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I give away a lot of killer marketing ideas here, but I never worry about the competitive implications.

For one thing, I believe to the core of me that it’s raining soup, that wealth is pouring out of the skies and almost none of us is smart enough to reap that bounty.

But, second, I have learned through years of experience that, no matter how good my ideas are, almost nobody will ever follow through on them. We learned to sell, most of us, from people who believed to their cores that real money comes from laziness and lies. My way of marketing looks too much like work, I surmise, for people to adopt it in big numbers.

So much the better for me, I guess, although, to be frank, I would rather see Realtors doing more to earn the business — and the trust — of their clients.

In any case, here’s a way of thinking about marketing my way, a style of salesmanship based on integrity, transparency, follow-through and client satisfaction.

So: Start here: Build an iPhone/iPad app for your business. (See there? I just lost almost everybody!) The app has to be mission-critical and laser-focused on what your clients really need. Not — with emphasis — more idiotic self-promotion. If you’re not delivering something of value — in the estimation of your target-marketed end-users — you’re wasting your time.

Then get it on their iPhones and iPads. It ain’t easy, so you have to do it relentlessly. Ideally, everyone who can be expected to use you in the future — and to refer you to their friends and family members — should have your app on their iPhone or iPad.

Now you have the perfect means of staying in contact with those folks going forward. I’m not talking social networking, and my thinking is that drip marketing is probably a waste of effort. If they don’t unsubscribe, they’re going to ignore you except when they need you. It’s a pull-based marketing world, and your clients only really want to hear from you when they have a real estate need — not when you have a Read more

January 31, 2010

iPad observation #3: If your baby — or a caveman — can figure out how to use the iPad, the user-interface works

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is from an email exchange with Teri Lussier:

Here is the computer for the rest of us:

Imagine that civilization has collapsed. It’s happened before.

Now imagine a computer something like the iPad (but durable enough to have survived and solar-powered or whatever).

The ideal user-interface could be put to use by whomever finds that computer, with zero assumptions or expectations about what that person does or does not know about conceptual volitionality.

It will be babies (crawlers, not toddlers) who will tell us — by their interaction with it — if the iPad is there yet.

(FWIW, this is one of the things I’ve been waiting for all my life, a computer that can train its end-user literally from scratch — from nothing — from the complete collapse of all abstraction-based learning. If civilization ever does collapse again, a computer like this will deliver a much faster renaissance to the survivors.)

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January 31, 2010

iPad observation #1: The iPad is the computer for the rest of us

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cathleen bought her mother an iPhone just lately. Aloma Collins is 88, and her health is slowly failing. She’s in an awful spot, unable to do much and yet bored to tears.

The iPhone has become a bright spot on her horizon. Cathy loaded it with some apps, and Aloma has since figured out how to add others. She’s big on email and card games, so far. I don’t know if she’s surfing the web, but you can be sure she will be in due course.

When the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, it was advertised as being “The computer for the rest of us.” This was true at the time, when DOS was a ubiquitous zombie wraith afflicting the earth like the undead Unix. And Windows has sucked so perfectly, over the years, that the Mac segment of the computing marketplace has always had ample gloating space.

But what about Aloma? What about my own mother, who has so far managed to reject two EZ-to-use computing paradigms?

The iPad is the answer, or the first step toward an answer. For everyone who gets frustrated by the arcane modalities of the PC world, the iPad offers instant results, instant gratification, instant satisfaction.

Many of our ideas about computing are based in a puritanical reading of Dante’s Inferno: “How can you hope to enter data processing heaven without first having trundled your way through data processing hell?” This is hugely satisfying to many of us living the wired life, especially Windows and Unix geeks, and most especially Microsoft Certified Cash Sinks or whatever the reformat-that-hard-disk cadre is called.

To whom is it unsatisfying? How about the 50% of America that has so far managed to resist the wired life? How about Cathleen’s mother, and my own? How about your Nana? How about her grandchildren? The iPad is the computer for people who do not want to have to be told how to use a computer — the computer for the rest of us.

I’ve been thinking about and arguing about this idea for days, but the iPad is igniting a scenius all across the net. Here’s a post from Read more

January 27, 2010

The Apple iPad is a category-cataclysm and no one knows it yet: Double-thinking Steve Jobs and his double-suss of the hi-tech marketplace

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s the question that will appear in the deep-think mainstream media analyses of the brand new Apple iPad:

How can hardware vendors answer Apple’s new tablet?

Guess what? It’s a dumb question.

Slightly brighter lights might ponder this, instead:

How can Amazon compete with the new iBook store?

And: Yes: It’s another dumb question.

Here’s why: With the iPad, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has managed to double-suss the entire hi-tech marketplace. After 30-plus years of being ridiculed by nerdy dipshits like Bill Gates, Apple is poised to take over everything that matters in the new economy.

And, as far as I can tell, no one so far has even figured out what they’re doing.

Why is it that all of the supposed iPhone killers have fared so badly in the marketplace? Because the iPhone is not a cell-phone. It’s a software experience packaged as a cell-phone. Phone vendors can compete well enough with the actual phone, but they have nothing at all to offer as a software experience. Wannabe iPhone clones only have apps at all because iPhone app developers port their products to BlackBerry, Palm and Droid devices.

And if you’re about to get huffy about hardware or performance or open-source or whatever, stand down. We’re not done yet.

The true fact is, the iPhone isn’t a hardware product, and it’s only a software experience from the point of view of end users.

What is the iPhone, really? It’s the user-interface for the iTunes App Store. For iTunes generally, of course, but mainly for the App store.

So what is the iPad, really? It’s portable retail store-front for everything sold at the iTunes store.

Apps. Movies. Music. Books. And now newspapers and magazines.

The iPad is not a tablet computer, so all of the supposed iPad killers that will be introduced in the coming months will fail, just as all the iPhone killers have failed. Hardware vendors will kill themselves eclipsing the iPad’s hardware in every possible way — and they will fail dismally in the marketplace.

The iPad will be a great hardware experience coupled with the typically-superb Apple software experience. That goes without saying. But none of that will matter.

Here’s what matters: The Read more

January 27, 2010

Apple tablet computer announcement liveblogging now…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

…at Engadget.

It’s called the iPad…

Dear Brad Inman, while you weren’t Vooking, Steve Jobs stole your lunch: “Embedded video inside of articles that can be played.”

Don’t weep, though. It’s a Kindle-killer, too, as expected:

How free does information want to be? The marginal value of digital content is the discounted perceived cost of the hassle and risk of obtaining an acceptable free alternative. Why don’t books sell? They’re priced too high. Steve Jobs will take care of that, just as he did with MP3s.

Note to Richard Riccelli: “You can change the font… whatever you want.”

USB, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 3G:

An unlimited data plan from AT&T for $29.99 a month.

How much would you pay? Starts at $499…

ATTN: ZipForms, DocuSign, FlexMLS: Get on this NOW!

No word on multi-tasking, use of the iPad as a phone or syncing/pairing with the iPhone.

But: It rocks as an internet device, with Numbers, Pages and Keynote from iWorks available. Listers can use Keynote to sway sellers, and Buyer’s Agents can live without paper. This is a rockin’ device for any salesperson.

Bottom line: Wicked cool.

New York Times, top-middle of the front page. Take that, Obama!

Kindle? Dead. Nook? Dead. Vook? Dead. Zune? Double-dead.

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January 21, 2010

They are Smarter than you, Better than you and they Know More than you

by

Mortgage Systems Samurai

Author website

I’m a mortgage guy.  Mortgage guys (and gals) will often talk about how highly they regard and respect the professionalism and expertise of Real Estate Agents, and they paint thise adoration with a very broad brush.

Real Estate Agents have a big ‘ole brush as well as they sing the praises and glory of how efficient, communicative and quickly Mortgage folks do their job to ensure a speedy and worry free transaction.

(The sarcasm should be about waist deep by now)

And you know what? (this applies to both groups)  They are Smarter than you – at marketing to their services to thier prospects, they are Better than you – at doing their job, and they Know More than you do – about their business (most of the time!).  Here’s the kicker….we have the exact same clientele.

Here’s a question: What can you learn from someone that’s not in your line of work that will make you better, smarter and cause you to innovate?

A couple of years ago I read a book called the Medici Effect that quite effectively makes the case that true innovation is realized at the intersection of different disciplines.  There are no new ideas, only new ways of looking at things that already exist…maybe just not in your world.

If you think about it, mortgage types and agent types are different disciplines.  Some people can pull off both and make a good living at it, for the most part however, these are two different personality types.

The very best in one field of the Real Estate profession is rarely the very best in the other field as well.  We’re not talking about having competence in either discipline.

I’m talking about being cutting edge, innovative, kick-ass, gonzo marketing fools.  This isn’t vanilla agent or loan officer stuff we’re talking about.  I’m talking about raising the bar and being a thought leader in your market.

For the past few years I have belonged to Vistage, an Executive Coaching and Business Leadership group that promotes “better leaders – decisions – results”.

My group is made up of 12-15 CEOs  from different businesses and industries and we meet once a Read more

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Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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