It’s always nice to be liked!

It was cool to receive such positive reviews of nuroa from the Spanish blogosphere.

I mean, I’ve been pretty consistent in saying that we wouldn’t launch until we were happy with the product, and we are pretty happy with it (though the site’s still in private beta because there are a few more annoying bugs to fix).

But it’s always nice to see that you are not crazy and that other people share your opinion.

At the very least, I’ll never have to hear again that question to which I’ve become too well accustomed: “Have you launched yet?”

It’s a little like giving birth. At some point, you just want to get the damn thing out!

A year and a half is a long time.

And I kinda got tired of my mom’s constant questions about our delayed launch dates.

So all I can do is say “thanks” to all of the bloggers who took the time to test nuroa and express relief that our hard work was appreciated by leaders in the Spanish blogging community.

We still have a lot more that we want to do. Our limitation is more related to financial and human resources considerations than it is to imagination or a desire to innovate. (It must be nice to work at Google!) But in any case, we’ve only just begun.

For those of you who can read in Spanish but don’t have the leading Spanish bloggers in your blogrolls, here are the links to some of the bloggers who reviewed us:

• Carlos Mantero (disclaimer: Carlos worked for us)
• Error500
• Genbeta
• Incubaweb
• jcdelolmo.es
• Las Tareas
• Loogic
• Technología Inmobiliaria
• Visual Beta
  
• Tecnorantes (disclaimer: Juan Luis is a member of our advisory board)

Once again, I’m happy that we didn’t disappoint anyone too much.

Now the real fun and challenges begin!

We did it!

After what can only be described as an eventful and interesting year and a half, our website has finally gone live.

In the end, we have decided to launch vertical by vertical, country by country. The goal is to offer a depth and degree of local knowledge that tends to be absent in some of our competitors. We understand that classifieds are extremely local. Not even national in many cases. Extremely local.

A user in Berlin could often care less about the housing market in Munich (unless the move is inter-regional).

Similarly, most home buyers in Barcelona could care less about the various neighborhoods in Madrid. That information does little to inform her search for a property in a few select neighborhoods in Barcelona, and even within Barcelona, if she’s only searching for properties in Gracia and the Eixample Esquerre, she could probably care less about the real estate market in Sants and Sarria (two other districts within Barcelona).

Our goal is to understand what motivates and concerns the user in each key region. Otherwise, it will be very difficult to provide a truly satisfying user experience. There’s a limit to how individualised you can make the search experience, but the goal is to make it feel extremely personalised, and the first step in the context of a real estate search engine is to make it feel extremely local.

So that’s why we have started with two real estate sites: one in Germany (www.nuroa.de) and one in Spain (www.nuroa.es). They’re password protected for a couple of weeks — we’re still correcting a few major bugs like the fact that the search engine confuses Barcelona city with Barcelona province — but we will give the password to anyone who wants it, and we wholeheartedly welcome your feedback. (Please send me an email to gary @ migoa.com, and I’ll get you the passwords.)

Our goal is to launch in the UK and France within the near future, but only to the extent that we can launch something that demonstrates an understanding of how the local markets work. And only to the extent that we can dedicate sufficient resources so that the websites don’t just become cut-and-paste versions in French and in English.

We are the only vertical search engine in the world to include what we are calling “intuitive search”, which essentially means that we integrate web 2.0 aspects (i.e., we integrate relevant real estate blogs, newspaper articles, videos, photos, etc.) into our search results without detracting too much from the central focus of the page — the real estate listings. So if you do a search for “piso Barcelona”, you will get the search results AND in another column you might see relevant articles from the APIs in Barcelona telling you why now is the time to buy, or a study from BBVA about the evolution of prices in Barcelona, plus pics that other users have taken in and of Barcelona, etc.

We think that intuitive search is the wave of the future. The “big” search engines are already experimenting in this area with Ask3D and Google’s universal search. We think that they understand the future of search pretty well, so we adapted some of their insights to our particular verticals.

And such an approach makes sense. We understand that finding the right apartment is often only the first of many steps in the property purchasing process. And it is only one of the many considerations that will determine if, when and how you will purchase your dream home. So our results page tries to figure out what these other relevant considerations might be and provides you the collective insight of other members of our real estate community.

Our refined search features are also pretty cool and are supplemented by the ability to search by tags. And it all works pretty dynamically. So you have many options to narrow down the millions of possible search results into the few really relevant results that meet your criteria. That’s the key comparative advantage of a “vertical” search engine relative to a “horizontal” one like Google — the results should be more precise and relevant with regard to the vertical in question.

Our “official” launches will take place during the month of October at various conferences. We will launch the German site at DemoGermany (the German/European equivalent of the successful US conference). And if all goes according to plan, we will launch the international site at the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in London next week. We’re currently ironing out the details right now with Ryan, but it looks like they’ll give us a few minutes in front of the general audience to make a brief pitch. Both are cool events that will be attended by influential bloggers and press, so it makes sense for us to use them to launch.

And on top of that, both conferences should be cool.

I sincerely believe that the final product reflects the hard work and analyses that went into it. A lot of influential investors and people from the sector have already congratulated us on the interface. And our tech is probably among the best of the current vertical search players. That’s our goal, in any case.

One commentator on Juan Luis’s blog said that we took too long in development, which surprised me given that we took the same amount of time as the original vertical search engines in the US. Our goal wasn’t to put out a rushed and underdeveloped product, or a cut-and-paste version of what already exists in the US. Our goal was to put out something innovative with truly disruptive potential. I think that we have done it.

And as I have noted elsewhere on this blog, Google was the 12th search engine to launch.

The goal isn’t always to be first.

The goal is to be the best.

Particularly in the tech sector, the two concepts are often not synonomous.

Try out nuroa and let me know what you think.

A few years back there were rumors that she’d died from a crack overdose, even though she’s publicly said that “crack is wack”.

But after ditching the zero (ex-hubby Bobby Brown) and going to rehab, she looks great (the pic is from a couple of days ago when she was eating with Clive Davis at Nobu), and more importantly, it seems that Whitney is ready to drop another album.

And I, for one, can’t wait.

Whitney provided the soundtrack to much of my youth.

I hope her comeback is more Mariah (the Emancipation of Mimi) than Britney (Gimme, Gimme).

I hope that talent wins out.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft is in talks to buy 5% of Facebook for $300-500 million. Facebook is courting multiple investors and is asking for a valuation of at least $10 billion.

Google is apparently also in the running, though Google has a lot less cash saved up than Microsoft does.

Must be nice to be Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook is growing quickly. It not boasts 40 million users, up from 9 million one year ago.

But the funny thing is that the Journal reports that Facebook has chosen the investment approach, because their business model can’t sustain an IPO. The valuation isn’t based on actual earnings or profit. It’s estimated that Facebook has earned the majority of its $60 to $90 million (with no profit) in annual revenue from an advertising deal with Microsoft and that this year it will have a profit of $30 million on revenue of $150 million.

That’s a multiple of 300x profit, which is a bit exagerrated, particularly if you take into account that the payments from Microsoft are effectively a subsidy to create a relationship with Facebook. Although social networking sites like Facebook have huge audiences, most of their members don’t want to see ads. Their click-through rate is relatively low.

But the valuation is more about the clash of the Titans — Google vs. Microsoft — and the fight for the future of the Internet than it is about Facebook per se.

The Journal also has an interesting “where are they now” study of GeoCities, a social networking site that was the Facebook of its day. In August 1998, GeoCities was the 3rd most visited site on the web, and Yahoo bought the company in 2000 for $4.7 billion. But GeoCities failed to update its technology quickly enough so that less than a decade later, the site and its technology are obsolete. Apparently, Yahoo was more focused on building traffic than on improving the service, which meant that Facebook, YouTube and MySpace were soon able to dominate the social networking space.

As the Journal points out, of the top 20 most visited sites in 2003, only 9 still occupy market-leading positions. Innovation — and finding a viable business model — are the keys to staying relevant.

$500 million should go a long way towards making that possible.

Sometimes it’s surprising that Americans can’t see how racist and provincial they seem to the rest of the world, even when they are Ivy-League university presidents or “leaders of the free world”.

I wasn’t really following with any great fervor the controversy surrounding the invitation to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, to speak at Columbia University. I was just kind of surfing the web, when I stumbled upon the lead article on the New York Times online.

But when I read about how the president of Columbia, Lee C. Bollinger, introduced the foreign dignitary to the audience by insulting him with patronizing, almost racist challenges, I couldn’t help but get annoyed.

Would North Korean or Chinese leaders have been subjected to the same sort of insulting treatment, or are they higher in the racial (and political) hierarchy of respectability, even though their support of human rights is also a bit suspect?

By way of disclaimer, I am no fan of Iran. From what I’ve read in the Western press, it’s not exactly a hotbed of human rights. And I find Ahmadineja’s assertion that there are no homosexuals in Iran slightly Nazi-esque in its genocidal implications. Plus to be 100% frank, the hatred that many parts of the Arab world show towards the US scares me. I am, after all, American and the religious fanatics don’t seem to discriminate in their hatred of and/or desire to attack and kill Americans.

September 11th was a defining moment for me.

But I still don’t think that the way to convince someone from another culture that his point of view might be misguided is to insult and patronize him publicly. All you do is make him hate you more.

Why should he accept your argument that you and your culture are morally and evolutionarily superior when he has his own proud history and social norms?

Why should he trust you when the basis of your argument is “Do as I say, not as I do”?

As Ahmadinejad asked quite pointedly: “If you [the United States] have created the fifth generation of atomic bombs and are testing them already, who are you to question other people who just want nuclear power?”

This is the heart of the matter. What is the moral or cultural basis that separates the US’s right to produce weapons of mass destruction from the claims of other nations? That they’re Arab and can’t be trusted?

Again, after September 11th, I completely understand the rationale behind that argument, but I admit that it’s not a morally upright or intellectually convincing point of view. It’s a purely emotional reaction with racist implications.

It’s pure survival of the fittest.

Ahmadinejad is the president of a proud nation, one that’s profoundly influential — for good or for bad — in the modern political world. Bollinger is the president of a prestigious national university. That’s a great job, but not quite as influential or powerful.

So why does Bollinger think that he’s superior to Ahmadinejad? Just because he’s an American WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)?

A few gems from Bollinger’s introduction:

• “Mr. President, you exhibit all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated.” (Nice technique. Call someone “petty”and “cruel”, and then hint that he’s “astonishingly uneducated”, but buffer the insult by starting with “Mr. President”.)
• He noted that it was “well documented” that Iran was a state sponsor of terrorism. Wasn’t it also well-documented that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Isn’t that why we went to war with them?
• After 10 minutes of insult in which he suggested that Iran did not belong to the “civilized world”, Bollinger concluded that “I doubt that you will have the intellectual courage to answer these questions.”

If Bollinger felt this way, why did he invite someone he regards as an “intellectual coward” to speak? Maybe he just wanted to get free press and benefit from Ahmadinejad’s celebrity/infamy?

Isn’t he the intellectually disingenuous one?

Ahmadinejad is no idiot. As he astutely observed at the beginning of his speech: “In Iran, tradition requires when you invite a person to be a speaker, we actually respect our students enough to allow them to make their own judgment, and don’t think it’s necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of complaints to provide vaccination to the students and faculty.”

On that point, I think that the “petty dictator” is correct. And it’s not just an Iranian tradition. I think it’s pretty universal that you should treat your guests with respect.

All of this hypocrisy in the context of a country where, as Paul Krugman notes in his New York Times column, “race remains one of the defining factors in modern American politics”. The context to his commentary is the case of the Jena 6, a group of black students who beat up a white classmate (admittedly, not a nice thing to do) and were charged with second-degree murder.

The punishment doesn’t seem to fit the crime, which has made the trial a cause celebre. It is indicative of a culture in which the white majority has often used its political and economic superiority to control and oppress racial minorities.

In this environment, some white students warned black students not to sit under “whites only” trees by hanging nooses, a reference to the not-so-distant past when blacks were lynched (killed and hung from trees) as a means of social control.

And the party of our President has historically used the promise of continued racial superiority in order to win the white Southern vote. A few examples:

• President Bush, the idealist who goes to war to protect the freedoms of other countries’ citizens, exploited the symbolism of Bob Jones University in 2000 as part of his electoral strategy. Bob Jones’ claim to fame is that it banned interracial dating and punished students who dared to date people of other races.
• All four leading Republican candidates for the 2008 nomination have rejected invitations to debate minority issues on public television, and they have declined to address Latino voters directly. Given how a lot of poor whites are defensive about immigration rights — and given that poor, Southern whites were the only group to support the Republicans in the recent Congressional elections — the candidates don’t want to appear to support Blacks, Latinos and Asians. Their loyal, religious, white and often racist Southern voter base might get offended.

In short, intolerance, religious fanaticism and racism are not unique to “uncivilized” parts of the world.

Violence and aggression are not only initiated by (Arab) state sponsors of terror.

I’m happy to be American. But every now and then, I can’t help but be a little embarrassed and disappointed.

Last night we had a pot luck at my house. It was also our going away party for Christina, intern extraordinaire.

Christina is only 23 years old, but she is so dedicated, responsible, hard-working and dedicated that she redefined for us what you can expect from an intern. Whenever we gave her a new challenge, you could see the hunger and desire in her eyes. Then she’d giggle demurely and you knew that she was about to kick ass.

She was a key member of our German team, helping with market research, researching and writing content, etc.

We are going to miss Christina, but she’s already told us that she wants to come back next year to work for us. So it’s not so much a “goodbye”, as much as an “auf weidersehen”. Henri, our new head of corporate development showed up, as did Emma, who has the first employee that I ever hired and the one that will continue with me in any company in which I have influence over hiring.

Jason, our other star intern, also made it to the party. His creative Philly dip was the star plate of the night, and it was accompanied well by Victor’s killer caipirinhas.

It’s good to like the people that you work with.

The APIs (Spanish association of real estate professionals) are going to go down fighting!

And maybe slightly mislead the public along the way.

It all started on my to work yesterday. The front-page headline from the free daily newspaper grabbed my attention: “Real Estate Professionals Suggest that You Buy a Flat Now”.

I thought: “What the Hell?”

So I went to go find the article, and in the process picked up a “20 Minutos” and surfed El Pais online. They all tell the same story without any attempt to verify if what the APIs say is true. Obviously, the APIs have a vested interested in jump-starting the market. That’s why they want you to buy now. Does good journalism mean investigating the story? That’s a debate for another day, I guess.

Anyway, here’s the API’s argument:

• Prices in Barcelona dropped by 2% in 3Q 2007
• Prices have increased in “only” 4/10 neighborhoods in Barcelona (isn’t that almost half? And in any case, it seems that the prices are rising in the areas in which I’d want to live.)
  • 3% rise in the Eixample Izquierdo
  • 2% rise in San Andreu
  • 1% rise in Sarrí-Sant Gervasi
  • 1% rise in Sants-Montjuic
• Demand from buyers has decreased by about 20%
• Sales are about 75% less than they were in 2005
• 30% of real estate agencies/offices have closed. By the end of the year, that figure will rise to 50%.

The APIs also note that since this is no longer a sellers’ market, they will only work with sellers who accept reasonable valuations and who will give them exclusive rights to show the property.

They say it is as if exclusivity is an advantage for the buyer, but it probably only helps the agency. The APIs try to spin it by saying that exclusivity means that buyers won’t be pressured, but an agency can still “pretend” to have another interested buyer or use other pressure tactics to animate a hesitant buyer. That’s unlikely to change. It’s part of the sales process.

Almost hidden in the articles is the fact that year-on-year, prices in Barcelona are still 2% higher than they were a year ago. 2% is immaterial once you take into account inflation, but it’s still slightly misleading to take the 3Q numbers out of their full context — the real estate market is pretty dead, the majority of real estate agencies need life support, prices are stagnant, but there’s no dramatic increase or decrease of prices.

It’s not clear why now is the moment to buy.

The dramatic numbers — 20% decrease in demand, 75% decrease in sales, 30-50% of the offices are/will be closed — all refer to the dire state of real estate as a business.

The numbers that would be relevant to buyers — 2% drop in prices in 1 quarter / 2% increase in prices — are almost immaterial by comparison and pretty much cancel each other out.

That being said, you have to give the APIs credit. They are resilient and know how to sell a story.

Via GurusBlog, I came across an interesting follow-up to my post, Dead Pledges and Dead Pools. Don Piso has apparently confirmed that they closed 25% fewer operations during the 1st quarter of 2007. It’ll be interesting to see what they report about Q2 2007.

Don Piso is one of the biggest residential real estate groups in Spain. They have very deep pockets, as they are owned by Ferrovial (one of Spain’s richest companies). Their brand is one of the strongest and most well-known in the sector.

So if they are suffering 25% drops in sales, one can only imagine the challenges that local neighborhood agencies face. I’ve already recounted a bit about my experience, and each day I see that more of my former real estate collaborators are being forced out of business.

Current market conditions are challenging, to say the least.

Now it’s all about survival of the fittest. Those agencies with the resources to withstand these tough times will survive. Everyone else will die.

The reasons put forth by Don Piso to explain their crisis mirror my own experience:

• Mortgages are harder to get and more expensive when you get them, because interest rates have increased and it’s generally harder to convince banks to grant mortgages to interested buyers.
• Neither buyers nor sellers fully appreciate market conditions, making it more difficult to reach an agreement as to price. Buyers believe that prices will fall. Sellers believe that prices will continue to rise. There’s little middle ground.

Nonetheless, despite a 25% decrease in sales, Don Piso’s representatives still hope for a “soft landing”.

Maybe it’s a “glass half-empty/glass half-full” thing. In these tough times for real estate agencies, a bit of optimism doesn’t hurt. Plus with Ferrovial behind you, I suppose few landings are going to be very hard.

But I’m sure that the other agencies that can’t count of Ferrovial’s support have a slightly different perspective.

One country, one vertical.

That’s what I thought as I read the news that Deutsche Telecom had exercised its right of first refusal to buy Immobilienscout24 for €500 million.

Back in late August, Jesus announced that PBL and Macquarie Bank had formed a joint venture to buy 66% of Immobilienscout24 for €357 million, which would have valued the company at €540 million. PBL is a traditional media company that is apparently trying to enter the online classifieds space more aggressively. They already own Australia’s second most important real estate portal: MyHome.com.au.

Axel Springer, a large German media group, was also in the running, but dropped out when the price got too high.

There’s no doubt that Immobilienscout24 is Germany’s biggest online real estate portal. The company boasts some monster numbers:

• Revenue of €53 million in 2006
• EBITDA of €21 million (meaning that the acquisition price was about 24x EBITDA)
• 1.2 million ads
• 70,000 customers
• 2.5 million visitors per month

Again, this is one vertical, one country.

We will soon launch our property search engine in both Germany (www.nuroa.de) and Spain (www.nuroa.com). As we embark on this journey, Immobilienscout24’s numbers will no doubt serve as both a challenge and an inspiration.

It was also interesting to note that, as Nicole from Blognation points out, the rationale for the transaction was to diversify Deutsche Telecom’s business model. Apparently, the company is losing money from its traditional telephone business and wants to promote a more modern image by focusing more on Internet-based businesses.

It seems that it’s not only the traditional media companies that see the value of online classifieds businesses.

Online videos (and a tabloid-worthy personal life) killed the untalented pop star.

Britney Spears is over. She’s amassed an amazing fortune based on limited talent and her ability to glamorize normalcy. Her unique trait seemed to be her hunger to succeed and her Janet/Michael Jackson-like performance skills.

But that was two kids and a rushed marriage ago.

Her performance at the MTV Video Music Awards were profoundly normal but decidely unglamorous. It was like a bad Karaoke night in little Tokyo. The lip-synching sucked. The dance moves were limp. She was sporting a beer gut, despite being dressed skimpily in “sexy” lingerie.

The most interesting part of the entire performance was to see how MTV is now using online videos to pump up its declining relevance and to combat YouTube.

In addition to the Britney performance, MTV’s website boasts Kanye West’s meltdown (he complains that a black man apparently can’t win an MTV award — with his bank account, I hardly feel sorry for him. I don’t think that his failure to win an MTV VMA is the biggest struggle facing the black male population).

And there was the all-out, “white-trash” slugfest between Kid Rock and Tommy Lee, both of them ex-husbands of the even more sordid Pamela Anderson.

Apparently, the fight was for Pamela’s virtue. A losing battle.

And it was all caught by MTV’s cameras and streamed via its online player.

Of course, I didn’t watch the MTV Awards. I read about them online in the New York Times and perezhilton.com, before redirecting myself to MTV’s website to see the highlights.

MTV apparently understands that you won’t view the awards on regular TV either. They’ve completely revamped the format to focus on the YouTube generation that wants more performances, fewer speeches, and all of it in short video snippets. And they’ve promised not to rebroadcast the show 100 times on their channel.

Instead they’ll let you stream it from their website, based on your preferences.

And they’ll sue anyone — in particular, YouTube — that attempts to broadcast their content without permission or a good revenue-sharing plan.

Once again, it’s clear that Internet is disrupting media — some of it traditional, and some of it more provocative and youthful like MTV once was. (For a less pop-culture review of the disruptive force of online videos, see Ollivier’s post (in Spanish)).