Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

Someone once told me that there are two happy moment in the life of a boat owner: the day he buys his boat and the day he sells it. The rest is spent fixing, moving, cleaning and worrying about the boat.

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?

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We are extremely busy with The Next Web Conference 2008 but that doesn’t mean we don’t work on our other projects too. If you feel lucky you might want to play around with our new and improved Fleck.com service. Officially in beta at http://beta3.fleck.com/

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On April 3 & 4 we will host another edition of The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. We are very busy preparing everything. We expect 700+ visitors and a lot of exciting news and speakers. Check out more information on http://2008.thenextweb.org and regular updates on The Next Web Blog.

For people who have been following me here I also have a special discount. If you want to visit the conference and have been reading my blog and want a good discount contact me or leave a comment here and I will send you a special promo code that will give you a very good discount on the normal €750 price.

There is an interesting discrepancy when it comes to the price of the conference. It seems that most people in the Netherlands think it is expensive and people from the rest of the world find it cheap. It is true that similar conferences are easily priced at three times ourprices and so we think the price is more than fair for a two day conference.

But I think it has to do with the relative cost of everything. People from other countries spend a few thousand on airfare and hotel and then the €750 seems relatively low. People from the Netherlands take their cars or the train and so compared to their additional cost the conference seems expensive.

Either way, we hope to meet you all at the conference in April!

As broadband becomes ubiquitous it becomes more and more interesting to use online applications. Your data is safe and always available and you don’t have to worry about software versions and back-ups. Recently I have started to move my important documents to Google Docs. The fact that is is so easy to work together on stuff without emailing attachments, losing sight of versions and keeping everything safe makes it a huge improvement over the old application/document model. I also use Google Calendar for my appointments, some parts of Gmail (to filter out spam) and Plaxo to handle my addresses. My photos are on Flickr and my .Mac account syncs my bookmarks, passwords and some other important data.

All these applications live in my browser. On an average day I keep 5 to 10 browsers windows open with a range of tabs in every window showing different (30+) websites. I will be blogging, checking stats, reading feeds, managing photos, calendars, addresses and email.

In the old days there used to be a few weak links in this chain. My computer could crash and my applications could lock up and become unresponsive. The days of computer crashes are a thing of the past. My computer still needs a restart now and then but in general I don’t lose data and it might happen once every 2 months. But my browser is a different story. I will be browsing 30 sites at the same time which really puts a strain on my browser. Every now and then my browser simply quits and restarts. Firefox luckily remembers some of the sites I was visiting and will offer to open these. But the information I might have entered (that blog post I was writing) will likely be gone.

I think the future of Web Applications needs more browsers. And I don’t mean another browser developer like Firefox, Opera or Safari. What I want is application specific browsers that will open independenly from my regular ‘random purpose’ browser. It’s content will be completely web-based but it will be slightly different, on the outside, from a regular browser. It won’t need an Address-Bar and back buttons. It will simply open and immediately show me Google Calendar, Google Docs and Gmail in one window. Big buttons will allow me to switch from Calendar to Docs and back. In the settings I might want to add more Tabs with other Google Applications as, and when, I need them or they become available.

When I click a link in Gmail to a website out of the Google domain a different ‘Browsing Experience’ optimized Browser will open. There I will be able to browse blogs, play games and search the web. If some Flash or Javascript applet screws up my browser it will only quit that Browser and not mess with my Google Office Browser or my WordPress browser. Different tasks need different browsers.

All the browsers would work independent from each other but will share a common technology and libraries. I could just use a Firefox, an Opera and a Safari browser next to each other. I am actually doing that right now but the experience sucks. The different shortcuts, interface and browsing experience makes it too hard to switch between browsers.

Just heard an internet entrepreneur complain about his parents’ use of their mobile phones. They switch them off when they are at home and often forget to turn them on when they leave the house. Our generation carries a mobile phone at all times and sometimes doesn’t even have a home phone. This is hard to explain to our parents and other older people. The entrepreneur urged them to simply keep the phone on at all times which they warily refused. They told him they didn’t like the prospect of people calling them everywhere and all the time.

My grandfather was a doctor in a small village. He had one of the 20 phones. His phonenumber was 9. When my father grew up the phone was still regarded as a serious tool which you would only use for urgent matters. My father made one phonecall a year and his father had him sit down and make a list of things he wanted to ask - a script - which he had to show for approval before he made the call.

I remember when I had to explain - defend even - to people why I had a mobile phone. Recently I met someone who didn’t own a mobile phone. This was a fact that led to a lot of amusement at the party where I was at. It was noteworthy enough to keep everybody talking about it for about a hour.

One day telephone calls will be free. They might be always on. Probably it will use some technology that confuses me. I will not understand it and resist. My daughters will come over to have a chat about my phone use. They will say something like this:

“Why do you hang up daddy? What is the use? Why do you need to be disconnected? It is so inconvenient to have to reconnect every time we want to hear how you are doing. Last week you hung up the phone for 3 hours! We only found out after 2 hours and then we spent almost a full hour to reconnect! You know it is free, right? No need to keep it short. From now on just keep your communicator switched on at all times so we can hear you, see your heart rate and check your temperature…

About a month ago I received this quote in my inbox from Max Shapiro that I can’t seem to get out of my head.

“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.”
– Alvin Toffler

I think I’m still young but even I am sometimes overwhelmed by new technologies and get tired at the thought of having to ‘unlearn’ my old habits and ‘relearn’ another new exciting technique. They say you are never too old to learn but you might just get too tired to invest time and energy in learning.

But, as Toffler explains, I need to keep up and persuade myself to keep evolving.