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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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.

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.

I have often heard people (including myself) say “That isn’t enough to build a company on. That is just a feature”. In theory it is good to think about this. Is your idea or technology something you can build a company on or just something interesting that might be added to another company or product?

But in reality things work differently. Yahoo started as a page with links to websites. Can you imagine that someone said “Yeah that is nice. But it is just a feature. You can’t build a company on a page with links”.

Or take Google. All they had when they started out was a better technology to index pages called ‘BackRub’. They tried to sell this ‘feature’ to a few established search engine companies. These companies weren’t interested so they started their own search engine to show off their technology.

I think it is dangerous to dismiss ideas as only ‘features’ and have decided to stop saying this to people. Great companies are built on simple features. Lets respect that.

On monday evening I made soup for 25 people. It contained broccoli, zucchini and other vegetables. To make the soup more special I added a little Truffle oil just before I served the dish. Truffle smells delicious and makes almost any dish special. Brillat-Savarin called the truffle “the diamond of the kitchen”. Other people describe the pungent scent of truffle as similar to the scent of unwashed underwear. It has a sharp acrid scent to it and you either love or hate it.

Michael Arrington* (Techcrunch editor and serial entrepreneur) has been described as arrogant, a hypocrite or just ‘an asshole’. He can be extremely critical about companies, even the ones he invests in or is friends with, and without ever holding back. Despite, or because, of this Techcrunch is THE technology blog in the world with more than 500.000 feed subscription. Both Wired and Forbes have named Arrington one of the most powerful people on the internet. You either love him or hate him. But you can’t ignore him.

Being controversial is good. It means you are different. It means that you will attract fans and enemies but at least you will garner attention. Being bland is boring and won’t make you the subject of the conversation at any dinner table. It also means that you will have to live with people hating or disliking you.

If you find out someone really hates your stuff (project, company, looks, product, girlfriend, car, song) than that might be a good thing.

In fact, if nobody hates it it will be harder to get people to love it. They can love you or hate you but they won’t be able to ignore you.

* = Just so you know: I love Michael Arrington.

Entrepreneurs need to be confident and tenacious.
But not arrogant or stubborn.
There is a fine line dividing both.

It is easy to mistake confidence for arrogance and the same goes for tenacity. Some entrepreneurs think they are tenacious but are simply being stubborn. I think a way to test if someone is being confident or arrogant is too challenge their ideas. A confident human being won’t be easy to convince but he will likely take pleasure in being challenged. An arrogant person will not even allow you to challenge any of his or her ideas.

It is harder to detect whether someone is tenacious or stubborn. I remember being accused of being stubborn and later proving my point. That would mean that I wasn’t stubborn but just tenacious. But how can you test this?

I have been accused of being arrogant in the past (not recently) and stubborn too. I would like to think that these people didn’t see that I wasn’t being arrogant but simply followed my instinct and wouldn’t easily give up. But I know it IS hard to see the difference so I don’t blame anyone.

Or is that an arrogant thing to say?