A Web site launched Wednesday by Zillow.com’s founder will showcase compensation figures from individual companies along with employee reviews.

Glassdoor.com so far has about 2,000 salary reports and reviews from about 1,300 employees, covering more than 250 companies.

Zillow founder Rich Barton is a former executive at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. and also the founder of Expedia Inc.

Source: San Jose Business Journal

1. Facebook: $240 million on Oct. 25

2. Facebook: $60 million on Dec. 3

3. Ning: $44 million on July 11

4. Metaweb Technologies: $42.5 million on Dec. 31

5. Zillow: $30 million on September 2007

6. Metacafe: $30 million on Aug. 16

7. n2N Commerce: $30 million on Jan. 31

8. Veoh Networks: $25 million on Aug. 31

9. MyStrands: $25 million on April 11

10. Reunion.com: $25 million on May 21

Source: The Industry Standard

Geographic databases of political boundaries, streets and water features are quite old, dating back nearly to the beginnings of GIS. Digital neighborhood boundaries are relative newcomers, dating back only a few years. With January’s announcement from Zillow that the company would share its neighborhood boundary data for free, this seems a good time to explore the nature of this data layer and how some of the major players approach its creation.

The article lists several companies offering neighborhood data.

Source: Directions

Monday, Yahoo! and Zillow visited our Trulia offices in San Francisco to hash out the details of the new data standards format for real estate listings. It’s a huge step for the real estate industry. The plan is to launch later this year…syndicating your listings will soon become much easier.

+ Seonik

Seonik is a search engine friendly link generator, currently in beta. It works basically like any URL shortening service, however, with a twist as it goes beyond the simple crunching. Enter a URL and Seonik will spit out a more people friendly version like this http://seonik.com/whatever-whatever.html.

+ Glubbe.com – Google Redux

Glubbe.com, for all intents and purposes, is a Google clone. It looks Google. It feels like Google, and it sort of sounds like Google. But, it’s open source and currently in development. Glubbe provides you with the standard search bar. You can conveniently click below to specify where you want to search: the web, images, video, audio and blogs. There’s even a search query archive so you can see what others have looked up.

+ PriceHub.com – Actual Sales Prices For Cars

Shopping for a used car? If so, you should check out PriceHub. This site will give you the real low down on prices. Buyers and sellers will actually be able to see the real, actual value for their cars and trucks. Think of it as Zillow for the auto market. As a consumer, you can submit the concrete price you paid for your car, so that others can benefit, learn and see not merely projected values, but true, transaction worth. Used car buyers are able to see what’s worth what; sellers on the other hand can get a feel for how much they can really charge based on car prices with similar mileage and options.

+ Baidu to Launch Japanese Version of Search Service After 1-month Delay (via Search Engine Journal)

+ Welcome New Neighbour: New Social Network Launches in UK (via WebUser)
If you don’t want to ring the doorbell and introduce yourself to the new neighbours, you can use ResidentsHQ.

+ Say Hello to Fancast (Beta)
From Comcast. One stop shop to view complete programs online, show clips, options to buy DVD’s, tv listings, movie listings, and more.
See Also: TV Guide Online Directory

+ The Search Party (via New Yorker)
Google squares off with its Capitol Hill critics. By Ken Auletta.
See Also: Summary and Analysis from Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan

Second, from this point use you can use it to find local places using various databases (for example, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and AskCity) and many other local info databases including:
+ Fandango
+ GasBuddy
+ Zillow
+ Amtrak
+ Zipcar
and MANY others.

Ideal for both when you’re at home and on the road.

NOW, the news is that a closed beta (register here for a login) is online. Register here for a login. Learn MUCH MORE HERE about My.Loki.

What is it? Facebook or RSS junkies, you’ll love this, share your location with your friends. Loki’s slogan, “Consider “Where are you?” a thing of the past.”

From the Loki blog:

MyLoki automates location sharing and lets you choose how and where your location is displayed. Every time you’re in a new place, you’ll check into MyLoki, simply by opening your browser or manually entering your location. The MyLoki Facebook application will post all of your locations to your Mini Feed, showing your Facebook network where you are. Updates to your location will be displayed on the MyLoki RSS feed on your profile page and can also be integrated into applications like Google MyMaps or anything that supports GeoRSS. We’ve also hooked MyLoki up with badges, so that you can post a map or icon of your location to your blog, website, or email signature.

The blog post goes on to make very clear that the MyLoki user is in total control of who sees what.

The beta version of the Loki Toolbar with MyLoki functionality is currently only available for Firefox on Windows XP. We will be rolling out support for all other platforms shortly.

As soon as we get an invite, we will update this post.

See Also: Skyhook wants you to know (via All Points Blog)

From the abstract:

Online interactive mapping systems are growing in popularity: Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo[***] all offer interactive maps, with varying features and qualities of aerial photography. For the maintainers and designers of such systems, the behavior of users can provide critical cues on how both to improve their offerings and understand how users are now interacting with the system. The tools needed to track user data for these systems are different from the traditional tools of log file analysis.

Direct to Full Text (8 pages; PDF)

You can explore Hotmap at http://hotmap.msresearch.us/

Source: Microsoft Research

See Also: Other Sources for Heat Maps that Help Visualize Data include:
+ SmartMoney’s Map of the Market
+ Trulia Home Sales Maps
+ Zillow City Heat Maps

*** Ask.com where Gary is Director of Online Information Services offers several interesting and useful features with its map and local search products. For examples, with Ask Maps you can watch your directions (both driving and walking directions) dynamically change as you move pointers or “pins” to new locations. Ask Maps also provides aerial imagery.

At Ask City you can draw a circle, line, etc on the map and then “search inside” the specific area you’ve marked-up. You can also embed these maps on blogs and web pages.

See Also: How We Watch the City: Popularity and Online Maps
Another paper by Danyel Fisher.

+ ScanR: Turning Your Mobile Phone Camera into a Scanner, Fax, and Copier

+ Mobile Editions of Newspapers: San Jose Mercury News and Good Morning Silicon Valley
Your mobile home page can be customized to show only the sections of the newspaper you select. SJM also offers SMS alerts (Breaking News, Weather Scores, etc.) Register here for both services. Free but regular mobile charges apply.

Business Press Mobile Sites
+ Mobile Edition of Crain’s Cleveland Business
++ RCR Wireless News

Interestingly, the name Google itself is not mentioned anywhere in the story except the headline and summary found at the top of the article.

Why only Google? Well that’s one that only the News.com editors can answer. However, the ResourceShelf team wants to remind you that DigitalGlobe imagery (of all types) is available from numerous web sites, licensing partners, and directly from the company via GlobeXplorer, “a proprietary web-based search and retrieval system that makes it easy to find, purchase and download global imagery.”

Where else can you find Digital Globe imagery? Here are a few examples. Remember, different chunks of imagery (often depending on resolution) taken different on different dates can be available from various services. Another reason to use a variety of tools.
+ National Geographic Map Machine
+ Map24
+ Image Atlas and Image Atlas Free Link
Note: Image Atlas provides the exact dates images were taken. Example: Union Station, Washington, DC.
+ UK’s Multimap
+ eNeighborhoods
+ Getty Images
+ Ask.com Maps*
+ Zillow
+ Various Map Mart Products
+ Resellers around the World

* Gary is Director of Online Information Resources at Ask.com

What can be difficult — actually a challenge — are the constantly growing number of tools and features that often receive little or no attention from the masses, sometimes including info pros. We’re not only talking about small information providers and organizers but also, at times, the big guys.

That’s somewhat the case today in The New York Times with the story, “In Google Earth, a Service for Scanning the Heavens.”

The article reports that beginning today Google will offer a service named, Sky. It sure sounds cool.

“You will be able to browse into the sky like never before,” said Carol Christian, an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute, a nonprofit academic consortium that supports the Hubble Space Telescope.

The article mentions that other services exist like the World Wide Telescope research project at Microsoft.

However, there is not a single mention (seems strange) of another project — NASA World Wind, developed by both NASA employees and volunteers. It has been online and growing for several years, about the same time Google Earth started to take off. World Wind offers imagery of the:
+ Earth (several data sets)
+ Moon
+ Venus
+ Jupiter
+ Sloan Digital Sky Survey
+ Mercury
+ Saturn
+ Layers for the Solar System and Planets.
+ Real Time: MODIS: For getting near real time images from orbiting satellites with resolution down to 250 m
+ Blue Marble Next Generation

And that’s not all. Check out all of the available add-ons. For example, this add-on shows the Apollo landing sites on the Moon. Numerous data sets of Earth are also part of World Wind, and an another add-on allows users to see Virtual Earth imagery from MSFT. You could easily write a book about all that World Wind provides. It’s sad that more people don’t know about it. Perhaps in some (maybe not all) situations, Service B might be better than Service A, the one that is already well known.

The point is that one sentence about this service would have made the NYT article even more useful to its readers.

Is that it? Any other tools come to mind?

We like some of the features on SkylineGlobe and, of course, the bird’s eye aerial imagery from Live.com. At Ask.com Maps,* both walking and driving directions are available. On Ask City, you can define a specific area (i.e., a five mile radius around your office or two miles along a specific street near your hotel) and then SEARCH that specific area. This is potentially useful not only useful for the traveler but also for the business person doing some basic market scanning. Of course, all of these tools (World Wind, SkylineGlobe, Live Bird’s Eye Images, and Ask Maps) are free.


Also, it’s one thing to see a location from above, but it’s something else entirely to learn specific facts about the location you are viewing (i.e., census data, local business establishments, school locations, etc.). TerraFly, from Florida International University, does this particularly well. The amount of local data offered by the site — including recently added links to Zillow — grows daily.

In summary, for information professionals it’s about researching, tracking down, learning about, demonstrating, and knowing about a wide variety of resources. This is NO different (only more difficult) then what info pros have always done in terms of collection development and “learning the collection.” Yes, it’s a challenge and you will not be using each and every tool daily. However, in terms of the web and knowledge of resources BEFORE they are needed, a little bit of research and discovery can go along way. Finally, fee-based services are still essential for many types of research but there are many gems (not just sites but parts of sites, search features, etc.) which are free but overlooked. Let’s make sure we are using all of the choices available to us and sharing them with our users. As we always say, right tool at the right time.

See Also: World Wind Can Import KML and KMZ files.

See Also: Another Source for the Data Google is Introducing today is: Sky-Map.org. Access is free and is entirely web-based. Background in this article: Sky-Map Site To Show The Beauty Of The Universe To Everybody

You can browse the sky either in Map-Mode or in SDSS-mode. (SDSS-mode provides real-time photo images of celestial objects). While in the Map Mode, SKY-MAP searches the system database for information about the objects within a specific area. Then SKY-MAP uses this extracted information to automatically create map images. In SDSS-mode, you can observe star clusters, different galaxies, clouds of cosmic dust – formations of new stars, jets of gas erupting from the active core of distant galaxies, the remains of the supernovas’ explosion, among many, many others.

The API for SKY-MAP is also available. Learn more about Hubble data here. Windows Vista user? Check out this sidebar gadget for SKY-MAP.
See Also: This post from MARCH, 2007 that discusses the site (via New Scientist).
Funny to see them compare it to Google Earth. Again, this article five months ago.

* Gary is Director of Online Info Resources at Ask.com.

We continue to use as many of the following services as possible so we can find the pluses and minuses of each. Try them all. What works for us might not work for you. Choice is good. Btw, perfect material here for a demo or a “brown bag” for your organization. Some of the conversion services (voice to text) use both human transcription and speech-to-text technology.

1) CallWave (Free)
Receive voice mail messages as text (SMS) messages. This post has more about personalizing the CallWave/Vtxt Greeting.

2) SpinVox
Convert voicemail to text. Speak your message, have it delivered as a text message to a group of people.

3) Reqall (Free)
Leave your self “audio notes.” Call to listen to them, sent as text email reminders, etc.

4) Jott (Free)
Mobile notes, group messaging, etc.

5) PrivateCaller (Free)
Get a local number (all area codes) for incoming voice mail. Check your voicemail online or on the web (as an audio file).

6) numbr (Free)
Receive a temporary (auto expiring) and anonymous phone number for a selected period (day, week, month) of time. You tell numbr where to forward the calls to. Many other features. For example, don’t except calls from blocked Caller IDs, Do not disturb from xPM to xAM, and several others.

See Also: What Time is It? Accessing the Precise Time by Telephone & Other Tools

See Also: Free International Long Distance from the U.S. and Canada

See Also: Home Prices, Info and Estimates Delivered via SMS
From HouseFront and Zillow Mobile.

See Also: Voice activated directory assistance services and other voice activated resources.
We have found 1-866-MY-TRAFC to be useful right before we hit the road. The service will even call you when traffic reaches a certain level.

See Also: PhoneCasting, CellCasting, MobileCasting
Listen to “podcasts” over the phone. Services like UpSnap and PhoneCasting.com work with any phone. Extra bandwidth and tools not needed. Just dial a number a listen. For example, to listen to The Onion Radio News dial: 1(832) 532-0435 or diggnation at 1(408) 538-2141. While this may seem not something for the tech geek, it makes accessing podcasts and other audio content very easy for the non-geeks (most people) out there. As I think Greg Linden would say, this method is “grandma ready.”

+ mPire
Shopping Search + Historical Pricing Info

+ Wize
Aggregation of consumer reviews into a single number

+ Trulia
For example, their heat maps and monthly trends report (PDF).
++ Zillow
Zestimates, public record data, etc.
+++ HouseFront
Includes access to public record data about a property

+ Farecast
Air fare search (for some cities) + historical pricing info along with advice about if/when it’s a good time to purchase the ticket. We’ve posted about Farecast many times in the past year and in this post provide a few links to a research project at the University of Washington in Seattle by Dr. Oren Etzioni, that eventually became FareCast. It was originally named Hamlet (to buy or not to buy). Farecast also offers FareGuard that backs up their predictions by paying out the difference if a fare goes up and their database says it will stay the same or go down.

Now, another Seattle company, Yapta, is developing an air fare alerting service. The company launched in May and they just received $2.3 million in Series A funding according to the Puget Sound Business Journal.

All we can say is hooray (assuming that it works). Frequent travelers know that they need all the help you can get in finding the best price for a seat on an airplane. It’s a cat and mouse game that can depend on constant monitoring of several databases for fare changes, being alerted to them without having to sit and reload pages hourly, and then reacting, one way or another, quickly. Of course, being alerted to fare changes is nothing new. Most of the major players offer them and FareChase/Yahoo also makes them available as a Yahoo Alert and a Yahoo Widget. Yahoo’s service is available only for selected cities.

Is Yapta better (faster, more accurate, etc.)? We’re going to do some monitoring and comparisons and report back.

Yapta in a few bullet points:

+ Requires download of the Yapta Tagger (IE only at this point, Firefox Coming Soon, Sorry Mac users.)

+ Search for flights and fares using major aggregators (Orbitz, Expedia, etc.) and airline web sites (12 sites/databases as of today). In case your’re interested, no Southwest.

+ “Tag” the flight(s) your interested in using the Yapta Tagger.

+ If the price drops, you’re notified via e-mail (we hope SMS alerts are in the works).

+ If you have already purchased a ticket, enter the confirmation code (directly on the web site) and the price will be monitored. If it drops, you might be able to get the difference as a travel voucher or a cash refund. More here.

+ What’s with the name? It stands for: Your Amazing Personal Travel Assistant

+ More questions. See the FAQ

One service that’s now online (beta) and is mobile friendly (via SMS, text messaging) is HouseFront.com.

Of course, you can enter in an address and get the data that is available via HouseFront on your regular web browser. We were able to get to the data without having to register for the service. However, if you are registered you are offered a few more services.

Remember, this info (the amount of it and how current it is) varies from state to state, county to county, and city to city. In other words, results can vary a lot. Here’s an example of a results page as listed on the HouseFront web site. Note that it also provides aerial imagery and “comps” of other homes that recently sold in the neighborhood.

OK, that’s cool but hardly unique.

Now, comes the mobile service. A complete guide to the service is available here.

First, send your text message request to 46873 (HOUSE) and enter the address of the home/property you’re interested in.

Example Format:
123 AnyRoad Blvd, Anytown, WA
or
123 Main St, 80202

Next, in a few seconds you should expect to receive a text message back containing some or all of the following data:

+ Estimated Value
+ Number of Bedrooms
+ Number of Baths
+ Total Square Footage
+ Year Built
+ Property Owner
+ And more!*

Again, what info is provided is determined by the specific area where the property is located.

Happy Searching!

* It’s worth mentioning that Zillow also offers a SMS/Text mobile service. It contains a large chunk of the same info. In some cases more, in other cases less. That’s why, like we always say, no tool is perfect. Use the right resource at the right time. To access Zillow Mobile, send a text message to: z@labs.zillow.com.

++ In the past few days a bunch of new papers written by researchers at Google were added to the Research Publications collection on the Google Labs website. What follows are links to just a few of them. Most of these papers are technical but, at a minimum, the abstract and intro can often provide youw with an idea of what they’re all about if you don’t have the technical knowledge to read the entire paper. Interesting reading follows.

+ An Alternative Ranking Problem for Search Engines
by Corinna Cortes, Mehryar Mohri, Ashish Rastogi

+ Magnitude-Preserving Ranking Algorithms
by Corinna Cortes, Mehryar Mohri, Ashish Rastogi

+ Margin-Based Ranking Meets Boosting in the Middle
by Cynthia Rudin, Corinna Cortes, Mehryar Mohri, Robert E. Schapire

+ Organizing and Searching the World Wide Web of Facts – Step Two: Harnessing the Wisdom of the Crowds
by Marius Pasca

+ The Ghost In The Browser Analysis of Web-based Malware
by Niels Provos, Dean McNamee, Panayiotis Mavrommatis, Ke Wang, Nagendra Modadugu

+ Selective Disclosure
by Ben Laurie

+ Estimating Clustering Indexes in Data Streams
by Luciana Buriol, Gereon Frahling, Stefano Leonardi, Christian Sohler

+ Speech Recognition with Weighted Finite-State Transducers
by Mehryar Mohri, Fernando C. N. Pereira, Michael Riley

+ Power Provisioning for a Warehouse-sized Computer
Power Provisioning for a Warehouse-sized Computer
by Xiaobo Fan, Wolf-Dietrich Weber, Luiz André Barroso

+ Learning the Inter-frame Distance for Discriminative Template-based Keyword Detection
by David Grangier, Samy Bengio

+ A Machine Learning Framework for Spoken-Dialog Classification
by Corinna Cortes, Patrick Haffner, Mehryar Mohri



+ Vanessa Fox, Head of Google’s Webmaster Central, Moving to Job at Zillow (via Search Engine Land)
See Also: Comments from Vanessa Fox

+ GoogleApps.com Moved to a Google Name Server
Previously on the Awaken.net name server.
++ Blog-google.com Now Registered to Google
++ Blogger.org Now Registered to Google
Previously registered to Blogger founder, Ev Williams.

More than a year in development, legal search and ratings site Avvo officially launched yesterday. The site allows users to search by geography and practice area or by lawyer name. It combines data from public records and (eventually) clients, community members and legal peers to offer a composite score for every attorney practicing in the U.S.. Like real estate site Zillow, which shares Benchmark Capital as a funder, Avvo builds lots of functionality (and eventually community) around a core set of data.

Sources: Screenwerk and Search Engine Land

See Also: Thomson Legal Record

Thomson Legal Record is a unique research tool, combining an attorney’s litigation history on Westlaw with the attorney’s profile on FindLaw. It provides a simple, efficient, fully documented resource for legal and corporate professionals seeking experienced litigators and a verifiable basis for decision-making.

Canadian attorney info is available here.

This allows you to get multiple home value estimates in order to give users a more complete view on a home’s potential value range. The real estate team also expanded their Zillow relationship to include home data (such as beds, baths, square feet), sale history and tax info, as well as recently sold comparable homes that are plotted on the map.

Direct to Home Valuation Section at Yahoo Real Estate
Source: Yahoo Local Blog

+ 411Sync

+ 4INFO

+ Airplane Departure and Arrival Alerts from FlightStats

+ Amazon.com and Amazon.com UK

+ CS411 (CitySearch)

+ Sending E-Mail To SMS (Text Messaging)

+ Fandango Movie Info

+ Google, Live Search, Yahoo SMS

+ Gumiyo

+ nowthen (a mobile diary)

+ New York Magazine (GoNYC” or 46692)

+ Proxito

+ Reuters News Alerts

+ Shortcode.info ||| Recently Added Codes

+ Smarter.com

+ SMS LOCAL

+ SportsLine Alerts

+ TextBuddy

+ TextMarks

+ Traffic Alerts via SMS from Traffic.com and MSN Auto.

+ UpSnap

+ where/ULocate

+ Zillow via SMS

See Also: More Mobile

++ A Selection of Mobile Video Services

++ More Tools, Sites, and Resources for the Mobile Web

++ Tuned.mobi: Stream Hundreds of Radio Stations to Your Mobile Device

++ Another Round of News, Info and Job Search Sites Optimized for your Mobile Browser

++ ResourceShelf’s Guide to Wireless “Mainstream” Media Sources (#2)

++ ResourceShelf’s Guide to Wireless “Mainstream” Media Sources (#1)

++ A Few Mobile Web Favorites

+ Real Estate Databases: How Good Are Zillow’s Estimates? (via WSJ, available to non-subscribers)

+ Compilation of Canadian Library Association Blogs

+ China: Baidu reports profits up 400 percent

Hot Pads is utilizing Simile timeline technology from MIT. Examples and info here.

Source: Trulia Blog

See Also: RedFin (Real Estate Dbase) Selects Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.
Additional info.