estatecreate blog

How much time do you waste clicking on a link to a property only to see that the photos show somewhere completely unsuitable. How would you like to drag a stream of photos of images of properties in the price range and area where you live to quickly zoom in on something you like?

Sorry to get you all excited, but this site does not exist. But it could. I have just been playing with Cooliris. As they put it themselves, “Cooliris transforms your browser into a lightning fast, cinematic way to discover the web”. I was not disappointed. Somone will adapt this for browsing properties - it’s going to be great.

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Mass emailing everyone you know is not something you should do often, if at all. Seth Godin, marketer extraordinaire, advises against it at all times - he has a great post on it here. Occasionally you get a mass email from someone you vaguely know and they put all of the email addresses in the “to” box so that you can see everyone else they have emailed. I usually “tut” to myself and think what a dumbarse. Well today, I broke both rules. What a dumbarse. If anyone who received that email reads this, I apologise!

We launched estatecreate.com this morning -  we are very excited to be live. The Independent also launched a white label version of the site - you can see it here.

Please give us your feedback as we will continually be trying to improve our core service as well as introducing new features.

Some of the new features in the pipeline include:

- more feed partners. Let us know which property portals you would like added;

- an extension of the wizard which helps you complete all the steps to building a site;

- automated AdWords. We will automate the set up, including selecting key words. All you have to do is choose a budget and sign off the wording;

Let us know which features you want. The more requests we get for a feature the higher up the list it will go.

Image via CrunchBase

I have just tried out Google’s new social bar (you can read their blog post about it here). It allows you to easily integrate Google Friend Connect into your website, so that users can login using either their Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account, comment and have conversations about content on your site.

You can try it out on this site: http://www.ossamples.com/socialmussie/

It looks very easy to implement, so expect to see it on estatecreate.com soon.

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Thanks to Marc Davison over at 1000Watt.

Great post from Robert Peston on yesterday’s apologies from the bank bosses. You can read it here. The key for me is where he says “Apologies carry weight when they are accompanied by a clear explanation by the miscreants of what they did wrong and why.”

No sign of a “why” yesterday. Mr Peston generously suggests it may be too early for them to fully understand the motivations behind their actions. Maybe it is too early for them to face up to the reality under the harsh light of the cameras.

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Why would you do that?

Well, Mark Cuban has just asked people to do just that here. It is his “Open Source Funding” plan to help kick start the US economy by creating jobs.  He says “Rather than trying to be a Venture Capitalist, I was looking for an idea that hopefully could inspire people to create businesses that could quickly become self funding. Businesses that just needed a jump start to get the ball rolling and create jobs. I’m a big believer that entrepreneurs will lead us out of this mess. I just needed a way to help.”

To qualify, businesses need to be cash flow break even within 60 days and be profitable within 90 days. So what sort of business could that be? How about a UK start up with a product ready to be shipped and a business model that could work in the US? Why wouldn’t you want Mark Cuban to help you launch in the US? Did I post our business plan on his blog? Of course I did.

UPDATE (15th Feb): 1,300 comments and counting!

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Great clip from the Today programme this morning comparing two very different reactions to “stressful” situations. The pilot of the airbus, which landed safely in New York’s Hudson River compared with Christian Bale’s outburst on a film set. You can listen to it here (Bale’s rant has been sensored - you can hear the full outburst here. Poor thing, he must have been very stressed out).

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After 7 days, 55 followers, following 120 people, 50 updates and more time than I will ever admit to, I just could not take it any longer, so I deleted my account. Twitter.com/HPY is no more.

Last week Twitter dominated my life. If I wasn’t checking Lance Armstrong’s latest musings from the tour down under (twitter.com/lancearmstrong), or stalking Dragons (which turned out to be fake), I would be constantly interrupting my thought process by checking out the latest conversation being held by some people I am vaguely connected to.

I started the week using www.twitter.com, by Wednesday I had downloaded Power Twitter, a firefox plugin, by Friday I had downloaded Tweetdeck, allowing me to have 3 columns of different groups of mindless consciousness streaming down my page, with a desk top reminder flashing at me just in case I missed a tweet.

Finally the weekend arrived. Respite from this constant pull was in sight. But no. I still had a nagging desire to just have a quick peep to see what was going on. We had some friends over for dinner. Once they had headed home my wife and I stayed up chatting. I confessed about my new relationship with 120 people that I hardly new. I showed her what I had been up to. Relief. Sharing was half the battle. She laughed. “It’s pathetic, what are all these people doing?”. I showed her more, we laughed together this time. I suddenly had an urge to delete my account. The wine definitely helped. Options, Set up, Account, DELETE. Phew. A wave of relief swept over me.

Reading this you may be thinking that the problem here is not Twitter, it is how I was using it. I can not deny that my character is particularly susceptible to be overrun by something like Twitter, but, I could not help but notice that I was not the only one that Twitter had got a grip on. That is why it works so well - it sucks people in, as they feel the need to be part of the constant stream of conversation.

So, did I learn much during my week on Twitter? Did I influence anyone? I don’t think I learnt anything that I would not have picked up elsewhere. I read some blog posts an hour or two before I would have picked them up. However, a few people did read this blog that otherwise would not have done. That is why I signed up - we are launching soon, and we are starting to get our communicating channels in place.

We will use Twitter, but when we do we will need some firm objectives and someone who can handle being plugged in to 100s of people without getting sucked in.

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In a speech to the Demos think-tank in London yesterday David Cameron suggested that the UK will have to go begging to the IMF because of Gordon Brown’s borrowing. “If we continue on Labour’s path of fiscal irresponsibility, at some point – and it could be very soon – the money will simply run out.”

Gordon Brown countered on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning that the current crisis was “totally different” to anything seen before, because it was not driven by high inflation and wages.

So, who to believe?

As I said in my previous post at the beginning of the week, the danger is in the ballooning government debt and the eventual risk that the UK can not raise adequate additional funds in the bond market as international markets loose faith in sterling.

The UK may have a much lower national debt as a % of GDP than many other countries, however, the figures exclude the liabilities relating to the government bank guarantees and the fact that the government has effectively stated that it will not let any of the banks go bust. Their liabilities are therefore effectively the government’s liabilities. Much of UK bank debt is international. The falling pound therefore exacerbate the situation.

Gordon Brown says that the situation is very different to 1976 - we are not facing a scenario where high inflation and rising wages cripple the economy. Does that mean everything is OK then?

There is more than one way to run out of money. Having a banking crisis at a time when government finances are already stretched, committing to bail out the banks and losing the confidence of the international financial community is surely another way of ending up at the door of the IMF.

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