We know that pictures draw interested clients to a house. Why not make the best of your listings by improving and updating them with videos?

"Early on, some agents popularized one style of virtual tour that emulates the feeling of being inside a room and being able to look around in every direction," says a recent article in the Chicago Sun-Times. "But they're less popular now because users complain they give the viewer a distorted, fisheye view of the home. Now many virtual tours are controlled motion videos, in which images are stitched together and the point of view pans across to create a movie-like effect."

New, sophisticated technology allows for voiceovers, background music and red dots that allow you to navigate other photos.

(For more on getting the biggest bang out of your videos, check out our Field Guide to Using Videos as a Marketing Tool).

Posted on November 7 at 10:49 AM | Permanent Link | Add a Comment (0)

Over at the blog Future of Real Estate Marketing (and if you aren't reading it you're really missing out!), Joel had a great post on a new iPhone app from the Japanese company Tonchidot called Sekai Camera (World Camera).

TonchiDot’s idea is to use the iPhone camera and location awareness as a mobile information interface. Using the Sekai Camera application you can tag real-world locations and simultaneously view the tags shared by other users - Tonchidot calls it “Air Tagging”.

...snip...

And it brings up obvious applications for real estate. Imagine a real world property tour (boots on the ground, walking through a home) where you could instaneously access Zestimates or property data, read individual tags on the features in a room or listen to audio clips describing the amenities through the Sekai Camera terminal.

It probably helps that Japan has a robust 3G network in place to make all this possible. And I can't say the thought of everyone walking around staring at their iPhone screens is very comforting, but in the right place and time it could be really powerful...Watch the YouTube demo video after the jump...

Continue reading "Tagging your world with the iPhone" »

Posted on October 9 at 12:56 PM | Permanent Link | Add a Comment (0)

Today's Mossberg column in the Wall Street Journal [linked here through ProQuest for our members] discusses Microsoft Live Labs' latest webservice, Photosynth. I first heard about this project through a YouTube video of a presentation at the 2007 TED conference in Monterey, CA. Mossberg explains the technology:

"Unlike a simple 2-D panorama, which many photo programs can create from several pictures, a Photosynth creation, called a "synth," is a virtual 3-D environment. It gives you the feeling you are in the middle of a room looking around, or circumnavigating a building or object. You can travel through a scene both laterally and vertically, and zoom in to see detailed, higher-resolution views of objects inside the synth, such as paintings on a wall."

How does this differ from existing virtual tours? Well, for one, you can create these yourself without any special equipment. It does take some skill to get the photos to work seamlessly together, but the results can be a lot more impressive. Currently "synthed" photos are only available for viewing on the photosynth website and there are no privacy settings. However, look for this innovative application to spread and grow.

Watch the video demo from TED2007 below the jump...the Photosynth demo starts at about 2:45.

Continue reading "Photosynth 3-D Photo Tour" »

Posted on August 21 at 04:32 PM | Permanent Link | Add a Comment (0)

From the NAR Archives: Laser-powered lockboxes, driverless talking cars, and some seriously funky clothing are just a few of the features of the real estate industry of the future -- or at least they were in 1991, when this short film was created for NAR"s State & Municipal Issues Forum. While some of the film's predictions are over-the-top, others weren't too far off, such as rapid online access to property information.

Posted on July 14 at 09:15 AM | Permanent Link | Add a Comment (0)

Google's new operating system for mobile devices, Android, keeps progressing as more and more applications come online. The first android-based phone (manufacturer still unknown) is set to launch in the second half of this year. While people talk of a 'gPhone' in comparison to Apple's iPhone, there is no one gPhone, but rather a variety of products that will use different facets of Android as their framework. Google hopes that its OS will become the ubiquitous choice for both manufacturers and users, hopefully speeding new application development as engineers can focus on one system rather than the myriad in use today.

Recently at Google's annual engineers conference in San Francisco, Google engineering director Steve Horowitz gave a tour of some of the latest applications being developed for Android. With its browser-based touch-screen interface this flavor of the gPhone resembles nothing so much as the iPhone. The Android walkthrough begins at 23:32 and the 'wow' moment comes at 31:05.

via webmonkey

Posted on May 30 at 09:07 AM | Permanent Link | Add a Comment (0)