New map tool for real estate listings
While the Microsoft database Utility rebuilds, AGAIN!, my entourage database (and yes, I know I’ll have to delete the file and have it recreated from the Exchange server, but I’m always optimistics with computers) I decided to finally find some time to write something on this now seldom updated blog (and my feeds stats are here to prove this).
After a couple of weeks of implementation and tuning (where we learned that messy Javascript code performs better then the state-of-the-art) we finally released to the public the beta version of the Gabetti map search (a demo video lays on my Flickr page) for real estate listings (those of Gabetti obviously - at the moment).
Nothing so new (apart from the fact that - as far as I know - the ONLY other similar tool in Italy is MAIOM - which we tried back in 2006 to explore the potential of geomapping tools potential for the real estate market): satellite view, small geocoded houses, balloons with overview of the house, AJAX, panning, etc.
But I really find useful, and haven’t find in any other site apart Coldwell Banker’s (which works only in Firefox, on my Mac), is the usage of Point Of Interests (POI): we started from the hypothesis that price, square meters, number of rooms are important DETAILS not something you use when deciding to buy or not to buy (I find VERY interesting the usage of POI tha has been done in Walkscore)
When I bought my home I had two main objectives: i. find it in a pleasant neighborhood and ii. near to all the services that make life more comfortable (supermarkets, cinemas, restaurants, kinder-gardens, etc.) and a satellite view enhanced with POIs makes this task extremely straightforward.
We’re still in BETA and are plenty with enhancements to code and deliver (better user experience, better feedback, capability to search for streets and not only for cities, price/sqm filtering capabilities just to cite a few) but are really curious in evaluate how will the tool perform on our web users and how will our RE agents perceive it.
Things too cool to be silenced
It’s been really a lot this blog is now under silence due to my new home moving operations (more on this soon, promise) but I’ve recently been parte of a couple of things that are just too smart not to be written here.
Gabetti Real Estate map mash-up
We just released the brand new map search for Real Estate listings on the Gabetti site; it’s a .NET application mounted on top of ViaMichelin API that you could use to look for an house in a specific area in Italy. The geodata are collected from the huge Gabetti listings database and placed straight on the cartography.
We’re actually in semi-private (you should be a registered Gabetti site user; registration at the site is public and free) BETA and are collecting users feedback to improve the application.
Uh, as a side note Gabetti is the first real estate company in Italy to have such an application.
Frontiers of Interaction 4
This year the conference will talk about the more and more computerLESS World we’re living in. You can join us on Tuesday, July 1st from 9am to 5pm for a FREE DAY (lunch & breaks included) in Turin (Italy) (complete info on venue here).
My pal Leeander has really done a marvellous job for this year edition collecting a supa-dupa speakers frontline: Nicolas Nova, Bruno Giussani, Bruce Sterling, Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo Inc.), and many more.
As said the conference is completely free but reistration is required; use your Yahoo id to subscribe on the Upcoming page.
UPDATE: the conference has been a huge success; you can see all the talks video and the photos; we’ve been featured on a major Italian innovation newspaper and on Wired too!
Conclusions
I really feel bad not to have updated the blog in the latest weeks, but I had the chance to store a nice amount of things to say and still need to have the calm time to fix some aspects of my private life; that’s why don’t expect to find me here too soon.
Call to action: take part at Frontiers of Interaction and give a try to the brand new Gabetti Map Search.
Myrsine Island now open
In the nearly couple of month since my last post a lot of tasks of my professional life have reached their place in the cosmical karma.
One of these is the release of the Myrsine Island on Second Life: a perfect replica made by Electric Sheep Company of a residence Gabetti is building on the Island of Sardinia (and that will be ready in 2010).
You can take a look at the product site or take the whole tour at the buildings in Second Life. The choice is yours.
This is a complete new experiment in SL for the Gabetti Group: we’re starting using the metavers not for metaverse’s sake but for RL business stuff; Myrsine island will be used by the Group agencies devoted to its commercialization as a tool to showcase the apartments to potential clients and - at the same time - it’s going to be a tool for foreigners to take a visit to the apartments, before buying, before leaving their countries.
On the island you’ll find a Manfrotto (who’s one of the top tripod producers all over the world) where you can get for free a machinima-o-maker hud to create videos in SL; machinema making has never been so easy! (see a video made with the machinima HUD on YouTube)
Just a bit of info for the moment. And I still owe Leeander a post about his latest innovation disruptive project: Open Spime.
Ever changing
True. Yes, you’re right (and - almost obviously) I’m wrong. But I have at least a couple of reasons to explain you why I haven’t blogged in a month; at a second look I’d say it’s just one reason: I love a constant change feeling to fulfill my life.
Point one. Professional life: officially speaking I’ll take a new role as manager at Gabetti with a brand new team reporting to me and a whole new task to supervise the whole servers+security+network side of our infrastructure.
If you know me or read this blog since some time you might know that my carrier/experience path (programmer turned web designer turned project manager turned interaction specialist turned researcher turned again project manager) has in the years just lightly touched the “hardware” side of the thing, so it’s going to be exciting finding a way to manage all this new knowledge that will flow into my mind in the forthcoming weeks.
Point two. Personal life: even if in our original path our current home would have been “current” for at least something like 10 years this summer (5 years in our counting) we bought a new and bigger one in the Brianza area near Milan. We’re currently restructuring it from the ground up but you might take a look at how it’s going to appear once ready (caveat: our architect designed the home, but the Floorplanner version and its mistakes are completely mine.
Thesis: I’ll try to post as frequently as I can, but need to suspend my pact with you. For a while at least.
Concentration
Black and green. I mean: green IBM3270 font on a full screen whole black background; no browser, no feeds, no email. Just the black background, your text and you. A cool parenthesis of concentration.
I miss that word so much in my last weeks life: we delivered the most complex release of the Oracle Enterprise One ERP at Gabetti early in December which kept us REALLY concentrated on making all the amount of old data take their right place in the new system (and also fixing some errors inserted in the old systems during years which made OE1 simply mad).
And then there’s the 2008 budget planning, Second Life, analysis to be made and data to be properly understood. And, wow, this is the end of an overwhelming year dude!
On the personal side of life we’re hitting the start of our new house renewal: discussions with the architect, choosing the right pool, planning the suite bathroom (I replicated it on Second Life to help my wife understanding my ideas better), choosing the doors, the windows, managing all the papers…
I’m tired. I’d like to have more time to manage all the things. Need to slow down. Just a little bit. And that’s also why posts lacked here in the last weeks.
Oh… and thank you writeroom for these 15 mins of distractionless writing.
UPDATE Alberto, while back linking this post, discovers a bond I sincerely have bypassed: the concentration feeling you experiment Writeroom donates you follows the same path Ev highlighted in his LeWeb3 speech: it really seems that innovation, more than from making software more complex, arise when you try to make it simpler. Thanks Alberto!
Creating the helpdesk experience
We all have, sooner or later depenging on how you feel lucky, a frightening story about helpdesks: labyrintic menus, looping hold-on messages, and ultra-dumb helpdesk guys (ever felt that strange experience when every guy you talk to asks the same identical question before passing your call to the next one?).
Believe me, I’ve always been kinda unlucky with helpdesks. Unfortunately. So I was happy my first day at Gabetti to discover I would have worked shoulder to shoulder with a small helpdesk team serving our 1000 agencies on IT related problems.
Back in June 2006 the only way to contact the helpdesk was to give a call to a phone number behind which laied an exchange that took care of the call forwarding to the first free operator. In other words the process was something like
- call the number
- stay at least 15 mins (if you’re the lucky boy) on hold
- explain your problem to the operator (other 15 mins, at least)
- wait until the IT team solves your problem
A syncronous helpdesk is a waste of time for everybody: for who has the problem and for those who solve it.
Then we started innovating the technology and the processes below the IT helpdesk; our keyword was “asyncronous”.
The first step was to provide the support team and our users with a web interface, with proper problems sections, to communicate and manage tickets. We’re really really happy with the open source software OTRS which could be managed both via email and web and is plenty with personalizations.
That was an important shift from syncronous to asyncronous assistace which brought some interesting features to our helpdesk structure:
- Our clients wouldn’t have to wait for a free operator to communicate their problems anymore
- We have the power to simultaneously close a large number of tickets in the very moment (that is to say make more users happy in less time)
- We can prioritize problems (both basing on the quantity and quality data of our users’ problems)
With just this change we obtained a huge (nearly half an hour) speed up of the ticket opening. Not bad, huh?
But the we moved fast forward both from the technology and process points of view: we rolled out Gabi, our Virtual Assistant, back in July to manage the whole help desk front-line and, more recently, we choosed to prioritize our asyncronous tools (such has gabi itself and the online helpdesk) by cutting the telephone helpdesk times from 8 to 3 hours a day.
Even if this strong move towards the asyncronous life style hasn’t already showed its entire potential the results are huge: the mean life time of each ticket is now something less than 1.5 days and the monthly helpdesk performance has gained full 44 man hours (which is something more than the Italian equivalent of the work week).
The long tail of helpdesk tickets
I should have had lunch with Leeander today to discuss the 2008 edition of The Interaction Frontiers, the innovation related seminar we co-produce each year. Just a few minutes before our appointment he SMSed me cancelling the lunch. After a while, while at lunch with my boss, I received a call from Leeander where he told me he was in a mess managing the calls after an article on Virtual Assistants (he’s an Interaction Design Director at Kallideas, and they actually produce VAs) on a major Italian magazine.
A Virtual Assistant is basically a 3D human-like interface that processes natural language (both spoken and typed) and is ahead of an artificial intelligence engine which takes information from a knowledge base.
I’m gaining more and more knowledge on this subject since we’re developing a VA - named Gabi - at Gabetti (see here a video interview with some interaction with the VA, in Italian) , together with the Kallideas team, to manage the basic support at our IT helpdesk. And - since the pilot phase launch early on July 2007 - we started training Gabi.
We choose the training arguments by taking a look at the most frequent items on our online helpdesk: we released Gabi with basic knowledge on PC, printers and network problems and then moved to email and password management.
During a meeting, early this week, with our Helpdesk manager and the IA expert from Kallideas I was taking a look at the tickets data to understand which arguments need to be teached to Gabi next and then BOOM I “saw” the long tail in these data.
It’s not long ago that I finished reading the inspiring The Long Tail book by Chris Andreson: looking at the ticket statistics I saw how the higher number of tickets was concentrated in less then 10 different arguments and, from there, the number of tickets decreased rapidly while the problems our users were declaring raised impressively.
It was pretty interesting finding my first tail, but now problems arise: VA are very good at managing a small amount of know-how helping with this large numbers of users; but we’re now going to face a nice task: managing a large amount of information to help a relatively small number of users… uhm… need to go deeper into this to better understand the most effective solution.
Back in town
It’s been a while since I haven’t posted a single line here (also my Flickr photo stream deserve a better treatment) but I’ve been travelling through vacations and busy days (and the deadline for my “Achivieng real business growth through Second Life” hasn’t helped).
But now I’m back with a whole lot of things to says and experiences to be told. And, again, with so few time available to write them down.
So, let’s go with a Powerpoint style bullet list of important things happened meanwhile
- I’ve been interviewed on the next phases of the Gabetti presence in Second Life (interview in Italian, here’s an automatic translation)
- I’ve spent 3 whole weeks on holiday (the last time I had so much vacation I was 17). Photo to be uploaded soon.
- My sister Marianna got married. She’s now enjoying her honeymoon in Polynesia.
- Leeander published a video interview with yours truly (again, in Italian) about the Virtual Assistant that’s now managing Gabetti first line IT helpdesk. More on this soon.
That’s all for now.
Gabetti recruits virtual agents for Second Life
Gabetti (note: the company I work for) has released today a job opening to recruit virtual real estate agents for it’s Second Life project.
We’re looking for skilled avatars eager to make some money working directly in Second Life; we can offer a pay in Linden Dollars, an office on the Gabetti Island and the possibility to work in the most cutting edge project of a real life Estate company inside Second Life.
You can take a look at the job opening on our site (Italian only, sorry), Monster (again, Italian only) or send your CV at SLrecruiting[at]gabetti.it; we’re closing the offer during September, so don’t loose this opportunity.
Second Architecture for Second Life
Gabetti sponsored a very interesting initiative by the Italian editor Meltemi who launched a pitch to build its premises in Second Life.
A lot of designers worked hard to build up a whole lot of buildings that will cover the Myrsine Island in the next few days: you can navigate non-spaces with gas walls or 18th century buildings or nature-like projects; you choose!
You can take a look at the building by entering the Myrsine Island in Second Life or you can take a look at the buildings pictured here.
A nice machinima has been shooted too.
