Movity Blog

As 2010 comes to a close, Movity is moving onto some big things in 2011.  We started as part of the YCombinator Winter Class, and will end as part of the Trulia.com team.  

What were the highlights of 2010?

1.  We brought on 3 awesome guys in Zain Memon, Andrew Kitchell, and Jonathan McCoy.

2.  We did not get arrest for hanging noise recordings on the streets of San Francisco: http://tendernoise.movity.com

3.  We hit 100,000 users for weeplaces.com… fast.  (not to mention being on Fox News and NBC)

4.  We got to work with an amazing group of investors, advisors, and mentors that believed in us and supported us.

5.  We’ll be joining an exciting and growing company in Trulia.com. 

If you want to learn more about the acquisition, you can read more on the Trulia blog post.

So we hope 2011 is filled with just as many great moments:

1.  Reaching tens of millions of people with our vision for the industry.

2.  Solving big problems around moving.

3.  Bringing transparency to millions of data points that home buyers need.

4.  Continuing to build a team of passionate, innovative, and ambitious entrepreneurs.

5.  Helping Trulia continue to break through the noise and create lasting value.

Thanks again to everyone who supported us thus far.  We’re extremely excited to join Trulia.com and contribute to their growth, innovation, and success. 

Moving is difficult.  In 2009, thirty-seven million people moved, many because they accepted a new job. 

New hires have their hands full: changing jobs, moving their belongings (and families), researching good neighborhoods, sorting through house listings…  Aaaargh!

What if there was a magical world where movers could get advice about where to live from people they trust? 

We thought this would be useful, so we built a custom & private mapping platform that enables groups to share location advice.

Check out YCombinator’s (W10) map, which is filled with advice for young entrepreneurs about where to live in the Bay Area.    

HOW CAN MOVITY MAPS MAKE HR DEPARTMENTS LOOK AWESOME?

With Movity Maps, HR departments will make new hires swoon. 

Create a Movity Map, gather reviews from current employees, and share the map with new hires.  Moving to town just became E-a-s-y.  

With Movity Maps, anyone you invite to join your map can easily add reviews, such as the one below.

WHY ARE OTHER GROUPS USING MOVITY MAPS? 

Movity Maps helps groups gather and share location advice. 

Alumni groups, student organizations, and friends: all are creating maps to share opinions and reviews within their network.  

READY TO LEAD YOUR OWN GROUP?

To start a map, visit maps.movity.com. 

In 2 minutes, you’ll have a tool that helps your friends, new hires, and classmates (and you’ll be gaining praise along the way). 

Have a suggestion for Movity Maps?  

Send comments my way:  andrew@movity.com.

I read a quote this morning about which summed up the power of crowd-sourced maps:

“While (the mapping of the Haiti Relief Efforts was) not without problem, this effort nevertheless represents a remarkable example of the power of crowdsourced online mapping and the potential for new avenues of interaction between physically distant places.“ 

The map below (created by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade) illustrates the recent Gulf Oil Spill.  This map is maintained by a concerned populace, and enables them to effectively illustrate damage done to their community.  The most powerful aspect of the map is that it allows users to digest and filter information rapidly.  These filters enable users to examine local incidents, examine particulars of the event (oil slicks vs. bird deaths), or view time-specific information (recent events).   

UGC maps are an increasingly powerful tool that help us understand and analyze event, communities, and society. Much as Google’s analysis of user search terms has helped the CDC understand the spread of endemic diseases, UGC maps present a more complete picture of an event.  

One of the strongest indicators of the power of UGC maps is the rapid, widespread, and universal adoption of this technology.  UGC maps have been used to organize relief efforts in Haiti, monitor voting procedures in Africa and India, and record violence in Gaza. Since a large portion of the global population can already contribute to these maps, the framework is in place for this avenue of data dissemination to expand and improve.  

Do you have hesitations regarding UGC maps?  

Have you helped to construct a UGC map?  Why?

How else would you want to filter the data from the oil map?  

As always, we are curious to hear your thoughts.  

The entire article that the opening quoting references can be downloaded 

here.

The Oil Spill Map was created by the Oil Spill Bucket Brigade.

More amazing UGC maps can be found at Ushahidi.com.

- Andrew

Click here to view a rough San Francisco Pet Map

Most pet owners would agree with the statement “I want to live in a pet friendly area.”

However, how can pet owners gauge whether a neighborhood or location is pet friendly?  We quickly put together a map of factors that may contribute to a pet’s happiness: access to parks/off-leash areas, day care facilities, etc.  However, after mapping this data, it is clear that one would be hard pressed to make a richly informed decision about the suitability of a location based on this map. 

In judging a location’s suitability for pets, there are too many subjective (yet important) factors that public sources of data do not address. 

For example:

-       Is the off-leash area two blocks away filled with vagrants?

-       Do your neighbors own a Rottweiler?

-       Would you feel safe walking your dog late at night?

-       Are there frequent loud noises in an area that would frighten your pet?

Traditionally, data of this type could not be collected.  It required an understanding of the local area that was impractical for a centralized authority to collect.  However,  without this data this map offers a slightly superficial understanding of an area.  What is the value of living near two off-leash areas if both are areas you would want to avoid? 

We are interested in how much maps such as this can be improved with crowd-sourced data.  Can maps enriched with crowd-sourced data help consumers (or pet owners) find a better place to live more quickly?

Let us know what you think the pros/cons are of our rough pet-friendly map.  Want to add a comment about one of these areas?  Send it my way – we’ll add it to the map.

-Andrew 

Because it’s a bit hard to find us, here is our office location: 

Pier 38, Suite 5, at Townsend and Embarcadero.  We’re downstairs in the back next to Lab Zero and CoTweet.

Noise complaints are the “No. 1 quality-of-life issue for New York residents”.

For the the past few months, we’ve interviewed home buyers, renters, and movers to identify the important factors when deciding on where to live.  We knew of the obvious ones, safety, commute, price, and social.  But in our initial brainstorm, we missed a pretty obvious factor… noise.

Interview after interview, movers expressed concern about the noise of freeways, cable cars, bars and restaurants, etc.

So at Movity.com, we decided to take on noise as a data set we would own.

At first, we explored different modeling avenues and complex software.  But we decided for the v1 to “streetview” it, collect the data ourselves, and get feedback based on data for one neighborhood… the Tenderloin.

The Setup

In the first test, we had a few recorders stolen (they are $200 a piece).  So we took precautions and on each recorder, clearly stating, “Device is being tracked by the SFPD”.

The Hangings

In a partnership with Arup and Stamen Design, we contributed and worked on the noise project for the CityCentered Festival. We hung decibel readers at major intersections in the Tenderloin and gather data over a weekend and weekday.

After being questions by the police three times, and harassed by local business owners, bums, and the occasional drug dealer, we gathered decibel readings at 13 intersections, resulting in 1.6 million data points. Our v.1 of the visualization at Tendernoise.Movity.com.  Sha literally built this in 1.5 days.

Our Vision

Moving into a bad area can greatly affect one’s quality of life. Our goal at Movity is to give home buyers and renters the data and content they want before making a such a large financial commitment. We hope a clear understanding of noise is one of those data points.

From this initial data set, we can draw quite a few conclusions on how much noise is generated from bars, munis, cable cars, fire trucks, and people hanging out.  We’ll share our findings soon.

Up Next for Us

1.  Improvements to make the data consumable, comparable, and rankable.  Ie, answer the questions: which intersections are the loudest, what times is it the loudest, how does this compare to other neighborhoods in the city, how does this affect the quality of life?

2.  Gather data in the rest of the city.

3.  Build out a sustainable process for recollecting data and ensuring accuracy and granularity.

We just started and need feedback!  Do you care about noise?  How would you want it visualized?  What other factors influence your next home?  Please email me at eric@movity.com.

-Eric

We rounded out the core of our team this month with Zain Memon.

Zain is one of the key contributors to the Django framework.  He’s a talented entrepreneur, graduated high school at 16, speaks at the Django conferences, and previous was the Sr. Engineer at Voltage.  We’re very happy he’s fighting the fight with us.

The rest of the team consists of:

Eric Wu

- Previously founded RentWiki.com

- Top 25 Entrepreneur by BusinessWeek

- Speaker at NAA, Harvard Business School, NMHC, etc.

- Founded a real estate investment trust at 19

Vaughn Koch

- Expedia - 6 years as an engineer and PM - Built parts of the core search path 

- Bing - managed an engineering team for Bing Rewards

Sha Hwang

- Previously at Stamen Design

- Build projects for Twitter, Flickr, Adobe, CNN, MTV

- Speaker at data visualization conferences

We started at YCombinator in January of 2010.  Our vision for the the next three months is to validate our hypothesis of the problem:

- Buying or renting a home is a difficult process because of the lack of transparency around real estate.

Most real estate sites are powered by realtors or property managers.  We aim to build a real estate search site that is driven by unbiased content and data, and change the way people find a place to live.