Google Maps Update

A few weeks ago I posted that Google now allows you to embed a map into your website or blog. Well now you can take that technology a step further because Google has raised the bar once again.

Yesterday a Real Estate Technology Specialist e-mailed me to show me how they are using Googles new mapping technology to help market their listings.

They found a way to use Google Maps along with the "My Maps" technology to create a listing map with pictures, videos and more!

If you would like to see how this new technique can be used to benefit your business please click the link below to see the map we created of our "Celebrity Listings".

When you look at the map click on any of the blue place marks to open the listings and look how one place mark even has a video(potential virtual tour) embedded into it.

CLICK HERE TO OPEN!

-Real Estate Technology Blog

A Quick Glance at the Future.

Many real estate professionals are photographer connoisseurs and we think that photography is a very large part of real estate technology. Most of the time we like to keep real estate professionals updated on what is coming in the future instead of what is happening right now because like most of you already know "new" technology is "old" news. I say this because by the time one great idea has time to spawn there is already a better idea in the works.

Let's take a look at that "better idea". Let me introduce you to the GIGA PIXEL digital photograph. A giga pixel is used to describe the resolution of a photo much like the more common mega pixel.

So how does a mega pixel compare to a giga pixel? Well, your average digital camera can take a single picture constructed of somewhere around 7,000,000 tiny dots(pixels) to create an image. A GIGA PIXEL camera on the other hand uses 1,000 mega pixels or 1,000,000,000 pixels to create a single image.

A digital camera with this kind of capability can produce an image that is 48 feet wide without losing any picture quality. To put the detail this camera can capture in perspective it would take a video wall of 10,000 HD television's to capture as much detail as one single image from a GIGA PIXEL camera.

If you want to play with the amazing detail of these new giga pixel images download Google Earth 4.2 and check the featured content layer.

Here is a quick video of a picture taken from a rooftop in Harlem that can clearly depict a persons face from nearly 20 miles away.



-Real Estate Technology Blog

Backup Everything! Here's How

So you have a friend that just lost EVERYTHING because their computer crashed. Well that's no big surprise considering the probability of a hard drive crash is 100%. This statistic surprises a lot of people but in reality if everyone knew how often this happens backups would be priority number one. If you stop and think about it your hard drive is nothing more than a high tech record player. Inside its small metal case it houses some magnesium disks that store data and an arm much like on a record player that reads and writes that data. Having such a primitive design makes failure inevitable because the smallest particle of dust can crash a hard drive and I know the inside of most computers is a dust heaven.

So what do we do now that we know our hard drives are going to crash?? Well thankfully there are many ways to backup everything on your system and they have gotten pretty cheap. We have recently setup a few of our machines in the office to have automatic backups using some Symantec Software and Western Digital External Hard Drives.

To do this yourself we need two things. First thing is a Symantec software called Norton Ghost 12.0, this is the software we are going to use to automatically backup our systems. The second thing we need is a Western Digital External Hard Drive. I choose Western Digital because of their outstanding reliability and fair price. When purchasing your external hard drive try and stay above 250GB depending on how much you are backing up. I recommend this product.

After installing Norton Ghost, you need to set it to automatically backup your system while you sleep. To do this press "Run or Manage Backups" under the tasks menu. When you do this you will see the "Easy Setup" window open. From here you can click each of the links highlighted in blue to change these options. The first two sections are "Back Up my Computer" and "Back Up My Documents". The backup computer section shows that it will back up your entire main hard drive at whatever time is scheduled and the My documents section shows it will backup your My Documents folder. I recommend changing the schedule time for both to 1am or 2am while your sleeping so it does not conflict with work. The last area to change is the Backup Destination. We want to point the backup destination to your new external hard drive. This way everynight while you sleep your computer will automatically backup all of your files to your new hard drive. Now go ahead and press ok and run a backup to make sure everything is setup correctly.

The final step is to give your self a big pat on the back for saving your business in the future.

-Real Estate Technology Blog