BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Technology (page 6 of 60)

August 1, 2011

Get rich fighting crime! Save the girl — and make big money doing it — by correcting one simple error in your thinking.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The pitch…

That’s a sweet offer in the headline, don’t you think? It’s like Batman meets Ironman, but it’s all real — achievable now, no super-human powers required.

Not enough? You want more?

How’s this?

I can show you how to all-but-eliminate every sort of street crime.

I can show you how to protect any real estate or personal property you own from theft, mayhem, mishap or from simple maintenance oversights.

I can show you how to resolve almost every kind of civil dispute — without courts, without attorneys — and usually without rancor.

I can show you how to perfect your sales praxis to an amazing state of efficiency.

Hell, I can even increase your chance of successfully hooking-up at the singles bar.

I can cut your commute time, maximize your work-day productivity and save you from getting Aunt Whatshername’s name wrong when you see her.

Watch me: I can show you how to create a brand new trillion-dollar industry that will spin off dozens of start-ups as it is aborning and hundreds more later on.

I can show you how to mine an incredible new source of vast, uncountable wealth, a source no one has ever thought of before. I can put you there, at the dawn of a new age of human productivity — a pioneer, a prospector, and ultimately a tycoon in a brand new way of making money.

As you gaze upon that incredible motherlode of riches — knowing that there are unfathomable trillions more buried within it — I have one simple question to ask you:

To gain access to those riches — no fear of crime, no more petty lawsuits, better closing skills on and off the job, plus hundreds of new businesses, each one throwing off astounding new opportunities — would you be willing to correct one simple error in your thinking?

Are you willing to consider the proposition? Stay tuned…

 
The moth, the cat and the ontological nature of error…

Oh, good grief! Was there a fifty-cent word in that subhead?

There was, alas.

The good news is that, if you can hang in there, and if you have the guts to change a fundamental error in your thinking, I Read more

July 26, 2011

Introducing Displet RETS / IDX: How I Spent My Summer Vacation….and the Following 2 Years

by

Real Estate

Author website

It all started with two phone calls to two separate IDX vendors:

Call #1

Eric: Hello. I really like your product and am considering moving from my current IDX vendor over to you.

Vendor #1: Great! Can I send you paperwork?

Eric: Well, there are a few features it’s missing – indexable listings and some conversion features I would like. Is there any way I can pay you guys to add these features for me? I have a decent budget for these features & understand that you would need to roll them out to the entire system, since you don’t provide custom IDX solutions.

Vendor #1: Sorry, we don’t take any customization orders.

Eric: Really? It seems like a win/win, since I get want I want, and you get to charge me to improve your own product.

Vendor #1: Sorry, it’s just something we don’t do.

Eric: hrrrrrm

Call #2:

Eric: Hello. I really like your product and wanted to get some more info.

Vendor #2: Great! What can I tell you?

Eric: Well, I already have a nice website and wanted to see if I could implement your indexable product on my own site.

Vendor #2: No, we have a proprietary system that it integrates with. You would have to move your site over. We charge $125/hour for that.

Eric: Okay…$125/hour is a little high, but I can live with that. I do tinker with code a bit and have some good, local vendors. Is there any way I could get access to just my site, once it’s moved over, in case I want to make my own customizations?

Vendor #2: No. You’ll have to use our developers and work on our schedule for any customizations.

Eric: Are you sure? It’s pretty easy to add directory specific FTP or shell access.

Vendor #2: There’s no way we can allow you to work on the site yourself or use your own vendors.

Eric: hrrrrrm

At this point, I was pretty frustrated. I spoke with a handful of developers in early stages of RETS projects with good, misguided intentions. They saw RETS from the consumer’s perspective, which is fantastic, but they didn’t understand RETS from an agents perspective – namely that Read more

July 25, 2011

Do you want to know how cool ARMLS could be? Sell it as a business and see what someone who is working for money can do with it.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s a true fact of life: Not-for-profit “businesses” suck. Don’t believe me? We’ll discuss it after you get back from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

To be fair, I’m willing to regard the Arizona Regional Multiple Listings Service (ARMLS) as something of an exception, at least as administered by Bob Bemis. Under the last guy, it was run like the Mayberry Jail. This was not entirely a bad thing for me at the time, but it was nothing at all like a business. And the Bemis ARMLS is no business, even now, even if it is significantly more efficient — which is not entirely a good thing for me now, alas.

But: ARMLS is a sleepy not-for-profit fiefdom that has been thrust by fate into the data-processing business. As an MLS, it’s not awful. But as a data-processing business — it sucks!

Why? For the same reason every other not-for-profit “business” sucks: Profits and losses are the guideposts to customer satisfaction in business. Without them, a not-for-profit “business” cannot ever hope to achieve customer satisfaction — which is not to imply that most of them are even trying.

Here’s the news, by way of Inman: ARMLS, now owned by four Phoenix-area Realtor associations, is to be sold for $4.75 million to the Arizona Association of Realtors instead.

First, metropolitan Phoenix Realtors will be robbed of an extremely valuable asset, and then all the other Realtors in the state will subsidize us hotshots in Phoenix, but that’s all just good old-fashioned Rotarian Socialism, to be expected from any crime syndicate with “Association of Realtors” as a part of its name.

And, as you might guess, the grand plan is to create a statewide Arizona MLS, so every neck can be conveniently strangled with one noose. ARMLS über alles.

But that’s all just the garden variety stupidity we expect from any not-for-profit “business”. We know from organizational theory that every sort of “service” organization comes to be a force of evil deployed against its own supposed “masters”. Do you disagree? Clearly you’re not spending enough time trying to renew your driver’s license.

I like Bob Bemis, along with the people I Read more

July 15, 2011

Regarding the Zillow.com IPO: “Since when is a seven year old company with really no large scale growth prospects that has lost money every single year on revenue less than $45 million/year worth half a billion dollars? Am I missing something?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The question comes from a comment to a post at Seattle-based start-up blog, GeekWire. The news? Zillow.com is bumping the per-share price on its forthcoming IPO to as high as $18, up from the $12-$14 range it started with when the public offering was announced.

I like that question, because it parallels one of my own: What, precisely, can Zillow hope to do — other than provide big paydays for its VCs and founders — with $71 million in new funding? Which parts of the site will require that much build-out?

My take: The web-tech IPO craze that’s going on right now is just the next phase in the rape-the-rubes strategy Wall Street has pursued since internet start-ups came on the scene in the late ’90s. There is plenty of money to be made churning the stock of “businesses” that, in the end, all amount to MySpace.com — all hype, no actual value.

What’s the name for that phenomenon…? Oh, yes — a bubble.

The good news: Cynthia Pang Nowak, formerly Redfin.com’s queen-bee PR geek, is now signed on with Zillow. While she may be both the smartest and most breathtakingly beautiful woman on the Puget Sound, it remains to be seen if she can answer the BloodhoundBlog question: What would David Gibbons do?

Meanwhile, GeekWire.com deserves your daily attention. Run by Todd Bishop and John Cook, formerly the start-up reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a long-time friend of BloodhoundBlog, it’s kind of like TechCruch in the rain — but without the bluster and hyperbole. The daily email digest is quick way to keep up with the wired side of our world.

But: Am I all wet? Does Zillow.com look like a buy to you at $18? Can it go to $36? To $180? To $0.01? I like the people who work there, and the founders have been very good to us from the beginning. But I’ve never seen the value of Zillow.com, except as an advertising play, and I still don’t. As with the comment quoted above, am I missing something?

July 15, 2011

Google Plus = MySpace Redux?

by

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Author website

If MySpace (current valuation, $30 million) is the Facebook of the past, then what does that make Google Plus?

I’m not sure. But, as an inveterate fan of all things Google, I hold some hope that Google will succeed where other platforms have failed, or are failing.

I share Greg’s skeptical view of Facebook, which has struck me from day one as a kludgy mess. I find it virtually useless for business. It strikes me as AOL-like in its attempt to separate itself from the Internet.

Facebook wants all things to be Facebook. The Internet wants to be free. Google wants to help us more effectively find things on the Internet. Those are radically different visions of what it means to organize information and minds.

Google does all this at great risk, since making things more accessible, more open, and more transparent also lowers barriers to entry for competitors.

Google Plus seemingly moves in a different direction, by providing the tools by which can interact in a “social framework”. The trick will be to keep it all more free-wheeling than is possible on Facebook, give users more control over how information about them is shared, make it easy and intuitive to use, and make money at it.

Here’s where Google has an advantage: because it is the means by which people already search and organization information, that means that social networks can be brought to bear on that information, such that search results, for instance, can be influenced by your network.

For businesses, that means figuring out to make their business a part of various social networks can really give them a leg up if, and when, Google Plus takes off. And, unlike the pointless Google Wave and dreadful Google Buzz, I think it just might.

July 13, 2011

Wired: “Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A fascinating story about open source programmers deploying Microsoft’s Kinect hardware in amazing off-label applications.

From Wired magazine:

For 25 years, the field of robotics has been bedeviled by a fundamental problem: If a robot is to move through the world, it needs to be able to create a map of its environment and understand its place within it. Roboticists have developed tools to accomplish this task, known as simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. But the sensors required to build that map have traditionally been either expensive and bulky or cheap and inaccurate. Laser arrays cost a few thousand dollars and weigh several pounds, and the images they capture are only two-dimensional. Stereo cameras are less expensive, lighter, and can construct 3-D maps, but they require a massive amount of computing power. Until a reasonably priced, easier method could be designed, autonomous robots were trapped in the lab.

On November 4, a solution was discovered—in a videogame. That’s the day Microsoft released the Kinect for Xbox 360, a $150 add-on that allows players to direct the action in a game simply by moving their bodies. Most of the world focused on the controller-free interface, but roboticists saw something else entirely: an affordable, lightweight camera that could capture 3-D images in real time.

Within weeks of the device’s release, YouTube was filled with videos of Kinect-enabled robots. A group from UC Berkeley strapped a Kinect to a quadrotor—a small helicopter with four propellers—enabling it to fly autonomously around a room. A couple of students at the University of Bundeswehr Munich attached a Kinect to a robotic car and sent it through an obstacle course. And a team from the University of Warwick in the UK built a robot that had the potential to navigate around post-earthquake rubble and search for trapped victims. “When something is that cheap, it opens up all sorts of possibilities,” says Ken Conley of Willow Garage, which sells a $500 open source robotics kit that incorporates the Kinect. (The previous non-Kinect version cost $280,000.) “Now it’s in the hands of just about anybody.”

Robot freaks weren’t the only people to explore the Read more

July 6, 2011

A Virtual Real Estate Broker Who Declares Freedom – An Anathema

by

Realtor, Attorney

Author website

This virtual real estate broker hereby declares freedom. Freedom from the traditional bricks-and-mortar business models that worship the institutions of the real estate industry. I have always been an iconoclast who is bored by the weekly office manager giving his inane speech about “get out there and get those listings.” I have always been sensitive to lies being clothed with smiles and the we’re-here-to-help-you pep talks by brokers who fully intend to get rich off all the ignorant agents they are using.

The very institutions in the real estate industry that claimed to take our membership money to help us . . . have become behemoths intent on supporting their own executive salaries and bonuses. Associations created to protect consumers have become massive organizations that manipulate and deceive the very people they claim to protect.

Like the saying, “Trick me once, shame on you, trick me twice, shame on me,” agents all across the United States seem to refuse to take responsibility for their own futures. As if they had no discernment at all, behaving like lambs to the slaughter, they glibly obey their traditional brokers and their associations, going to the office everyday like automatons, attending unproductive meetings, standing around the water cooler, chit chatting about some property that another broker sold, making a couple of cold calls, looking at the MLS online and surfing the Internet for hours under the guise of working.

Of course, they would defensively deny all this, but it is far too common today in the big offices. Not just big offices, but many offices around the country, even small ones. Greg Swan is quite right (talk about an iconoclast) when he wrote, “What we teach is independence, the recognition that you alone are the source and the sink, the alpha and the omega of your knowledge, of your business and of your success or failure.” See The Unchained Epiphany. Read more

July 4, 2011

The unchained epiphany: Working in the Web 2.0 world is not mastery of technology but the celebration of your own independence

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top from April 8, 2008. — GSS

 
In comments to Sean Purcell’s “NAR Challenge”, Scott Rogers wonders why the NAR could not teach hi-tech real estate as well as or better than BloodhoundBlog.

The short answer is that we’re not teaching hi-tech real estate, not even close, and what we are teaching is anathema to the NAR.

In her own comment to Barry Cunningham’s post on the typewriter being state-of-the-art NAR technology, Newport Beach Realtor Stacey Harmon offers this serendipitous explication:

WOW. This video really highlights for me the opportunity that exists for Realtors who really embrace not only technology, but Web 2.0. What I see in this video is the application of technology to improve the “traditional” way of selling real estate. I think there is a whole emerging group of Realtors out there who are looking to utilize technology (in particular Web 2.0 technologies) to TRANSFORM how real estate is sold. I agree with Dave that this video speaks to 75% of Realtors – I work in one of the most lucrative markets in the US (Newport Beach, CA) and I’d say that this video accurately represents how most Realtors (that do any business in my market) view and utilize technology. I see this as a huge opportunity for anyone who is savvy enough to have even found this blog. Thanks for a very interesting post!

That’s an epiphany in text form. I don’t know Stacey, and I don’t want to characterize her thoughts, but that kind of epiphany is what BloodhoundBlog is all about.

We don’t teach technology, even though we talk about it all the time.

We don’t teach marketing, new-wave or old-school, even though marketing is constant obsession around here.

We don’t teach Web 2.0, even though many of the brightest lights in the wired world of real estate write, read and reflect here.

What we teach is independence, the recognition that you alone are the source and the sink, the alpha and the omega of your knowledge, of your business and of your success or failure.

I am a rude, crude and vulgar man, so it falls to me to Read more

June 5, 2011

Peering into Apple’s new iCloud service, to be rolled out tomorrow, to see how much closer we might get to virtuoso virtuality.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Steve Jobs is going to do the keynote presentation at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference tomorrow. Surely part of his motivation is to show Apple’s shareholders that he is still in charge. But Jobs wouldn’t be doing this if Apple didn’t have some cool new toys to show off.

Systems designer Kevin Fix speculates about what might be on the agenda:

I get the feeling that the announcements at next week’s Apple WWDC are going to represent the same kind of fundamental shift in Apple’s offering that the iPod did in 2001.

I don’t have any inside info, and I make a point of not trying to pry secrets from my friends who work at Apple, but the rumblings are huge. ‘iCloud’ could mean anything, but given the complete failure of MobileMe over the last decade there’s no way Apple would introduce it on such a pedestal unless it’s incredible. My guess is that iCloud is to MobileMe as iPhone was to Newton: a complete, deep, polished solution after an underwhelming market failure.

Apple took a long time to get the Internet. Geeks were still installing FTP clients and web browsers for years after Apple belatedly included TCP/IP and PPP to their OS and, when Apple finally did integrate the Internet into Mac OS, it was in a very tacked on kind of way. A browser, an app for making web pages, eventually a few vertical online stores. I think that’s all about to change.

The scene has been building for a long time: The iPhone blurred the line between using a local device and being online. Chromebooks propose to eliminate the line completely by using an OS that expects to be online all the time (though still has limited functionality when the wireless cord is cut). Dropbox is a huge hit because it provides the most seamless way to use native apps while still writing to the cloud. Google and Amazon are tripping over each other (and the music labels) trying to roll out virtual music lockers.

My guess though is that these vertical solutions will seem pretty thin by the end of next week.

What, specifically, Read more

May 24, 2011

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Steve Jobs in Forbes. One of the most hateful precepts of socialism is the idea of existential equality. We are all equal politically, but in the things we do with our lives we are very different. The world we live in is much richer because Jobs is alive now, too. We will be poorer when he shuffles off this mortal coil. The best thing we can do — for ourselves, for our businesses and in tribute to the best the human mind can achieve — is to learn to think as Steve Jobs thinks.

May 16, 2011

Illustrating a software paradigm shift in the simplest possible way. Or possibly I’m just simple-minded.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have every intention of talking about the paradigm shift in software engineering that is being ushered in by the iPad. The iPhone pushed us half the way there with “apps” — dedicated client interfaces into server-based databases. The iPad pushes all that much further, with interesting implications for real estate marketing.

Meanwhile, I’d like to use a very simple example to illustrate how a small change in the way software operates can result in big changes in the way we live our lives.

Consider the alarm clock: Big, clunky and loud, a magnificently useless dust magnet. One alarm, one time a day, set it and regret it. The digital age brought us the snooze alarm, and micro-electronics gave us the his-‘n’-hers alarm clock with a weekend override. But still very dumb technology, guaranteed to fail — partially twice a year at daylight savings time and completely every time the electricity goes out.

Enter the iPhone:

What you are seeing are my early-morning alarms: I get up early to deal with my email and to work out, then I get back into bed with Cathleen to snuggle for fifteen minute before we both get up to walk the dogs and get our days started.

The point is, I can have as many alarms as I want. It’s useful for software engineers to replicate analog tools in digital form. End-users already understand the concept, and so the new software simply seems to replicate the familiar analog functionality.

But this is not true, all appearances to the side. By enabling you to set up — say the word: to program — as many alarm clocks as you might need, the iPhone’s implementation of the alarm clock idea permits you to shift the way you have always thought about that wretched noise that greets the dawning.

This is an extremely simple example, but a useful one, I think. Software, at a minimum, permits us to do a better job at the things we’ve always done. But if we stretch our minds and use the tool as it can be used, and not simply as we have always used it in the Read more

May 10, 2011

How does the National Association of Realtors love me? They sent me an evaluation so I could count the ways.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I appeared by videoconference at the National Association of Realtors Association Executives convention in March. At the time, I made note of my remarks in a comment to Teri Lussier’s first post on the NAR’s latest anti-consumer money-grab:

I spoke by videoconference to the NAR Association Executives conclave on Monday. I held nothing back, patiently explaining to them that legislation is crime — using force to induce an outcome that would not have occurred without the imposition of force.

I explained that a legislature can do nothing in a free market except harm, and that the American economy is by now essentially a vast mutual-vampirism cult: Each one of is sucking the lifeblood out of his neighbor’s neck, and each one of us is being sucked dry by his next neighbor. Taking a death-grip on the obvious, I patiently explained that this cannot but result in pandemic disaster.

Instead, I said, if the National Association of Realtors were to come to be as zealous about private property rights as the National Rifle Association is about firearms ownership rights, I would be proud to call myself a member.

As you might expect, the reaction was subdued.

Bob Bemis, CEO of ARMLS, intimated to me that there is video of the presentation somewhere, but I have not seen this. But yesterday there came by snail-mail a three-page evaluation of the event.

I think it would be fair to say that I made an impression. I knew going in that I would be telling them exactly what they did not want to hear, so I have to commend the people who made comments for their forbearance of my effrontery.

Here’s my take: What they don’t want to hear is precisely what they need most to hear. It’s not reflected in the evaluation, but a very important idea I took up with them is this one:

What happens if someone comes along and resolves to do real estate brokerage for free?

I’ve pointed out many times that Zillow’s “make me move” feature is brokerage: The introduction of buyer to seller. This is not affected by the real estate regulation machine since the act of Read more

May 9, 2011

Me and my iPad: Slouching toward a still-more-mobile style of mobile real estate representation.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I got an iPad 2 Friday, my spiff for hitting my earnings goal ($1,000 per day, if you’re keeping score at home) in April. The dogs have written a ton about the iPad since its introduction, and my plan is to write a ton more as I get used to this little box.

Here’s my deal: How can I make a grand a day every month? How can I push that up to five grand a day? I’m on the move all the time. And I’m tethered to my desk all the time. And I need a way of reconciling that contradiction.

My MacBook went a long way toward dealing with this problem — and may the lord rain his blessings down upon Ronald MacDonald and all the other providers of free WiFi linkage. But a laptop wants too many resources to be universally useful.

How so? If I’m away from free-WiFi-land, I need to plug in an air card and wait for it to initialize. Not only that, I need a flat surface, and I need to give the laptop itself time for house-keeping. Plus which, I always need to nurse the battery, which makes me reluctant to use it for blue-sky purposes, for fear I’ll be powerless to deal with mission-critical problems later on. Still worse, I have to schlep the damn thing around — which makes it much too easy to leave behind.

The iPad takes away all of those problems:

  • WiFi plus 3G means instant-on internet virtually everywhere.
  • I can actually use it in my lap in my car — without moving to the passenger seat.
  • Ten hours of in-use battery life leaves me at little risk of running out of power — and the two iPhone power cables I already have in my car will both fit the iPad, as well.
  • And the iPad is almost too easy to carry: The size and weight of a magazine.

All that’s great, but it’s not as if the iPad does not introduce complications of its own. I’ll be going through everything in detail as I integrate the new machine into my praxis, but I’ll touch on a Read more

April 12, 2011

Two old soldiers in the wired world of real estate — Jott.com and the Flip video cameras — are shuffling off to the hi-tech graveyard.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve loved Jott.com since it was introduced. I use it every day — mainly to send reminders to myself, but also as my primary interface into Google Calendar. No more. Jott ends five years of gamely trying to get people to understand its value on May 3rd.

A lesser cause for mourning, Cisco flipped the switch on the Flip video camera line today. Frankly, I’ve been waiting for this for a while. The best idea Flip had was easy integration into YouTube — a feature your phone has by now, I should expect. Meanwhile, we switched almost all of our video to our Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot cameras as soon as we got them.

The first BloodhoundBlog Unchained was clip-documented via Flip cameras, so I am not indifferent to see it go. Just to put extra icing on the Flip’s farewell cupcake, Cisco paid — wait for it — $590 million for the company in 2009.

Ultimately, I won’t weep, though. I can’t remember the last time we used the Flip for anything. Jott, on the other hand, is going to leave a big hole in my workday.

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

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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