#opencagedata

[2014wherecamp]

Lokku-long time supporters of geo-innovation @WhereBerlin

WhereBerlin is having great supporters in the geo area. Thank you Lokku!

  "We are long time supporters of geo-innovation, via our brands Nestoria (http://nestoria.com), OpenCage (http://opencagedata.com) and  #geomob (http://geomobldn.org), the regular geo-innovation event we run in London. In addition we do seed investments in geo start-ups.

For example we recently invested in SplashMaps (http://www.splash-maps.com), who make custom fabric maps for the outdoors.  I am pleased to announce that in November they will be expanding outside of the UK and customers will have the ability to make German maps. 

  To celebrate we will be awarding free SplashMaps to the best WhereCamp speakers, as voted by the audience. 

We're delighted to again sponsor a WhereCamp event." 

  Ed Freyfogle- co-founder of Lokku & organizer of #geomob

[devblognestoria]

Good looking addresses

The team at our sister brand OpenCage Data have rolled something out that we though Nestoria dev readers might find relevant.

Given a bunch of geodata about a location, (for example like what you might get from OpenStreetMap) how can we form that data into an address or placename that makes sense to a consumer. This challenge is non-trivial as address formats are different from country to country. So we've released an open source set of templates (in the widely used Mustache format) that can be used to programmaticaly format addresses correctly.

It's all in the "address-formatting" repository over on github. NOt all countries are done yet, but bit by it they are being added.

The templates themselves are programming language independent. As regular readers of this blog will know, we're heavy users of perl and as such have written a perl implementation of a parser. Geo::Address::Formatter is over on CPAN, just waiting for you to use it (and the code's of course on github, where we welcome your pull requests). That said, they would welcome other parser implementations.

There's a post up on the OpenCage blog that goes into the motivations of project, and explains the problem set in more detail. There have already been a few pull requests coming in, and more are of course welcome.

In other geo news, we continue our long running streak by sponsoring WhereCamp Berlin which is coming up in mid-November. If you can't make it to Berlin, hopefully you can join us at the next #geomob in London on the 4th of November.

[lokkultd]

Proud to once again sponsor SOTM-EU

Since the earliest days of Lokku (back in the neogeo dark ages of 2006) we've been admirers of and participants in OpenStreetMap. Even when we were just a small team with more vision than lines of code we found the money to sponsor the very first State of the Map, the annual gathering of OpenStreetMap enthusiasts. Fast forward eight years and Lokku has grown a lot, and so has OSM. So much so that now, along with an annual global SotM there are are also regional and national conferences.

Over the years it has been our pleasure to sponsor and present at many of them (and to support OSM in other ways), and as a founder of Lokku I'm very proud to announce that this year we will be continuing the long-standing tradition. Our brand OpenCage Data is an official sponsor of State of the Map Europe which will take place in Karlsruhe (not far from where I spent several years of my childhood!) June 13-15th. If past indication is any guide the event will be very well organised and offer some great talks and good fun. 

Our portfolio brand SplashMaps has submitted a talk (and will hopefully be able to show off the first non-UK maps!) and we've also submitted a few of our own. Indeed, we've just started a new geo related project which we hope to announce and show off in Karlsruhe. To kickstart the project we slipped out of the office for a bit of geo team building in Greenwich. 

So if European geoinnovation is your thing, we hope to see you in Karlsruhe in June. But for those that can't quite wait, we invite you to join us on the 13th of May here in London for the next #geomob - and if you can't make either there'll be another #geomob on the 17th of July. 

yours in geo-innovation,

Ed (@freyfogle)

[blognestoriauk]

Seven years later and we're still searching

Fellow nestorphiles,

though we've been active on our twitter feed (you do follow us, right?), it's been a fair while since we've blogged. Apologies. 

So what have we been up to here at Nestoria HQ the last few months? Well, to be very open with you first and foremost our focus remains more of the same - we remain laser-focused on making it simple and fast for you to find your next home, be it to buy or rent across all of our eight markets. In terms of day to day that means a relentless focus on the key factors that make a good search: data quality and freshness, relevancy of search results, user experience, and of course speed. 

That perhaps sounds straight forward, but we can assure you it isn't always. Recently Savio, one of our star engineers, gave a talk at #geomob (the location based services event we run) that gets into the sometimes insane difficulty of geocoding that we face, particularly in some of our newer markets. Nevertheless, where there is a will there is a way, and I'm very proud to announce that over the last few months we've seen great progress, but especially on Nestoria India and Nestoria Brasil, where we've been adding new partners and making hundreds of little bug fixes. We're now helping more people than ever before find their next home. As we've always said, search is a game of details, and day in and day out we're finding and fixing them.

Nevertheless, there also comes a time when bigger changes are needed. A few weeks ago we passed a non-minor milestone: Nestoria is now seven years old. While our mission of fast and easy property searching remains as relevant as ever, we also thought it might be time for a bit of a visual refresh. Looking back, the web has evolved immensely in seven years with the rise of mobile, social, radical improvement in the tool set available to web developers, and significantly raised level of user expectations. In the next few weeks we'll begin rolling out a total revamp of our design, to include new branding (for a sneak preview of the new logo check out Savio's presentation). We hope you like it and look forward to all of your feedback. "New" can always be a bit jarring, but we're convinced it's a significant improvement. nevertheless, you can rest assured the key focus of our service on fast and easy searching will remain. Now and forever.

For anyone interested in some the the tech under the hood of Nestoria, our CTO Alex was recently interviewed. He goes into a lot of detail about the tools we use, why we use them, and even talks a bit about some of the office decor. It's a good read. We're working hard to release more of our tools as open source, if you'd like to contribute please swing by the Lokku github page. 

In a similar spirit, we've been thinking about whether we can turn any of the tools and services we use behind the scenes into businesses in their own right. The first of these new businesses was revealed a few weeks ago at the OSMPLUS event in San Francisco - please say hello to OpenCage Data. This new service is based on our years of experience and support for OpenStreeetMap. In trying to use OSM's amazing wealth of geodata on our projects we found there was a bit of a technical barrier. Our hypothesis is that this barrier prevents other organisations from realising the potential of Open Data and that there is space in the market for services like ours to help. One of our founder, Ed Freyfogle, will be talking about this at OSM's annual conference State of the Map in Birmingham on 6-8th of September (which we're also very proud to once again sponsor). We've been fortunate to attract a great team of advisors to help us on OpenCage, and we look forward to working closely with them to help others see the benefits of open data. Please get in touch if you have any geodata needs we can help you with. 

Likewise, we're looking closely at whether our knowledge of search, particularly geo or location based-search might be useful to brands doing large amounts of search engine marketing. Right now this is still very much at the exploratory stage, but we've posted some details on slideshare. If this might be relevant to you please ping us. 

Over the next few months, if we see that they can serve a need in the market, we hope to spin off several such similar businesses. 

Despite all of this keeping us very busy, we have managed to find a bit of time to celebrate our progress. Here's a picture of most of the team toasting life last week at our summer drinks. 

If this all sounds like good fun, which it almost always is, and you'd like to join us, we do have a few positions open. We're always looking for smart new team members. 

And with that it's time for me to close by once again thanking everyone - employees, partners, advisors, and most of all property-searchers - who has helped make Nestoria and Lokku a success over the last seven years, and head back to the hard work of continually improving relevancy, user experience, freshness, and speed. 

happy house hunting!