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By Reggie · March 26, 2008 · Leave a Comment 

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Viral Tools to Boost Your Real Estate Blog’s Readership

By Reggie · March 5, 2008 · 6 Comments 

Over the past few years we have all witnessed the explosive growth of social networking. One could argue this growth has been achieved with viral marketing tools. Think about it every time we sign up for a new network or add a new application we are given the option to spread the message (or application) to our network. By having the option to easily broadcast a message to your database, without having to retype your contacts email address, you are more likely to spread their word…right? Would that type of viral element work on your real estate website or blog?

Introducing Octazen Solutions a contacts importer and address grabber for PHP, .Net, Java, and Ruby. Octazen has built in support for all the major Webmail systems (Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, & AOL) also including Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and Mozilla. For their complete list of supported services, click here to review. Are you wondering if your server is compatible with the address book importer? Try this PHP test script? Try the contact importer demo.

Perhaps rather than importing contacts from an address book, you’d like to spread your message through a social network. With Octazen’s Invite Sender Script, your visitors can message their friend list in Friendster, MySpace, Hi5, Facebook, Orkut, Xing, BlackPlanet and Bebo. Your visitors with enter their login information and the Invite Sender script will compile a list of contacts to invite. Once the message is sent it will arrive as a social network email. Try the Social Network Friends finder

These scripts could be placed before the download of an eBook or other value added item. It would allow those interested parties to also help spread the word with other that share similar interest…easy!

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Google Offers Free “GPS-Like” Technology for Real Estate Agents

By Reggie · December 5, 2007 · 5 Comments 

As a real estate professional you’re in and out of neighborhoods all the time. You’re expected to know your area well. But at times you still need some directional assistance. When those times arise, you may be thanking Google. Recently the Google Mobile Maps crew has launched a new “GPS-Like”’ technology called “My Location”. This new feature is freely available for most web-enabled phones, and you don’t need to have GPS on your device for it to work.

So how exactly does the My Location technology work?

Google will pinpoint your location within 1000 meters by calculating and estimating your handset location based on the unique footprint of surrounding cell towers. To start up this feature from with Google Mobile Maps, click “0” and your approximate location will be displayed on the Map. Your location will be represented by a blue dot if you have GPS or a blue dot with a light blue circle around if you do not have GPS. This dot is your approximate location.

To get started, simply text the word “bluedot” to 33669 or visit www.Google.com/gmm on your mobile device to download the application.

Other useful Google Mobile Apps:

• Search
• Gmail
• Picasa
• Goog-411
• Google Readers
• Google Docs
• Google Calendar
• YouTube

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Let’s Talk Google Apps

By Chad A. Johnson · April 1, 2007 · 2 Comments 

After posting my article on the benefits of Outlook Exchange hosting for the real estate professional, I got a great comment asking, “Why not use Google Apps?” This question really made me think. We here at MyTechOpinion.com are huge Google fans. I have become addicted to my personalized Google homepage and love my Gmail account. While these tools have improved my personal computing life, let’s take a look at Google’s offerings from the perspective of a real estate agent’s business needs.

Google is in the first stages of a new push towards becoming a leading business applications provider. In fact, they have recently announced a partnership with IBM to develop enterprise applications starting with an intranet search tool.

Google Apps is a compilation of several existing Google applications with the addition of some new offerings. These applications include Gmail (email), Google Talk (text and voice calling), Google Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets (a Microsoft Word and Excel alternative), and Google Page Creator (web page publishing). Google has also added domain name hosting, allowing you to use the Gmail application without an @gmail.com email address.

Google Apps is a very impressive package. Yet, I am not convinced that this is a great option for a real estate agent. While Gmail and Google Calendar have some great functionality, they fall short on contact management and smart phone synchronization is limited. I have played around with Google Docs & Spreadsheets and am amazed at what Google has accomplished with this application, but it isn’t robust enough to replace my beloved Microsoft Office (think of functionality like mail merge). Google Page Creator does make web page creation easy, but are you a real estate agent or a webmaster? Focus on selling homes and pay a professional to build your website.

Feature comparisons aside, the most important issues are that of reliability and support. InfoWorld.com ran an article here this past week discussing problems with service outages. According to their article, Prudential Preferred Properties, a Chicago based real estate firm with about 500 agents, experienced a several hour period recently where email service was unavailable. That type of service disruption can prove to be quite costly to a real estate agent or in this case, the entire brokerage.

With regards to support, phone support and uptime guarantees are only available to Premier Edition users. Premier Edition accounts cost $50 per user, per year. Standard Edition (free) users are limited to online support that includes user discussion groups, email and knowledge base access.

Relying solely on online applications adds another potential problem. If your Internet connection goes down, you are in the dark. With no access to your calendar, you could miss an important appointment.

When it comes to my business, downtime means lost opportunity. I would much rather spend a little bit more to have tools and services that I can rely on. Until Google Apps or another alternative can prove themselves over time, I am going to continue to use Outlook Exchange hosting, Microsoft Office applications, and a dedicated web host and recommend this for real estate professional, as well.

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FREE Google Maps for your Mobile Device

By Reggie · December 1, 2006 · 1 Comment 

If you are like me, you depend on your smart phone for so many things. Well now you can add detailed directions and real-time traffic to the list. That’s right, Google Mobile offers those services and much more such as Gmail, Google News, Google Search, SMS and Blogger access. See the full set of free offerings here. These tools have the same simplistic approach we typically see from Google, but now accessible on the go. If you’re curious whether your device is compatible, check out Google’s list of compatible devices.

To get started, visit http://mobile.google.com/ on your compatible phone.

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