Archive for the 'homepage news' Category

Property Technology Wins London Executive An Award

Published by Lauren Eden on December 5, 2008 in Company News, General Mapping and homepage news. 0 Comments

At Earthware we aim to use the latest in web based mapping technology to bring our client’s products and services to life which is why we make five promises to all of our clients including ‘to challenge ourselves to meet our client’s expectations’ and ‘to care about what they care about’. It is this ethos that inspires us to work hard to do all we can to achieve this and is why we are delighted to see our client’s being rewarded for the services that they provide.

Therefore, our congratulations go to our client London Executive on winning the Best UK Technology and Web category at this year’s Estate Agent of the Year Awards.

London Executive

We first got involved with Georges Verdis and the London Executive team back in September 2007 at PCS Expo (now Agency Expo). They were looking for an interactive mapping partner and thought EarthwareProperty was just the solution they were after. After working with them to brand the maps to fit the established London Executive colour and style, the maps were launched in January 2008 and became the first residential property implementation of EarthwareProperty. Since then London Executive have seen incredible growth thanks to their innovative approach to marketing property most notably their use of the Birds Eye imagery (which they have branded Property Bird) available in their property maps.

PropertyBird

It is innovative approaches such as this that we love and which led to London Executive winning this award. The judges said, “Two particular uses of technology make this entry stand out… [the] Bird’s Eye photography enables the prospective purchaser or tenant to see exactly where the home is located and what surrounds it. The London Executive deserves credit for finding and using this photography so effectively”.

Congratulations again to the London Executive team for their hard work in using technology and the web to market property in London.

However, it was not just one of our clients that were recognised at these awards. Our congratulations also go to Wow for being finalists in the Innovation category. It’s great to see all these people being recognised for their forward thinking approaches to the estate agency world.

EarthwareProperty Has Gone North

Published by Lauren Eden on November 18, 2008 in Company News, General Mapping and homepage news. 0 Comments

Cathedral Lettings are the Durham specialists when it comes to letting residential property. Their vision is to use their local knowledge and expertise in the lettings market to ‘match good tenants with good properties’ and make the process as simple as possible for both the tenant and landlord. It is in striving to meet this vision that Cathedral Lettings have become the latest company to implement Earthware’s property mapping product.

So the story goes like this: Mark Havers, Director of Cathedral Lettings, had realised that many of the tenants searching for property with Cathedral Lettings were looking to move to the Durham area from all over the country and indeed the world and that they often had little knowledge of the locality. Having recognised this knowledge gap, Mark wanted to find a solution and ensure the service his lettings agency offered did make finding property in Durham really easy. He recognised that using interactive maps was a really visually engaging way to display the locality information many of his tenants wanted to know. Having shared this idea with Aspasia, they pointed Mark in our direction. Of this Mark says, “When Aspasia told me about Earthware’s interactive mapping I was immediately interested and as soon as I saw it in operation I was very interested indeed”.

Cathedral Lettings Map Search

EarthwareProperty was designed to be really simple to implement; once the client has chosen which default features they want for their maps we send them a step by step guide including all the necessary code for a seamless implementation of our maps into their website. Cathedral Lettings really appreciated how simple this is saying that “working with Earthware to make the whole thing happen has been very straightforward”.

Although the maps have only been live for a short time Mark is already getting great feedback: “We’ve only been live for a week, but the response so far from our clients has been very positive”. Cathedral Lettings have achieved their aim of using the latest mapping technology to bring a residential lettings search tool to life and impart locality information in a visually compelling way making finding residential property to let in Durham much simpler.

If you have a vision to use interactive mapping to differentiate your company and bring your products and service to life then please contact us.

We Have Been Busy Web Developing Again.

Published by Lauren Eden on October 22, 2008 in Company News, General Mapping, Web Development and homepage news. 0 Comments

Earthware have now made live their latest web development project, an online estate agency website for residential property in Buckinghamshire, DreamSpot.

The journey began back in April 2008 when the two Neil’s first met. Neil Osmond, Earthware’s Operations Director and Neil Wood Managing Director of DreamSpot wanted to discuss how Earthware could help with the development and launch of this new online estate agency. The first step was for Earthware to build schematics for the site. Upon receipt of this Neil Wood became sure his dream of a website that made buying and selling property in Buckinghamshire really easy was possible and asked Earthware to submit a formal proposal for the entire site development and launch. The result of this is now available for all to see at DreamSpot.co.uk and Neil Wood is very happy with the process as much as he is with the result.

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“I just want to put in record how easy and enjoyable it has been working with all of you; I have always felt that the project was under control and at no stage was my confidence in your abilities to deliver unfounded! With all the other parts of setting up this business causing various amounts of stress it was so nice to know the major component, the website, was in capable hands.” Neil Wood, Managing Director, DreamSpot.

The site, which is split into two main sections, a buyer area and a seller area, aims to bring tomorrow’s estate agency services to the market today. Through being an online estate agent, DreamSpot are able to keep their overheads down, a saving which they pass on to their clients. But being online does not mean there is no-one to talk to or that you cannot control what is happening; not only can buyers ask the seller or the DreamSpot team a question using the websites messaging system they can book a viewing directly with the seller and the DreamSpot team are always at the end of a phone too.

In addition to developing the DreamSpot site, we have also implemented our residential property mapping, EarthwareProperty, allowing users to search for and see their next property in its actual location with road, aerial and Bird’s Eye imagery. Covering the Amersham, Beaconsfield, Chesham, High Wycombe, Chiltern and West Wycombe regions of Buckinghamshire, DreamSpot.co.uk provides information about what it is like to live in these areas of the county, as well as all providing financial and legal services for buyers and sellers and Home Information Packs (HIPs).

Contact DreamSpot to discover more about buying and selling property in Buckinghamshire or read the DreamSpot blog or if you are looking for web development services please contact us.

London UK street level views now live, but not from Google!

Published by Brian Norman on October 16, 2008 in Company News, General Mapping, Microsoft Virtual Earth and homepage news. 3 Comments

It’s an exciting day here at Earthware, after months of development on the latest version of our Earthware Property real estate mapping solution it’s now live on the commercial property portal Novaloca.com  with brilliant street level views of central London from our partners Seety.

To try out street level views for yourself, try the links below to some famous London landmarks:

london-bridge-thumb Earthware Property already includes the best aerial and birdseye imagery available by using Microsoft Virtual Earth as its mapping provider, now with Seety’s street side views Earthware Property offers a world leading mapping solutions to estate agents and property web sites.

We are proud to be partnering with Seety on this project who are an amazing company taking consumer level electronics and proprietary software and producing street level views all over the world. Not only are Seety innovators in the street level view market but they have beaten the biggest player in the market, Google, to making one of Europe’s major cities publicly available.

The area currently available covers central London as shown below:

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If you want to find our more about using Earthware Property for your own web site or about licensing and commissioning street level views of your city please contact us.

SQM Meets Captain Birds Eye

Published by Lauren Eden on July 10, 2008 in Company News, General Mapping and homepage news. 0 Comments

SQM Meets Captain Birds Eye

“Captain Birds Eye” aka Georges Verdis, general manager of London Executive, is featured in the June edition of SQM magazine giving rave reviews to his “new toy” Property Bird, an implementation of our mapping solution for residential and commercial property.

We move past the slightly cheesy title to the article attempting to put the Property Bird experience into words:

“Wow, it’s amazing… Not only can you swoop down the streets from all angles, you can also make the search criteria bespoke for your requirements… these would include where the nearest Waitrose, farmers market and hairdressers with parking are situated… [and] all the practical stuff too such as council tax brackets, doctors surgeries, schooling even the days the bins are collected”. However, “due to the lack of space” the article concluded that all the other stuff “you’ll just have to search out for yourself”.

As Georges gives examples of what Property Bird can do, it becomes evident of his enthusiasm for it. But what’s the point, the article daringly asks: “It’s by far the most advanced mapping system for estate agents”, comes George’s reply. “London Executive has a page rank of four on Google when you search for ‘London Property’ simply due to Property Bird’s click rate. The map page itself has a page rank of five. It would cost a fortune to pay for that kind of presence… In the last month, Property Bird certainly paid for itself”.

Read the full article to discover more about Property Bird and find out exactly why Georges is “a very satisfied customer” and to find out more about what Earthware’s mapping solutions can do for you and hear the stories of other satisfied customers contact info@earthware.co.uk or 08456429880.

Who leads the way in Interactive Property Mapping?

Published by Neil Osmond on April 21, 2008 in Company News, General Mapping, Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Multimap and homepage news. 0 Comments

In order to help with the launch of our new interactive property mapping product, we thought it would be a good idea to take a look at what the mapping looks like for a number of the top Estate agency chains and property portals.

Our findings are hardly scientifically robust, and we thought hard about whether to publish these, but given we had done the hard work, we thought it might be interesting.  What we did was take a look at every website (in early March 2008) and look at their maps to find out:

  • Do they use mapping at all ?
  • Do they have a map that has multiple properties on it (as opposed to a map for just a single property at a time) ?
  • What underlying mapping technology each website used (API) ?

and for property portals, we also:

  • Examined what data was included in the mapping
  • Rated the quality of the mapping (from our point of view)

The Background

I guess we ought to make a few things clear before diving into the analysis.  Firstly, we conducted this research over a week in early March - it is therefore already potentially out of date and any conclusions should be considered with that in mind.  Secondly, any rating or judgement is purely subjective on our point and therefore open to both scrutiny and challenge - we are definitely not aiming to upset our potential customers!

The top 50 Estate Agents were based on a list published by Estate Agency News and the top 20 portals based on a list published by Estate Agency Times in January and February 2008 respective.  We acknowledge the copyright and have offered links in this article to the original articles.

The Analysis

For the full analysis , including tables, ratings etc. please refer to a detailed pdf containing all the analysis.  The commentary below is a summary                   analysis and findings.

Top 20 Portals

Please see the table in the attached pdf for details on each portal.

Observations

We would draw the following observations based on our research:

  1. Google Maps leads the way
    Google Maps currently leads the way with nearly 50% of the portals (10 out of the 22) in this list.
  2. The UK is seemingly behind in the move to Virtual Earth
    Despite the significant move in the US Real Estate companies across to Microsoft’s Virtual Earth product (mainly due to the Bird’s Eye imagery), the UK portals are lagging behind with only two of the 22 in this list.
  3. Mapping still has a long way to go
    Despite technology being core to portal propositions, only 8 of the 22 have a multiple property map.  This would indicate that there is plenty of room for portals to maximise the value they can extract through interactive mapping and improve the experience of their users.

Top 50 Estate Agents

Please see the table in the attached pdf for our view on interactive mapping in the top 50 Estate Agents.

Observations

We would draw the following observations based on our research:

  1. Google Maps leads the way
    In a similar manner to the top 20 portals, Google Maps currently leads the way with nearly 50% of the top Estate Agency sites (24 out of the 50).
  2. Multimap still has a strong hold
    Unlike the portal list, the UK based Multimap retains a strong presence in the UK Estate Agency market.  Since the buy out by Microsoft, Multimap’s API has been further strengthened by the inclusion of Bird’s Eye imagery from the Virtual Earth API.
  3. Mapping still has a long way to go
    In a similar trend to the top portals, only 12 of the 50 have a multiple property map (less than 25%!).  This would indicate that there is plenty of room for Agents to maximise the value they can extract through the use of interactive mapping in their websites.  It certainly might be an area where Agents can positively differentiate their web offerings in the minds of their customers.

Summary

We hope that the time we have taken to look at the interactive mapping for leading websites in the UK residential property market will be of interest.  Should you have any questions about how we conducted the analysis, or would like to chat through any of our conclusions, please contact Neil Osmond at Earthware (neil@earthware.co.uk or 0845 642 9880).

Earthware creates Microsoft Eos Generali on behalf of 3DVia

Published by chris on April 15, 2008 in 3d models, Company News, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Shape and homepage news. 0 Comments

This project involved the creation of a proposed building the Eos Generali in the heart of the Paris business district for a Microsoft presentation also in Paris.

The video that appears above was created by the lads at 3DVia to show off the tools at their disposal and also the look of the environment in and around this new business development. Earthware worked on 9 models in total each of which can be seen in this video.

Each model was created in Shape and then imported to a collection in Virtual Earth. If you would like to see the results and browse around the 3D models for yourself then please click here.

This was a real coupe for Earthware and it was also a pleasure working with Marc at 3DVia over in the states. We predict big things for the 3DVia-Virtual Earth partnership and are eagerly awaiting the next release of their Shape modelling tool.

If you have any comments then please let us know.

Cheers

Chris

Multi Media Developer

Wind Farm Presentation aids local planning campaign

Published by chris on February 19, 2008 in 3d models, Company News, Google Earth, homepage news and sketchup. 0 Comments

This project that has been recently completed represents a new venture for Earthware that puts our 3D and mapping skills to a new and innovative use.

Video: Stonish Hill WindFarm

We have used the plans from a local planning application for a proposed wind farm and created a scale virtual representation of the completed site in Google Earth including support structures and access roads. To download the Google Earth file containing this project please click here

The purpose of creating this video and accompanying Google Earth file was to support a local planning campaign the outcome of which was successful with the assistance of this video.

We at Earthware believe that this style of presentation is highly effective for a range of uses such as environmental planning or pre-visualisation as it accurately shows how a future structure will appear in the environment and the visual effect it it will have on the landscape.

As part of this video 3D models of wind turbines were built to scale as well as a local structure to give a real world comparison between the sizes of each. Below are the 3D models which you can interact with inside the windows by clicking the play button and following the on screen instruction to download the necessary file to run the player. please be aware the 2 windows will not run simultaneously so one must be paused for the other to become operational. Do this by right clicking on the viewer and selecting pause.

I would just like to say a big thanks to 3Dvia for their excellent model hosting service which provides these stunning i-fame viewers. If you like these models or wish to see other 3D models created by Earthware they are available to view and download from my profile hosted at 3Dvia.

If you are reading this blog and you have an vested interest in scale presentations within Google or Virtual Earth then please drop us a line and find out how Earthware can help you.

Chris

Multimedia Developer