Category Archives: Mapping

This may be how the next generation will view Real Estate too. Consider the value of this to someone who is relocating. Will this technology be incorporated to the Virtual Tour in the future? This tutorial of Street View and Google Maps is quite impressive. Check out these driving directions. As the “NOW” generation continues trying to gather information and keep up with all the technology, the “NEXT” generation is active and persistent in creating more of it. Consumers’ GPS expectations, and “end user” products … Read More »

I read some stuff the other day about how the talented crew over at Estately recently launched into the Portland, OR market, and one of the stupid MLS rules (my opinion) they had to face triggered some memories of frustrations I had faced when I loaded the Portland data into our own IDX system. I’ll quote directly from the RMLS (Oregon MLS) rules themselves. (Rule III.13) Address fields are included in the IDX data set for the sole purpose of facilitating mapping functionality. The addresses … Read More »

Today, Paul Rademacher, a Technical Lead for Google Earth, announced the release of the Google Earth browser plug-in on the Google Lat Long Blog: Today, I’m happy to announce the release of the new Google Earth Browser Plug-in, which brings the full power of Google Earth to the web, embeddable within your own web site. Driven by an extensive JavaScript API, you can control the camera; create lines, markers, and polygons; import 3D models from the web and overlay them anywhere on the planet. According … Read More »

First, on Monday, it was announced that the KML format is now an international standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium. Google Earth Blog coverage – Google Earth’s KML Now International Standard. Then, Google Earth 4.3 was released on Tuesday (more commentary on Mashable). If you’re curious, here is a video demo: Regarding how these announcements relate to the real estate industry — to start, I certainly think the KML standard will impact any technology vendor doing online mapping within the next 2 years (real … Read More »

Over at the official Google Maps API blog, there’s an announcement that Google’s Street View functionality is now accessible programmatically via an API (that’s Application Programming Interface, for those who either didn’t know or just took that acronym for granted). What this means for agents, brokers, and vendors is that applications can now be created that tie directly into the pictures taken by those van-mounted cameras that drive around. Because I’m employed by an IDX vendor, most of the ideas I’m coming up with as … Read More »

At the time of this writing, Apple is holding a press release to announce their API for the iPhone; you can check out the live feed here. They’ve announced a lot of really incredible stuff so far, but the part that I was most intrigued with is this: We have a complete set of APIs for your app to talk directly to the contacts DB on the iPhone, and an entire database API with SQLite. … Core Location – we’ve taken that and patched it … Read More »

Though it was announced last week, I just saw Matt Goyer’s post mentioning a major update in Bird’s Eye imagery, and thought the news worthy of passing along. Here are the US cities (counties or MSA’s in some cases) with updated imagery: Etowah Co, AL Mobile Co, AL Monterey Co, CA Boulder Co Broomfield Co WashingtonDC. Cobb Co, GA De Kalb Co, GA Muscogee Co, GA Macon Co, IL Will Co, IL Rowan Co, KY Fayette Co, KY Anne Arundel Co, MD Grand Rapids Metro, … Read More »

According to the Google Earth Blog, there are now 12 new cities that include Google Street View imagery: Albany and Schenectady, NY Boise, ID Juneau, AKR Kansas City, MO Manchester, NH Milwaukee, WI Research Triangle Park (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), NC San Antonio, TX Salt Lake City, UT More coverage at Google Lat Long Blog. And yes, there are only 9 areas in that list, but there’s some areas like Raleigh that cover multiple cities More here on how real estate professionals might integrate this … Read More »

Since I’ve written about Google StreetView twice before, I thought this video might be of interest to some people. [via Spatially Adjusted via

There’s an interesting post at webmapper that’s probably worth reading, especially if you are a techy interested in real estate – Neighbo(u)rhood 2.0 The new services and products launched by Urban Mapping, Zillow, and the Dutch CBS in the first weeks of January may herald a new trend that affects online mapping: Neighbourhood 2.0. It does not only mark a shift from the global to the local, but also a further step in the democratisation of cartography: opening up neighbourhood data to both the (GIS) … Read More »