"Everything is amazing, nobody is happy..."

Sitting on a SJ X2000 train down to my home town Karlskrona happy surfing the clouds. 

Got me thinking about the fact that it is quite popular in Sweden to complain about the Internet connection that is provided on board the trains. Which remembered me about this video...

Absolute hilarious!

Quickly get used to something
It often amazes me that people are complaining about the speed to something on the web when the alternative takes days.

By the way, the customer is always right, and I'm doing my out most to meet their demands. And yes, I admire Google for the ability to create light speed services.

But sometimes it wouldn't hurt to lean back and be amazed.

Information portal at property companies

Attended a few days ago a seminar at Hypergene's office in Stockholm about the use of their business intelligence solution among property companies. (They have 20 property companies as their customers.)

Below is a screen from one of their installations at a large property owner. When the user log in to the portal a unique set of information is displayed for that particular user.

In this example it is the start page for a property manager with through the dashboard directly is displayed how he is doing compared to budget. Impressive and user-friendly!

 
           Jonas Leisvik from Hypergene is presenting their product. 

The product
Hypergene EOS is a 'complete product complete product for advanced and user-customized presentation of information'.  It starts with importing data from, for example, property management systems, financial software and energy systems. Then displaying it a user friendly way. Making it possible to drill down to the lowest level of information for example see an unique invoice.

During the entire presentation it was stressed how user-friendly the solution was. And trust me it is. According to a research by University of Cork (see the graph below) it scores higher than other major BI solution out there.

The evolution is clear.
The specialised software is only used by a handful of people (for example the property management system) and then the waste majority of the users are using a web-based portal where the most important data and the simplest functions are built in.

See it yourself?
Hypergene are running another set of ½-day sessions in the beginning of April in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö. Find out more here.

Beat a former French Prime Minister, but lost against the Mayor of London

That is talking about the list 'Overheard at JC Goldsteins 20th MIPIM' list...   ;-)

Read more at the CREOpoint blog, the international Corporate Real Estate network which is founded by Jean-Claude Goldenstein (a former Executive Director Global Solutions at NAI Global).

MIPIM - A great place for networking

Spent last week in Cannes (France) attending my 8th MIPIM event (with some 20 000 others). Once again it has struck me how brilliant this event is to grow ones international network (and meeting up with the 1000+ Swedes that are there).

Growing a network
Even though the fair has no IT perspective at all. I guess that less then 1% of the boots are IT related, but included RCA, Yardi, Qube, Reidin, HBS Research among others.

However, there are quite a few additional IT entrepreneurs around to meet up with clients. I'm happy to have been able to meet up with quite a few of them. Thank you all for great conversations!

Two types of people
This year at the MIPIM there really were two types of people; the ones discussing how little people there were at the fair, and those telling me that they were able to meet the right people.

Without any question the number of visitors were down from record year 2008 at 30 000, but there was still loads of potential customers. Quite a few of the exhibitors I was talking to were happy to being able to meet the right people, not just running demos.

Best new solution 
On the last day of the fair I visited the stand of HBS Research and one of the three founders Blaise Heurteux gave me a demo of their SaaS solution named LaPlace de I'Immobilier. Great stuff. A pure SaaS solution with a well thought user interface. Their service is created from data acquired from 20 different public records in France.

More reflections from MIPIM
Read more about the event at Steve Felix blogg, CREopoint, TheLawyer and Twitter (?).

See you next year.

Reflections from Realcomm Europe 2009

Earlier this week I spent a couple of days in London attending the second Realcomm Europe event and meeting up with great people from the RE.net world.

First of all, congratulations to Jim Young and Howard Berger for putting this event together. I very much believe there is a need for such events. The 'IT-in-real-estate-industry' can't complain that no one sees the benefits of our solutions if we are not creating/supporting as many channels as possible to communicate our offers. It's like Christmas, if you don't give, you want receive. 

So the Realcomm team; it's we that say Thank You.

The size
There were some 140 people attending the conference, which of roughly half were from property companies. The rest were software suppliers, consultants and media. In addition there were some 10 exhibitors.

A rather small event considering that an IT-in-property-day in Sweden a few months ago also attracted some 100+ attendees. (Sweden is one 6th of UK in terms of population.)

The content
A challenge in organising an 'IT-in-the-real-estate-industry' event is that the area covers everything from Intelligent building to board room reports (including CRM, tenant reporting, marketing, property management, valuation, market information and so on). Which makes it extremely challening to put together a compelling set of presentations.

From my perspective the most interesting reflections of the day where;

'Boardroom quality dashboard online and update'
An interesting discussion took of regarding why the 'upper' management doesn't push the reporting to be more up to date than a paper report that has data that is maybe up to a month old. "Why not a screen with all the up to date data?".

The battle of an XML standard in the industry
The standard is there. Who is stopping it? The lack of interest from the clients or the software suppliers defending it's market shares? There seems to be some differences why it takes so long..

... but the banks will solve the standard issue
Stephen Spooner, Executive Chairman of PISCES, had a great presentation pointing out the current financial crisis will have "a number of regulations coming in" and "lenders need data to analyze the tenants". All this detailed data will then also be requested to be updated. In other words, "the lenders will push the evolution!".

Innovation... finally
The biggest innovation at the event didn't come from the presenters, but the organisers.

 At the final session, the Realcomm team gave out TurningPoint audience response system devices and ran a series of questions. That really sparked the conversations.

Great innovation!
Next year maybe the attendees will push it start using Twitter as a backchannel... Well, one day it happen. (Like for the standard format!) The residential brokers are already doing it.