OnOneBlog Blogging the exciting times of OnOneMap.com

We have had to withdraw our popular and innovative flood map layer, ironically and sadly during one of the worst periods of flooding the UK has ever experienced. The Environment Agency claims they have copyright over the information, and despite the fact that tax-payers’ money has paid for it to be collected in the first place, apparently the tax-payer cannot benefit from innovations like our housing and flood map combination.

For more information on the lack of access the British public have to their data, visit The Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign.

I chaired the UK’s Mashup event on 19th June, an event entitled “On Location” (here’s how Wikipedia describes a mashup). With six panellists, a highly participatory audience numbering 180 and a topic with far-reaching consequences, it was an energetic and fun event for sure. We covered:

• Mapping
• Navigation
• Presence (continuous broadcasting and detection of one’s whereabouts)
• The advent of GPS capable mobile devices
• Marketing opportunities
• Privacy issues
• Social media
• and data mashups.

Almost oddly for a technology crowd, privacy took a significant part of the limelight. Who do you want to know where you are and when? At one point I suggested that we could sweep our honourable panel aside and get a load of lawyers in! There’s no doubt that privacy is going to be a hot topic of debate, and it will be interesting to see the varying degrees of emphasis and consumer protection afforded by different legal jurisdictions, particularly the differences between the UK and the US.

I asked if anyone could corroborate a rumour I’ve heard that Tesco’s Clubcard (their customer loyalty card) is so packed with personal data and insight that Tesco can determine when a woman is pregnant from her buying habits before she knows it herself. Sadly, no-one could confirm this for me, so it remains a rumour… albeit it a good one.

But for me, the highlight of the evening came in a presentation by Jack Reinelt, the EMEA MD and COO of Tele Atlas, and his colleague and Senior Director of Product Marketing Rik Temmink. Even if you don’t know this company, you will probably have benefited from the fruits of their labours when using Google Maps, or Nokia phone maps, or TomTom navigation etc. etc.

Jack gave us a teasing glimpse at some of the results they’re achieving following the company’s May 2007 announcement that they are mapping European cities in 3D. They are building these amazing cityscapes, but the buildings don’t just have a 3D structure, they have photos of the real-life buildings cleverly super-imposed on them. Magic. Talk about cheap city breaks!

I didn’t have my camera with me, but here’s a photo courtesy of GPS Magazine.

UPDATE: This feature has now been removed. We’ve posted an explanation to the blog.

We’ve been busy recently processing vast amounts of data to bring you a unique visualisation of the risk of flooding across the country - just tick the ‘Flood Risk’ tickbox and the map will be overlaid with coloured shading indicating where the land is liable to flood.

With environmental risks playing such a big part in property prices in risk areas, it’s as well to be aware of all the information that you need before you take the plunge and make an offer. We hope you’ll find the flood map useful.

And for those that like the odd statistic, it takes 5.8 million map tiles to cover the whole country!

Two blog posts in a row about great press coverage isn’t cool blog-etiquette, but the PC Pro magazine’s rating of OnOneMap this month is too good to ignore completely. We’ll update the press coverage page of our website over the weekend accordingly.

So really, this blog post is about the age-old continued dominance of word of mouth as the finest and most effective endorsement any product or service can receive. Here’s how we see it…

• “Hi, buy / use our product / service, it’s great” - advertising
• “I like this product / service so I thought I’d blog about it” - blogger
• “This product / service is editor’s choice” - journalist
• “I love it, and I know you will too…” - friends and family

There’s obviously an increasing “believability” and more compelling “call to action” as you move down this list (assuming you trust journalists more than bloggers?). So when I meet someone who says they found their home OnOneMap, and they’ve told everyone they know, I feel this is the ultimate accolade. In return, we have to focus relentlessly on what makes OnOneMap continue to stand out from the thousands of other products and services vying for your attention and, at the very best, makes the short-list of recommendations you are happy to make unprompted.

If anyone has a magic formula in this respect, please leave a comment here with your full contact details.
:-)

Hi, we’ve been heads down coding so we’ve been a bit quiet on the blog front recently. We even missed a great blog post about us at http://www.futureofrealestatemarketing.com/ononemap-gives-you-more which, now we’ve found it, I think is worthy of a whole blog post here.

One statement stands out for us: "OnOneMap has a truly awesome search interface". Thanks Joel.

We’ve also had plenty of feedback from OnOneMap users about our new widgets and our shortlists… mostly positive I’m very pleased to say, and a few constructive critiques and ideas which are always most welcome. In case you ever wondered, we do collate and classify all your feedback to inform our product development plans. Your feedback shapes OnOneMap.

TTFN.

We think you should be able to initiate an OnOneMap search whenever you fancy. And we’ve been really interested in the rise and rise of personalised homepages over the last year, including Google personalised page, Pageflakes, Netvibes and Mac OSX Dashboard.

Wikipedia says “Widgets are commonplace and are used by bloggers, social network users, auction sites and owners of personal web sites. …end users primarily use Web Widgets to enhance their personal web experiences”.

So it made sense to widgetify (?) OnOneMap. Take a look at what’s kept us busy this week…

OnOneMap Google gadget (Google’s name for a widget)
OnOneMap Pageflakes widget (shown below)
OnOneMap Netvibes widget
OnOneMap Mac OSX Dashboard widget

And it’s worth remembering that we also have the eTribes OnOneMap deskbar and the OnOneMap search box for your website.

We enjoy running OnOneMap, especially on days when we find out someone else has said some nice things about us. Techscape has listed their favourite Top25 cool Web2.0 sites, and we’re in there. Looking down the list we’re happy to see two of our favourites made the list too, last.fm and the associated Sleevenotez.

Two that we’d put on our list, but didn’t make Techscape’s, are AllPeers (community file sharing in Firefox, voted one of the best add-ons time and time again) and Pageflakes (create your own homepage).

______
Hey, just spotted it on The Register too. Fantastic.

The industry term for services like OnOneMap is vertical search. Rather than general search (eg, Google and Yahoo!), a vertical search engine specialises in one sector, property in our case. Being quite interested in vertical search I thought I’d point out some others we really like.

Retrevo is vertical search for consumer electronics. It pulls in information from forums, blogs, the manufacturers and retail websites.

ZoomInfo is vertical search for companies and people. Check it out and see if you and your company are listed.

Farecast is vertical search in travel. Whilst travel search is very well established, Farecast has an interesting twist. They log how flights vary in price over the months running up to departure, giving you guidance on when to get best value.

And lastly, BiggerBoat is vertical search for the entertainment sector. Does what it says on the tin.

The OnOneMap team is coming together next week to brainstorm, amongst other things, what to plot next. Some suggestions in the hat include banks, estate agents, primary schools and nurseries. If you have any ideas, please feel free to comment.

OnOneMap featured in an article in the Guardian yesterday… super news. Interestingly, the article focuses on making non-personal data collected by government agencies (and therefore paid for by the tax payer) available free to the public. That sits beautifully with the ethos behind OnOneMap.

The article refers to a Guardian Technology website at www.freeourdata.org.uk… well worth checking out.

And if you think you can take this stuff for granted, think again. The Government currently plans to clamp down on some of the freedoms granted under the Freedom of Information Act by permitting public bodies to exempt themselves from responding to FoI requests if the cost of doing so exceeds £600. The Press Gazette is lobbying hard to stop this regressive move, and you can show your support here.