There’s always something to howl about.

Month: January 2012 (page 1 of 2)

How to solve the video multiplexing problem you didn’t know you had.

I love this news story, an exposition of the Supreme Court exposing its irrelevance:

In an entertaining hour-long episode, Supreme Court justices on Tuesday considered the government’s power to regulate expletives and nudity on the airwaves.

Why is this amusing to me? Because along with many other twentieth-century electromagnetic phenomena, broadcast television is dead.

Every word in that claim is important. “Television” — meaning audio/visual content primarily intended to entertain — is still with us, although it is likely to merge with other forms of on-line content.

But “broadcast television” — TV transmitted over the airwaves, one sender, many recipients — is a dead-letter today, and it will be progressively less important — and progressively less profitable — with every passing year.

The reason is simple: The future of entertainment is iPad-style video:

The iPad is the ultimate perfect television. On-demand. Stop and start at will. Goes with you when mom says you have to go to soccer practice. The iPad is the perfect entertainment-consumption device: Personal, portable, programmable — and infinitely extensible.

You may watch this video content on a device as small as your phone or your wrist-watch or on one as big as your living room wall, but this is the future of video in your life.

Broadcast — one-size-fits-all, limited-choices, isolated in a frozen time-schedule, can’t stop it, can’t rewind it, no easy way to research or cross-reference it, stuck on one very stupid device, hag-ridden with commercials — all of that is dead. It was a kludgey business model when it was the best we could do. By now, it’s a dinosaur — so we should expect it to endure a loud but inescapable death.

Note, too, that your cable company’s very-stupid on-demand service is also headed for the morgue, as are slightly better on-demand services like Netflix. The future of entertainment video is your friendly neighborhood search engine — augmented by the kinds of software services I have been describing lately.

The reality of your life is that you are going to watch what you want, when you want, on whatever device you choose — and you are going to have many more devices to Read more

iPad observation #2: Find a bigger dead-pool: The iPad eats everything.

Kicking this back to the top. This is me, writing just after the introduction of the iPad — two very short years ago. At the time I wrote these essays, every so-called “expert” on the nets was insisting that the iPad was an unforced error. I was right, they were wrong. But I’ve been right about a lot more than I’ve seen in the marketplace so far. Note this, for example: “I hate the remote controls for electronic devices, and one thing we should insist on, going forward, is that every wired device in our lives should be IP-addressable and fully-controllable by internet connection.” It’s interesting to revisit these ideas now, to see where we’ve gotten — and to see how far we still have to come. –GSS

 

Real life at my house: We actually like to watch television, if watching TV means watching DVDs (lately almost entirely Netflix DVDs) or watching selected cable shows. This usually happens very late in the evening, usually when we’re pretty much exhausted.

But: TV at home used to be TV with laptops. Now it’s TV with iPhone. In six months, it will be TV with iPads — or just iPads on the sofa.

Take careful note:

Broadcast television is dead, as is broadcast radio. Let’s free up the bandwidth now. The iPad is the ultimate perfect television. On-demand. Stop and start at will. Goes with you when mom says you have to go to soccer practice. The iPad is the perfect entertainment-consumption device: Personal, portable, programmable — and infinitely extensible.

As was inferable from my first observation in this series of posts, the annual Christmastime frenzy of cheap-shit electronic children’s “educational” toys is dead. Anything that anyone in your home does while laying stomach-down on the carpet will be done on the iPad.

As I pointed out the other day, Microsoft, Amazon and many, many other hi-tech vendors are dead. (I have a quality/integrity argument to make about this, as well, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.)

Despite the iBook store, books are dead. I love literature and I love the drama, but you don’t have to spend seventy-five bucks Read more

Google discovers what computing is actually for: “In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.”

Across all products is important. Across all devices is vital.

Drudge and the privacy geeks are going typically apeshit, but Google is playing my tune:

“If you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services,” Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy, product and engineering wrote in a blog post.

How might that work?

For instance, a user who has watched YouTube videos of the Washington Wizards might suddenly see basketball ticket ads appear in his or her Gmail accounts.

That person may also be reminded of a business trip to Washington on Google Calendar and asked whether he or she wants to notify friends who live in the area, information Google would cull from online contacts or its social network Google+.

Hell, yeah! Those are the kinds of jobs I want from Sarah, your software secretary, but I can show you a very cool Constance the Connector connection here, as well.

How about I start a music service that seeks to sell you music that you will probably like and don’t already own. “Don’t already own” is an easy database from iTunes or whatever. But “will probably like” requires analysis — algorithm as art — and that’s what makes my business model work. To you-as-end-user, it feels like I know you, like we’re high-school buddies whose friendship is built around grooving to the same tunes.

How could I do that? Let me see your YouTube history, not just what you picked but how many times your replayed particular songs. Let me see your Amazon.com shopping history — especially the things you come back to again and again but don’t buy. I don’t need to know you. You already know you better than anyone else ever could.

That’s what we’re actually talking about, you collecting facts about yourself for future reference. Like a bad comic, Google can make anything sound dirty, but there is nothing wrong with you getting more of what you want — better, faster and cheaper.

Do you understand? Your fears, assuming they are real, are misplaced. The U.S. Government now has the lawful authority to assassinate you at will in Read more

Product idea: Constance the Connector.

It’s been a few weeks since I started talking about Constance, and since then I’ve come up with a completely different way of thinking about operating systems. There are three players who could profit from my thinking — Apple, Google and Amazon — and I would be more than happy to share my thoughts to the first one of those three who salutes.

Meanwhile, I give you Constance, which is in some ways the logical counterpart to Heidi, the self-maintaining CRM system I started talking about last August. Constance the Connector is a server-based service that maintains your handle — a topic we have discussed before.

So: Here are ways you can know of me:

  • By name
  • By street address
  • By phone number
  • By email address
  • By Twitter handle
  • By social media profile
  • etc.

For now, if you want to address me by one of those means, you have to know the specific proper noun to be used — my actual name or my current email address. You are responsible for maintaining that information, and everyone who wants to make contact with me must do the same redundant and error-prone maintenance.

A Heidi-like CRM can do some of the maintenance by means of assiduous, arduous data-base mining. But if I don’t make my new street address public somewhere, your of-course-I-haven’t-forgotten-about-you greeting card is going to bounce.

There’s more: The way things work now, I have no control over who addresses me or how. I’m not just bitching about spam. I want cold-calling salespeople to go straight to voicemail — and when I have determined that I don’t want to hear from a particular caller again, I want never to hear from that person ever again.

So think of me this way, instead: @gswann. That’s my handle: @gswann. Sending em an email? Send it to @gswann. Want to try to get me on the phone? Dial @gswann. Snailmail? Send it to @gswann, you dinosaur. Want to pull my LinkedIn profile? It’s @gswann.

That much is just the handle idea — but with a twist. What we’re doing with the handle @gswann is sending a request to the Constance server for the current mission-critical contact information associated Read more

Mindset

I was talking to a friend of mine who is a broker with a small “boutique” brokerage about the business recently and he told me that since it was pointless to list property in this market, he has focused his efforts on rental properties. He is “hanging in there”, waiting for the market to turn around. I was surprised by his position. He defended it vigorously. I get this all the time from friends who ask me how am I doing, fully expecting me to tell a sad tale.

Let me tell you a secret. People get used to everything. Even a recession, you ask? Yes, people  even get used to a recession. The secret is that there are still people who are securely employed, who have decided that with the interest at all-time lows and the prices down, now is a perfect time to buy. They barely even know that there is a recession. There are grandparents who want to get closer to their grandchildren ready to pay cash for a house. There are rich kids who just got married who are ready to spend Granddad’s money. There are people getting divorced, people inheriting homes they don’t want to live in, people letting their underwater homes go to foreclosure and then cashing out of their 401K and buying homes for cash at ½ the price of the one they let go. There are people buying homes in areas where the prevailing idea is that the market is dead. There are investors getting out of the stock market and into real estate. There are landlords increasing their holdings.

The other side of the secret is there are way less agents in the market competing for the buyers or the sellers.  The worst thing an agent can do is to buy the sad story. The fastest route to the poorhouse is to think it’s pointless to try. Yeah, there may be a lot of reasons to be depressed, but nothing will turn a buyer or a seller off more than an agent who seems depressed.

Well how do you find these buyers and sellers? Well Read more

Real Estate Brokerage models, Jeff Brown’s Dad, and Dead cats.

If you have never read what Jeff Brown writes, STOP. Go read it. Seriously. Go to the right sidebar, scroll down to the Bawld Guy and click the archive link. Ok. 😉

Jeff’s recent post brought up some good conversations that I want to shed some light on from my perspective. I consult with REALTORS on bulding their online presence as well as strategies for building their brokerages and teams. So his post was of significance to me.

The change that I am seeing in models right now (with some folks going right back to the model Jeff’s dad has practiced – an older school, more hardnosed approach that is much more leader (whether team leader or broker) centric and follower (dudes that manage leads either for listings or buyers and agents that are TRAINED to specifically convert those leads.)

“He who controls the leads makes the rules.” – me -several years ago. Still true.

Jeff’s 100% right about the value of whoever creates the streams of leads coming into the team (or brokerage or whatever). I think that was one of the most powerful points of Jeff’s post. If you can generate leads, build a brand (or utilize someone else’s until you can), then there are PLENTY of brokers willing to kiss your fanny just to keep you are part of their organization.

And in all but a few of those cases, you do NOT want your brokers advice.

Let me give you a concrete example of this type of model in play. I got a call from a client in Boca Raton Florida the other day. I have been working with this team on their online strategies for several months. Good guys. They have grown their team from the two of them to almost 20 (cannot remember the last count). Solely done by generating online leads and feeding their buyers agents those leads and working with them.

Here’s the kicker. Their brokerage (large independent brokerage with #1) level market share actually came to them and asked them to TONE DOWN their online marketing because they were getting close to outranking the brokerage site on Read more

More gratuitous gloating: I’m two-for-two for the weekend.

When I wrote The Unfallen, I studied a listserv list of lady romance writers. They were astoundingly mercenary, by my literary standards, but they were fun to read — and they were profoundly interested in making money.

One of their traditions was the “Yahoo!” — an announcement to the group of a personal triumph.

In that light: Yahoo! I put two contracts into escrow this weekend — and it is frolicking difficult to put a house under contract in Phoenix right now.

All I’m doing is skinning cats. Takes longer than it ever has before, and it pays less. But I’m nailing them up to the wall — and Yahooing when I have time.

Gloat in your own behalf. This is your year. I challenge you to prove me right.

Search is Dead, Long live Search

John Battelle has some interesting thoughts on search. Google’s 2004 message to investors was:

Our search results are the best we know how to produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for them or for inclusion or more frequent updating.

Google has abandoned that commitment. Just look at the screen real estate on Google that now is committed to paid content – AdWords now accounts for one-third of the space on your screen.

And now Google is including social results with the putatively objective results it used to provide. So if your potential clients are searching the web while logged into a Google account, their first-page results will include items endorsed by people in their Google circles.

And whether you get it or don’t, or like it or don’t, a lot of content is being created on Twitter and Facebook that isn’t systematically reflected in Google Search results, either because Google doesn’t prioritize it or because Google doesn’t have the rights to crawl it.

For me, as a Raleigh criminal lawyer, figuring out how to make my presence more social is difficult. Even if people get good results with me, they tend not to want to praise me, unless pseudo-anonymously. They may quietly confide in friends who ask that I’m a good lawyer.

But they’re unlikely to announce on Facebook or on their Google Plus pages that I got them a “not guilty” on their DWI.

I haven’t figured out how to solve that problem.

But as realtors (and mortgage brokers, etc.) you ignore the social aspect of search at your peril. If you’re banging away trying to raise your Google PageRank, then welcome to 2005. And you’re working your way to dominate your search results for your locality, then welcome to 2007.

You may be missing what your competitors have realized: being endorsed by past clients, friends, etc. can push your placement above competitors, and those endorsements may in fact be the added juice that gets someone to choose one service over another.

Does this mean search is dead? Not by a long shot.

Many Read more

The Brokerage Biz Model That Rocked In 1966 Is Still Rockin’

Let’s begin by establishing clearly — this isn’t new info — just widely ignored. In fact, it’s more likely than not most agents readin’ this will roll their eyes for one of two reasons. One would be cuz it’s old news to them. Not that they’ve ever contemplated using it, just old news. The other is cynical disbelief when something from a couple generations ago is touted as being highly effective and profitable in today’s real estate brokerage climate. Give it a read and then make your call.

I will tell you in advance that from what I’ve seen personally, the huge majority of super high volume per agent operations are using it. They just don’t know it was snatched from the hippy dippy 60s. 🙂

And yes, there are one or two big time brokerages who’ve successfully gotten away from the model used by the industry the last 40 years.

I learned this model beginning in 1967. I’ve spoken of Dad’s brokerage countless times here, but what may not have been communicated clearly is how relatively few agents were needed to produce such off the chart sales. Let’s put the numbers on the table. How’d you like to have been one of the 25 to never more than 30 full time agents (Usually 8-12 part timers.) who divvied up more than 1,000 sides a year for five straight years? As their janitor/official printer-of-listings, I witnessed some pretty astounding things. ‘Course, back then I had no earthly clue I was seeing world class production, as I thought it was the way it was supposed to be.

Boy, did I ever learn different as a few birthdays came and went.

Our industry, beginning in the 1970s, decided it made more sense to go away from a highly profitable business model. Before operating expenses, the OldSchool model netted 40-50% of every commission dollar earned. From that income they paid all costs — the broker did. I cut my teeth on that model, and it worked like a charm.

In their infinite wisdom, they decided a superior strategy included increasing agent pay by over 100% Read more

Update from 1 year ago. Page 32 of G till now.

For those of my friends on here, who remember. In 2010 I relocated my small real estate business to South Florida from Wisconsin. Everything was fine and dandy until I remembered that my position in Google will be starting over from page 1 to page 32. It is nearly one year ago (01-16-11) that I wrote a post on Bloodhound asking for some sympathy from fellow friends. To be frank about it, I was really struggling, with the move, life in general, a new baby, and trying to make it by selling real estate in a South Florida market. Although many agents are making bank, I have to watch every penny.

I am pleased to announce for the term “Boynton Beach Real Estate” I am now on the middle of page 2, and sometimes as high as the bottom of page 1. I want to personally thank all of you, for helping me in a time of need. Although I haven’t yet found the financial freedom I am looking for, I am least paying the bills…barely, but at least paying the bills. You know, looking back it’s the friends that I’ve made on Bloodhound that have really helped me out the most over the last two years blogging on here.

To cap off the year 2011, Russell Shaw commented on a blog I made on BHB! I thought that was so cool. What I’ve learned over the last year the most, is that, bills come and go, but memories are forever. In 2012 I’m going to put my focus on my family and 2 kids, and not my real estate business. Yes of course, I have to make a living for my family, but that’s not what it’s all about. I don’t know when the good Lord will call me home, but when he does, I want my family to be able to say, “you know, dad (me) worked hard for us, but he always put the family first no matter what kind of bills piled up”. Read more

Paging Sarah: “If there is a lesson in this story, it is to make sure your cell phone is off when attending a concert.”

Suppressing your phone’s ringer at the symphony is a Sarah job.

If we start with the presumption that a smartphone/tablet/laptop/desktop operating system, ideally, exists in a sort of client/server symbiosis with servers in the cloud — and hence with all servers in the cloud, by concatenation (that is, by XMLation) — then your phone should be aware of appropriate phone protocol wherever and whenever it might find itself. You should not ever have to tell it not to ring in a concert hall.

I’ll get to Constance when I can, but I don’t think anyone here is all that interested. How do I know? Because the paragraph just above this one describes a revolutionary computing paradigm, one that exists nowhere right now. More fool I. It’s raining soup and not one of us has a spoon.

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ListHub forms syndication Real Estate Network…

Happy New Year to the dawgs. Woof.

Ok..maybe their isn’t something to like about this…I don’t know…but it is interesting to say the least. I honestly don’t have a dog in this fight. More than anything, I just want to understand it. And there is NO PLACE like BHB to put it out in the open and air it out a bit.

But let’s start with the facts and then get to the opinion and thus the fun. It was announced this morning that ListHub (a syndicator and sister company *snort* of REALTOR.com over at Move, Inc) has formed a new Real Estate Network. This is a syndication network with publishers of real estate listings that are jumping in at the founding which include RE/MAX, C21, Coldwell Banker, and other franchisors.

This frees them (if everyone participates in their network)from any illusion of NAR control. They are in the same shape (if I understand this correctly) as Zillow, Trulia, and other syndicators. Am I missing something here? They have to abide by the network rules seen here.

This also frees the independents NOT to participate in the syndication network IF they so desire. They can opt out.

I am not sure if I have that right. I would LOVE to have someone in the know comment and fill us in.

This also (if I read this correctly) makes NAR more irrelevant than ever when it comes to marketing online real estate. (You notice how many times I have asked if I am understanding this right? Enquiring minds want to know.) Once everyone is sharing data outside of NAR (as syndicators), then who needs their .02?

Again. I am not saying this is good or bad. I would love some industry comment though.

I have a box of popcorn and a ringside seat and a lot of websites to work on..I will be waiting. 😉

CNBC: “In the name of supporting home prices, the Obama administration will likely put in place a system under which investors make private profits while the taxpayers subsidize the risk.”

Is housing the next Solyndra? Looks like it. The Obama administration is getting ready to transfer billions of dollars worth of foreclosed homes to campaign donors. If you think still more Rotarian Socialism sucks, wait until the house up the block from yours goes Section 8. Looters never tire of loot, so rent money they don’t have to earn will turn out to be the perfect garnish for real property they won’t have to pay for.

We are living in Part Three of Atlas Shrugged