Inseeto: Explore Real Estate Within Your Browser
There is quite a stir in the startup scene in Denmark with quite a lot of news coming in on newer services making entry into the web scene. The newest entry is Inseeto, a startup that amalgamates real state with Google Maps to help you browse what your next home or neighborhood be like. What makes it valuable? 3D visualizations of real state, which gives you more insight on the location you plan to move over to.
FinderBase - Helping You Find Your Things
Partied too hard and lost your stuff? There's a cool new Finnish startup looking to help you out with your lost belongings - FinderBase.com. The was launched only a few days ago, on the First of May in Helsinki, Finland. The launch was handled in junction with the First of May celebrations, where most of the country goes out to celebrate in parks with their friends. Needless to say, a lot of stuff is lost.
Selecting Your Hotel Just Got Easier
Ted Valentin, Swedish serial web entrepreneur, has lately been buy building a map mashup empire. Ted disclosed his maps gather 100'000 to 150'000 unique visitors per week at the moment, and growing. That is a great accomplishment considering all services are still mainly targeted for Swedish users.
Ted's latest service is a hotel map, hotellkartan.se. It essentially aggregates the global hotel infromation from (currently) three services, Booking.com, Hotels.com, and Expedia.com. It shows the hotels geographically on top of Google Maps, so that one is able to visually browse the hotels.
The great thing about the service is that you can search for the hotels in a variety of different ways. You can search alphabetically, by rating, by distance from a certain map point, by price - or the cheapest hotel within 1000 m from London Paddington station, for example. In my opinion, this makes it one of the most useful mashups I have ever run across. Having spent much too long a time lately looking for the perfect hotel trying to optimize location and distance along with price and hotel selections from different services, I just love this elegant solution to the problem.
Annonskartan.se, Swedish Classified Ads Google Maps Mashup
Annonskartan.se is a new Swedish search engine for local classified ads. The service is targeted only for Swedish market and not available in English at least for the moment, but it's rather interesting and the potential seems big.
With Annonskartan.se one can for example find an iPhone on sale in a certain city, or a sofa within a 1000m radius from a landmark, or find all possible classifieds close to a certain street in a given city. The service searches through different sites and aggregates this information and positions each piece geographically on top of Google Maps. The positioning is based on the postal number, so it's not totally accurate but gives a relatively good idea of the location. At the moment the site indexes around 1,2 million local ads.
The developer is Ted Valentin, a Swedish entrepreneur and web developer, who has been very productive with building different web sites and services, and he's also sold quite a bunch of the sites he's put together. Ted Valentin is also working on other maps, now with a working name Allakartor.se ("all maps"). At the moment this main address doesn't work, in the previous five months Ted has released seven other websites: for example Sushikartan.se (listing sushi places), Wifikartan.se (free wifis), Cafekartan.se (cafe map), and Ted mentions he has "more fun ideas in pipeline..."
Annonskartan.se hasn't received completely unanimous reception, though. The service aggregates the local classifieds currently from Blocket.se, Tradera.se och Eniro.se, while Ted states more sources will be added in the coming weeks. At least Blocket hasn't reportedly been very happy with the mashup. Ted Valentin comments that his aim is that more people would find the ads, which would lead to more traffic and higher turnover also for the sites that are used in searches. A short summary of each item is shown on Annonskartan.se, and then linked to the source of the information where interested users can find the whole description.
Ted Valentin commented to ArcticStartup that at the moment he doesn't have any business model for his maps network. His primary goal right now is to grow the network, and attract more visitors. To question whether he has any plans to expand the service into other countries, Ted comments it is a possibility and he will soon have to start looking into finding some business model and partners to cooperate with.
Eat.fi about to get revamped
Eat.fi, a Finnish website that let's its users rate restaurants and bars and show which ones are open at a given time, is about to get a serious face lift. The folks at Eat.fi emphasize that the new site is in Beta and unlike Google's Betas this Beta is really just to test out the functionality, thus all the reviews should still be written to the old site or they will disappear when the new site goes live.
The new site is build on Google maps and the new mashup has really improved the user experience. The site is easier to use and more intuitive from the get go. The functionality has also improved significantly. The website has a new bar on the right hand side of the screen which is quite handy showing the top rated restaurants which are open at a given moment. The 'top rated' bar of course changes based on your query, thus filtering out for example all the other venues except 'Asian food' if that's what you're after.
The smart folks at Eat.fi figured out they could use Jaiku's active user base to get feedback for their Beta (here). This is an ingenious and many times very effective way to get feedback for your web service due to the vocal yet colorful user base at Jaiku, thus giving you passionate opinions across the board from professional designers and user experience geeks to your average Joe.
The new Beta site and activity at Eat.fi leaves me wondering if or rather when they are taking the concept abroad. It turns out that the same Jaiku thread partly answers that one as well:
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Looks really interesting. Like to see this worldwide. A category of food/reastaurant that is really important to many is Vegetarian (though I'm a raging carnivore myself)
