Check out the website: MTV Shorts

Photo: Daniel J. Ashes.

You can imagine the satisfaction I felt when I got an email from an old friend at KPN who took this photo in the main lobby of KPN last week:

Yep, our original Wi-Fi hotspot, in the case I designed with the logo I designed is still active and visible to everyone visiting. Makes me proud…

We bought 15 iPhones in San Francisco last year for all our friends.

Yep, I’m serious. The other reasons for wanting an iPhone are valid too and apply to me too. It is the mother of all shiny objects, a great tool and a nice phone and you just want one as soon as you hold one in your hands. But besides that the iPhone platform is also clearly the start of something new. And I want to be a part of that.

Early Apple computers (before the Macintosh) had serial ports and something called a Game Port. It could be used for digital and analog input and output and was very powerful. People would buy an Apple I or Apple II and hack around with these ports to build exiting stuff like printers or home automation tools. Back then it was clear to people that you could build practicably anything with these machines if you had some basic hard- and software knowledge and that was an extremely exciting prospect.

Now we have the iPhone. A lot of people are complaining about the closed character of the iPhone but I see it differently. Sure, things could improve a lot. The NDA should go and the App store should work more transparent and all that. But look at the possibilities for a moment and you will realize just how empowering this little computer is!

The early Apple computers had serial ports that let people do anything with their computers which was cool. The box itself could do a few basic things which were exciting but still fairly limited. Now look at the iPhone: developers have access to the Internet, the GPS chip and all the motion sensors. The touch, tilt and move interface is all there waiting for you to take advantage of. All you have to do is come up with an application that uses a few of these, freely available, technologies and built it.

Better yet; you don’t even have to worry about setting up an eShop, coming up with license fees, promotion, illegal copies or how to make your invention available to users. The App store handles everything for you.

So what you have is a phenomenon with unlimited possibilities, free tools to build applications, an app store that handles distribution, promotion and security and millions of eager users who can’t wait to play with your products, and pay for them too.

It is not often that a revolution takes place where you get a chance to participate. It happened, and is still happening, with the Internet and now it has just started with a new platform called the iPhone.

I just couldn’t resist becoming a part of that.

The design you see here is based on a very popular WordPress theme titled “Bluebird” designed by Randa Clay. I only changed some colors and the header image.

Because of Twitter and TwitterMail I spend a lot more time micro blogging than writing regular, and longer, post here. But that doesn’t mean I’m planning to stop my blogging here!

But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the Kings of Code gathering on May 27 in Amsterdam! In fact, as one of the initiators of the event, I must be there!

Yeah, the Kings of Code gathering is an event by developers for developers with developers. There will be international speakers who will talk about the latest developments and best-practices for web development work.

A few examples:

John Resig, who founded jQuery and is a JavaScript evangelist at Mozilla. But also Nate Koechley, developer at Yahoo who knows a lot about front-end development and Nate Abele, core-developer of CakePHP, the PHP-framework loosely based on Ruby on Rails.

There will also be 8 Open Source projects presented onstage by local developers.

I look forward to meeting a lot of Kings of Code there and having a beer too at the party after the event. See you there?

If you are planning to attend do register today as the event is very popular and there are only a few tickets left…

The result:

I noticed that most real-estate websites concentrate on these two moments (buy & sell) when it comes to home owners. All these websites try to make money when people want to buy or sell their house. That means that most people rarely need them.

My upstairs neighbors just sold their house. The price they got per square meter (€4191) means that my house almost doubled in value since we bought it 7 years ago. I hadn’t thought about that until my neighbors sold their house and I recalculated the value.

So that got me thinking. Could it be possible to build a service that appeals to home owners and keeps them up-to-date on the value of their house, what similar houses in the neighborhood get sold for, what their over-allowance is and if they can’t get a better mortgage based on the value of their house and the current interest rates.

There are a few variables that make it hard to predict the value of real-estate. But I’m just suggesting that we really predict values only based on square meters. What i would propose is that we take the last known valuation (you bought the house for how much?) and take that as a the basis. Then we look at what other houses in your area get sold for and based on that we could multiply the value of your house.

My guess (but I’m not that good with math so that is why this is an OpenIdea) is that the more houses are added to the database the more precise it will be able to predict the value of a house.

There will always be exceptions and factors that will influence the price of your house positively or negatively but those could be added as we find out about them. Lets say you buy a few extra square meters of garden or you find out that your roof is leaking. In the database you could say ‘Shape of building: needs work” which we could translate into “needs work = 5% off value”. A bigger garden would be “Square meters x average garden value + total value”.

I can image that if you have the last 6 transactions of a house and the houses around it, the current interest rates and a few more variables you could give people a pretty good estimate of the value of their houses.

I registered the domain name Taxati.com for this OpenIdea. In The Netherlands a ‘taxatie’ means ‘Appraisal’.

Although the math behind the calculations will be pretty complicated in the long term the basic system should be easy to build. People should be able to input a few values and their contact data and then we could send them a weekly update on the value of their house, including a few interesting deals to re-insure, re-mortgage or maybe just sell their houses.

Who wants to help me build it?