Be careful Woz you wish for.

"Among his other activities, Woz collects phone numbers, and his longtime goal has been to acquire a number with seven matching digits… after more months of scheming and waiting, he had it: 888-8888. This was his new cell-phone number, and his greatest philonumerical triumph.

The number proved unusable. It received more than a hundred wrong numbers a day. Given that the number is virtually impossible to misdial, this traffic was baffling. More strange still, there was never anybody talking on the other end of the line. Just silence. Or, not silence really, but dead air, sometimes with the sound of a television in the background, or somebody talking softly in English or Spanish, or bizarre gurgling noises. Woz listened intently.

Then, one day, with the phone pressed to his ear, Woz heard a woman say, at a distance, "Hey, what are you doing with that?" The receiver was snatched up and slammed down.

Suddenly, it all made sense: the hundreds of calls, the dead air, the gurgling sounds. Babies. They were picking up the receiver and pressing a button at the bottom of the handset. Again and again. It made a noise: "Beep beep beep beep beep beep beep."

 

Virtual Interview: Zillow.com - Get it while it’s still free (and before Google buys it)

What’s the deal, who are you guys and how did you start?

In early 2005, we (Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink) were fresh from the success of bringing travel to the Internet at Expedia.com. While brainstorming ideas for our next business venture, we were drawn to the idea of real estate. Rich had actually started obsessing about bringing real estate online as early as 1989 when his mom decided to become a real estate agent after she packed her last child off to college. He even wrote a plan for a consumer real estate service, but the idea was shelved in favor of the dreaded “steady job.” However, his enthusiasm for it never completely disappeared…

Fast forward 15 years. We were separately involved in buying houses, while jointly looking for new business opportunities. Lloyd spent hours finding information on the house he wanted, putting data into a spreadsheet, and doing complex calculations to determine a home’s worth. The idea crossed his mind that someone shouldn’t have to be a computer programmer to determine what a house is really worth. He figured he wasn’t alone — there must be millions of people struggling with the same problem.

Then the idea struck us: Why not help consumers by giving them access to the same kinds of information and tools agents use? Why not equip consumers with information about what is their most important investment — their home? So Zillow was born, with the goal of helping people make smarter real estate decisions.

How do you come up with the Zestimate?
We compute this figure by taking zillions of data points — much of this data is public — and entering them into a formula. This formula is built using what our statisticians call “a proprietary algorithm” — big words for “secret formula.” Currently, we calculate a Zestimate for more than 40 million homes. We are adding data all the time and in the coming months we expect to add Zestimates for many more homes in the U.S.

What’s in this formula?
One eye of newt … Actually, it’s less wizardry than mathematics. When our statisticians developed the model to determine home values, they explored how homes in certain areas were similar ( i.e., number of bedrooms and baths, and a myriad of other details) and then looked at the relationships between actual sale prices and those home details. These relationships form a pattern, and they used that pattern to develop a model to come up with a market value for a home. Hundreds of home details feed into the formula and the home characteristics are given different weights according to their influence in a given geography and over a specific period of time. And, because the details are always changing, the Zestimate is extremely timely — it indicates the value of a home based on the most recent data available in an area. We receive new data and update the Zestimate daily to capture new sales in a neighborhood. However, there is a delay between when the county is notified of a transaction and when we find out about it. We might not know until next week about the sale of that house down the street from you that happened last week.

How accurate is it overall?
Our data shows that the majority of our Zestimate home valuations are within 10% of the selling price of the home. Of course, to a certain extent this depends on the accuracy of the home data we receive; see our Data Coverage and Zestimate Accuracy table. (You can refine the Zestimate using the “My Zestimator” tool, adding things you may know about but we don’t, such as remodeling information.) When it comes to unique homes ( e.g., luxury mansions, unusual designs) we are less accurate in our Zestimates.

Who calculates the Zestimate and how do they do it?
We don’t have homing pigeons flying from land parcel to land parcel to come up with the Zestimate for a house, but we DO have statisticians who work all day — and some nights — with a huge amount of data. They live and breath valuation models and tweak algorithms to get us closer to actual market value.

Where does all the data come from? How can you know all this stuff?
The data — believe it or not — is public. What? You’ve never seen it? That’s because it is hard to find and hidden in multiple sources. We’ve done the legwork for you by getting huge amounts of data from many sources and creating something unique that the public sources don’t provide — a Zestimate of your home based on the public data.

Thanks, Rich and Lloyd, for your time and for your website, I’ve gotta go start using it!

LinkedIn - Social Networking for people who are not social outcasts

Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn. What’s the difference? Think of Friendster and MySpace as the teenage equivelants of a rotary club, only with no membership restrictions. When you sign in you’re standing in a HUGE room full of horny teenagers. You can’t even see anyone you know unless you walked in together, and you’ll have to search to find anyone anyways. LinkedIn is like a Friendster that grew up, got out of bed, got dressed and went to WORK. LinkedIn wears a tie, and MySpace wears Gap jeans.

LinkedIn works by referal, and unlike Friendster, you cannot easilly email somsone who isn’t in your “netrwork.” I know, your MySpace network is 4.8mm people, but your LinkedIn profile will probably have more like 5,000 (if you’re good). FURTHERMORE, you can’t just easilly shoot those people an email, you have to be introduced.

Pop over to my LinkedIn profile and check it out, it’s really cool. If you want to join I will send you an invitation.

https://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=4438714

Gmail + Google Talk = FINALLY

Wake up Microsoft and Yahoo. If you don’t roll out of bed smartly this morning, Google’s going to eat your breakfast (they already ate your lunch).

Gmail now stores and indexes my Google Talk conversations. In a few weeks it will have a chat client built right into it. Amazing, about time.

The privacy implications are obvious, but not a concern. Obviously the only way to have the other person on the chat store your conversation is to go “off the record” when you talk to them. You can change your own chat storage settings (and they are off by default), but not the other person’s. The good news here is that IF there IS a company you can trust… some one’s going to kill me just for saying that… it’s Google. They recently showed they don’t just hand stuff over (even IF it’s not personally identifying, and EVEN IF the person asking for it is the D.O.J.).

The organizational and productivity side of this is obvious as well. No more emailing yourself your chat history. No more third party apps that don’t work so well anyways. No more multiple programs for one thing. Now it is all Gmail. All Google. All G.

If you don’t yet have a gmail account, email me, I’ll see what I can do.

News flash: Loud music can damage hearing!

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/02/02/microsoft-lawyer-handling-latest-iPod-lawsuit/

It seems the recent lawsuit against Apple claiming the iPod causes hearing loss is being filed by a lawyer who frequently works for Microsoft.

This whole lawsuit is stupid because a) the guy filing it hasn’t actually experienced a hearing loss and b) it’s not just iPods, but anything you TURN UP TOO LOUD!

It really sounds like someone just wants to make more money off another frivolous lawsuit. Sure, as a shareholder in Apple I don’t want to see them sued, but as a citizen of the United States, I don’t want to see our court system tied up in crap like this. Don’t we have some more doctors to sue or something?

That reminds me of something else… Remember all those ads about initiative I-9838948342 something, saying that Doctors are moving out of the state because of insurance rates? Let me ask you this: have you seen your doctor’s standard of living? His Benz maybe? I’ll give you a hint, there’s a good chance he’s not poor. I suspect the biggest reason the doctors care about lawsuits at all is because it means their pager will go off one more time while they’re out golfing with their buddies.