Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog.

Low and behold, someone has built an app for all those newly sold 3G iPhones. Granted this one is for NYC, but it’s only a matter of time until someone gets one built for the UK property market.

At least that is what THEY would like you to believe

There is an interesting debate happening over on the House Price Crash website. Basically, home owners are up in arms about a recently launched map service from the Met Police in London whereby anyone can view ‘crime stats’ for their borough.

Why is this such a threat to the home-owner?

The internet is basically the biggest depository of information ever devised by man. As a result, we are all empowered to be able to do property research in a much more efficient manner. I read somewhere that the average consumer in the UK does an average of 12 hours of online research when looking for property. Do home-owners actually believe in 2008 that they will be able to ‘hide’ the unsavory bits about their property’s location?

Whether it comes from the internet, from the council or directly from speaking to your knowledgeable estate agent, the buyer is going to find out everything they can before starting that mortgage paperwork. This includes how safe your neighborhood is in comparison to other areas of interest.

Maybe home-owners should consider what they can do to ‘clean-up’ their neighborhood ( get invovled ! ) rather than fight the unstoppable force for transparency that is the web.

A company in Mountain View, California has released a ‘newspaper’ tablet

that is meant to be the first try at replacing the physical newspaper. If things weren’t bad enough for the print business

With everyone trying to figure out how newspapers will survive today’s digital age of
citizen journalism and endless
ways in which to get the news, this device shows you what the future could be. Personally, I would love to have a paper that never gets ink on my hands and is constantly updated with the latest news that I want to read about. Other potential benefits -

• less newspaper clutter on London’s Underground
• a great green initiative
• total personalization of news

If you’d like to see this technology in action, I recommend heading down to your local Waterstones. Most of the major book stores in the UK are advertising the ‘book’ versions of similar technology.

Anyone who was working on the internet back in 2000 will remember the height of the browser wars between Internet Explorer and Netscape. Netscape died a quick death once Bill Gates got serious and Microsoft owned the browser for the next 6 years.

Then came Firefox from the Mozilla Foundation in 2006. With the re-birth of Apple, Steve Jobs and Safari, entered the game.

So who has just launched a new open-source browser? You guessed it, Google has and it’s called Chrome.

It is a significant entry into the market and something everyone will be watching. The NYTimes has a good overview of the implications, but if you’re on a Windows PC, go try it yourself.

Overall this will be a good thing for end users as browser security, privacy and render speed will evolve faster due to the competition for Internet Explorer’s last 7 years of dominance. Let the war begin anew!