Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog.

Last night was our ‘Capturing Online Leads Seminar’, the third event for agents we’ve organised now. We’d said goodbye to the BCS for this seminar and moved into Interbrand for the evening. I have to say the place was lovely and had a very pretty staircase, although it was a tad frightening if you were wearing heels! The running theme of the presentations was the changing face of online advertising, looking at the differences in ad spend with the portals and engines, the benefits of online classifieds and how Zoomf stands out as a clever advertising option for agents. As Mike said, up until this point our seminars had been pretty much unbiased so we felt it was about time that he pretty much waxed lyrical about Zoomfy benefits!

We really do have to give a huge thank you to Homeflow and Oodle for coming along and wowing us with their knowledge, thanks does go to Mr Carter as well but he kinda doesn’t have as much choice in the matter when it comes to presenting! Marianna was a star for organising the whole thing (and ordering the food, mmmmm the spring rolls). Of course the biggest thank you goes to those who came along and listened intently and chatted politely, we met some lovely people last night.

For anyone that didn’t bag a ticket, or was there and would like to see the presentations again, you can have a look at them here.
The next seminar will be in June and we hope to see you there

Technorati Tags: Real estate, Property, Zoomf, Homeflow, Oodle

Yesterday Ikea turned 21, if only one of us really did have the key to the door so we could lock it shut and vow never ever to return there.

Ikea is the only store that I can think of where people will shlep miles to a part of the country they would never normally step foot in to inevitably have a vicious argument with a loved one, lose the list with all the codes on half way round (along with the will to live) and generally have a soul destroying weekend before going back to work the next day. And why have we endured this for 21 years? Because the temptation of a set of drawers for the same price as a Starbucks is just too tempting.

When we walk around the show home section it’s easy to forget that we will have to *make* this furniture ourselves when we finally get the stuff back to our homes, the instructions and pieces being as useful as being given an axe in the middle of a forest and being told in a heavy Swedish accent to make a computer desk. And of course we haven’t planned how we will exactly get all the flat pack boxes back to our homes but that’s another story.

We have literally spilled our blood for this place, all so that our neighbours can come round and go ‘Oh is that from Ikea? We have that in birch’, just as half your street probably has.

If you have ever made a trip to the blue and yellow warehouse then you will enjoy this incredibly accurate article by Matt Rudd from The Times. It is nice to know that I am not the only one who has damaged a vehicle by forcing in one more box of goodies crap.

Technorati Tags: Real estate, property, Ikea, furniture

Fancy some weekend reading? Or seeing a ridiculously large photo of Zoomf bigwig Mike Carter? Then click over to The Guardian’s digital content blog to see the Zoomf Elevator Pitch interview by the lovely Jemima Kiss (such a hot name).

Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: Zoomf, Property, Real Estate

Google Suggest is one of my favourite products currently in Google ‘Labs’ mode. It’s very simple really, Google offers you suggestions for what you might like to search for in real time as you type in your query. Just typing in the letter M brings up a suggestion for MySpace, as the clever Googlebot has worked out that this is what you’re most likely to be looking for.

Now Google won’t just suggest anything, there has to be a high probability that the suggestion will be accurate. So I was very pleased to see that Zoomf now appears as an official suggestion, especially as we’re competing with the likes of ZoomFly for a place in the results (darn those cheap airlines!).

Google Suggest is a lot of fun to play with and if you have it as a firefox plugin you will quickly become used to typing in less and less to find what you need, and anything that promotes sheer laziness is good in my book. It’s enlightening to see what the world is searching for, as the results are obviously based on the popularity of queries. During the early stages of the presidential primaries, typing in ‘IS’ brought up ‘Is Barack Obama a Muslim?’ as the first result. Enlightening stuff.

Much like Google Trends, it’s possible to spend waste a lot of time on this site!

Technorati Tags: Real Estate, Property, Google Suggest