Rising home inventories, falling house prices and tighter mortgage lending do not seem the ideal conditions to be launching a real-estate site.

But Alex Chang, chief executive of Roost.com, says it is the best of times.

Roost is a search engine in the “vertical” of real estate. It launched a month ago in 14 metropolitan areas of the US.

“In a tough market, [realtors] need to see more return on their dollar and become more efficient, while consumers are doing a lot more research, so this is a great time for us to be launching,” he insists.

Roost is inspired by another vertical search play – Kayak, which has been successful in aggregating travel offers. Roost’s board includes two Kayak directors and the San Francisco start-up also took advice from Kayak’s founder during its development.

Its interface is very intuitive. Users can type in the name of a town to bring up all properties for sale, then use sliders to adjust numbers of bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage and other criteria to instantly narrow the search down.

As well as Roost.com, the company is incorporating its technology in brokers’ sites and earns money from clickthroughs to the agent’s details of the property.

It says it has an advantage over its San Francisco rival Trulia in having access to the MLS – the Multiple Listing Service that gives comprehensive coverage of new listings in an area.

Trulia has built up its database of 2m homes for sale by striking relationships with individual brokers, but Pete Flint, chief executive, says it is also starting to bring MLSs on board.

While Roost is focusing on pure search, Trulia also offers community features and advice for home buyers. He agrees it is a good time for the new wave of services like Roost, Trulia and Zillow.

“If you’re a consumer looking to buy, you have more questions than ever before,” he says.

With more than 3.5m unique users a month and traffic growing by more than 10 per cent a month, the chief executive says Trulia is by far the fastest growing site in the industry.

It has greater reach than Roost, but the newer site hopes to cover 30 to 40 per cent of the country by the end of the year and become another useful tool for buyers and sellers.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share This

The iPod and iPhone firmware update 1.1.4 has been released by Apple and it comes out just over a month’s time after the V 1.1.3 came out. Itsd available via the iTunes or it can be downloaded as a 165 MB standalone setup file. Just make sure you backup all your data on your iPod and iPhone or you’ll be tearing your hair out faster than you can say Steve Jobs!

Check out what Erica Sadun went through on the update. I keep my iPod nano in the shelve until V 2.0 comes out. I feel safer doing that.

Here is the 165 MB standalone setup file.

Tags: iPhone, iPod

Share This

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share This

Windows Mobile device owners beware. There’s a new trojan software that targets Windows Mobile devices and it installs without a warning.

WinCE/InfoJack sends the infected device’s serial number, operating system and other information to the author of the trojan. It also leaves the infected mobile device vulnerable by allowing silent installation of malware. The trojan modifies the infected device’s security setting to allow unsigned applications to be installed without a warning.

via

Tags: WinCE InfoJack malware on Windows Mobile Devices

Share This

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share This

Apple is trumpeting the fact that its iTunes music store is now the second biggest music seller in the country, behind only Wal-Mart, according to a new report from the NPD Group.

That’s interesting, but it overshadows some equally intriguing music industry data that NPD also reported.

First, the bragging from Apple:

Apple also announced that there are now over 50 million iTunes Store customers. iTunes has sold over four billion songs, with an incredible 20 million songs sold on Christmas Day 2007 alone, and offers the world’s largest music catalog of over six million songs from all of the major and thousands of independent labels.

If you check out the report from NPD, though, the iTunes ranking is only one nugget in a gold mine of information.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share This

Today Apple released new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. They haven’t changed on the outside, and their basically the same price as the old models, but their faster and have bigger hard drives and more. The 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros also get the new multi-touch trackpad.

From Apple: Apple today introduced new models of the MacBook and MacBook Pro. MacBook Pro models feature the latest Intel Core 2 Duo processors (running at up to 2.6GHz with 6MB of shared L2 cache), larger hard drives (up to 300GB), and 2GB of memory standard in most models. They also include the latest NVIDIA graphics processors — with up to 512MB of video memory — and an innovative Multi-Touch trackpad, first introduced in MacBook Air.

Available immediately, the new MacBook and MacBook Pro models start at just $1,099 and $1,999, respectively.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share This

Paul Mansour, an Austin-based entrepreneur and 2004 graduate of UT-Austin, e-mailed me last week to let me know about a new Web site he’s launched: JobBite.com.

The site lets workers rate their companies and anyone can read the reviews for free.

According to Paul:

It is not a place to dish out dirt but rather a place for professionals to give honest feedback on things such as compensation and company culture. JobBite puts the power back in the hands of job seekers.

The site shows its youth, with a fairly small pool as yet of employer evaluations.

But there are some interesting tidbits.

For example, from an employee review of Plano-based Electronic Data Systems Corp.:

Dress code is casual, hours are flexible, and diversity is welcome. EDS works with many large enterprises so there are some very diverse work opportunities. You really have a chance to develop your skills and tackle challenging IT issues.

There are some really great technical opportunities at EDS but opportunities for promotion are limited. Most of your development and learning will occur from lateral moves. Pay raises are rare.

Looks like JobBite could be a useful took for jobseekers.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share This

On Thursday, Microsoft had accidentally released the first service pack (SP1) for Windows Vista to a group of users who were not supposed to receive the update until mid-March.

“Yesterday, a build of SP1 was posted to Windows Update and it was inadvertently made available to a broad group,” Microsoft said in a statement.

Vista made its consumer debut in January 2007, and SP1 marks the first major upgrade to the operating system. Microsoft released details about SP1 in August, and opened it to a moderately-sized audience for testing in the weeks thereafter. It was released to manufacturing earlier this month, but Microsoft said it would not release SP1 to Windows Update or the Microsoft.com download center until mid-March.

Several users running the 64-bit version of Vista were surprised, therefore, to see that SP1 was available on Thursday. But that version “was intended only for our more technically advanced testers, and was meant to only be offered to those with a specific registry key set on their PC,” Microsoft said.

At this point, the company is “still planning to make SP1 broadly available in the mid-March timeframe.”

The release is the second SP1 snafu for Microsoft in the past several days. In a Tuesday blog post, Microsoft reported that a number of users were having problems resulting from the service pack prerequisite KB937287.

Microsoft decided to “temporarily suspend automatic distribution of the update to avoid further customer impact while we investigate possible causes,” wrote Nick White, Microsoft’s product manager.

Last week, Microsoft clarified that the phased rollout of SP1 was not due to malfunctioning drivers, but because of issues that arose when these device drivers were reinstalled during the SP1 update process.

Earlier this week, Microsoft also released what is thought to be the final version of its Windows XP operating system. Service Pack 3 Release Candidate 2 can be obtained through Windows Update, but users need to change some registry settings for the update to be sent.

Source

Share This

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share This

So you plug in your USB drive to your PC, do your thing and then proceed to remove the USB device when Windows says it isnt safe to do so, Now, what do you do? Windows will recommend - via a dialog box - that you wait and try again, and that often works. But while you’re waiting, check your taskbar and system tray for programs that might be running files off the USB drive. Close any such programs.

In fact, close programs that were running files off that drive, even if you’ve already closed those files. Yep, including those open explorer windows that show contents of the USB drive.

Still no luck? Try Task Manager, using these steps:

1. Press Ctrl-Alt-Delete. If you’re using Vista, follow that by clicking Start Task Manager.

2. Click the Processes tab.

3. Examine the list of processes, looking for anything that could be from that drive–for instance, a process with a name similar to that of one of the files on the drive.

4. If you find such a process, select it, click the End Process button, and confirm your decision.

5. Try safely removing the drive again.

If Windows still won’t let you remove the drive, it’s time for desperate measures. Here are two of them:

1. You can shut down your PC, remove the device, and then reboot. It works, but it’s time consuming and annoying.

2. Or you could take a deep breath, cross your fingers, and just pull the stupid thing out. I know, I’m not supposed to tell you that. It’s bad advice. But I’ve done it more times than I’d care to admit, and it’s never backfired on me. Which isn’t to say I can guarantee that it won’t backfire on you–I can’t. And don’t even think about doing this if your external drive is NTFS-formatted (see the tip on the next page for a discussion of that issue).

Source

Share This

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share This

From PC World: “A notebook PC is a handy thing to have, but lugging one around everywhere you go can be downright inconvenient. Fortunately, there’s a solution that fits right in your pocket: The ubiquitous USB flash drive, often called a keychain or thumb drive.

With the right device and software, you can plug your flash drive into a computer at an Internet cafe, hotel business center, or elsewhere, and have all the tools and files you need to do your work–complete with your own personal launch menu. Sure, you can use online applications like Google Docs or Zoho Office (see Life Without Desktop Software for more on these), but a flash drive lets you carry a much wider variety of the applications, utilities, and other fun doodads you’ve come to depend on.

Here’s everything you need, from hardware to software and beyond, to get going in the world of pocket computing.”
Harness the Right Hardware

To get the most out of portable computing, you need a good flash drive. Here are some things to consider:

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Share This

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share This

Youtube, we have a problem.

Imagine waking up on a Monday and finding your favourite YouTube videos can’t be loaded. Some will curse, some will just get ready for work. For me, it was a real pissed off. The only reason why this happened was Pakistan or more specifically the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority ordered 70 Internet service providers to block access to YouTube.com, because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site. Pakistan was not pleased with the trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders portraying Islam as fascist. Its a big wonder why Pakistan was the only country that did this. The root cause of the problem started when PCCW Ltd. of Hong Kong (one of the world’s 20 largest data carriers) made changes in it switches’ routing table and started directing requests from its global customers for YouTube data to Pakistan, where the data was discarded. Now that was a real dumb move by PCCW.

The block was intended to cover only Pakistan, but extended to about two-thirds of the global Internet population, starting at 1:47 p.m. EST Sunday, according to Renesys Corp., a Manchester, N.H., firm that keeps track of the pathways of the Internet for telecommunications companies and other clients.

via

Tags: YouTube

Share This

Popularity: 1% [?]

Share This