Maps named with the suffix -vision

March 12, 2008 – 5:21 pm

Maps named with the suffix -vision (if that’s any kind of definition) are a subset of map mashups that became fashionable in 2007, after David Troy launched Twittervision. We’ve created several of those lately. Two of them, UkPropertyVision and Casaszoom for a customer, Nestoria, a vertical search engine for the real estate world.

Describing UkPropertyVision Techcrunch says it’s like “property porn”. Well, there’s some kind of hypnotic effect in those mapvisions: Ajaxian effects moving and changing the info bubbles constantly on the maps, no action required on the part of the user (although in these two examples, the properties to be shown can be narrowed to certain areas and features).

UkPropertyVision

In Spain, besides the Casaszoom example featured in this screenshot below, we also created Betisvision , a social tool for a football (soccer) club that celebrated recently its 100th aniversary.

Casaszoom.com

Demoing at the Facebook Developer Garage of Madrid

February 27, 2008 – 4:54 pm

Tagzania was present las week in the Facebook Developer Garage of Madrid, an event that attracted several presentations and over 200 people in the audience. Fon the wifi network and its founder, Martin Varsavsky, hosted the event and it counted with the presence of the internationalization responsible for Facebook, Javier Oliván.

We were glad to present two applications, one in behalf of one of our customers, and the other one the Beta app of Tagzania itself. Nestoria’s search application to find homes in Spain was the 1st ever application developed in Spanish for Facebook last year, before the social network decided to expand to other languages this year. Last year’s experience with that app made us insights and ideas for other projects, and so the beta Tagzania app was recently launched: so far, only in Spanish, tailored to Spain, and in Beta stage, but it’s there, if you want to check.

Tagzania at Facebook Developer Garage
Luistxo and Nando from Tagzania Services demoing Nestoria’s app

Other apps in the event were interesting, of course, but most of all we were glad to hear Javier Oliván explaining that the Facebook Platform will expand beyond the limits of its domain. In the near future, it will not only channel third-party applications into the social sphere of Facebook, but it will also be open to be used in other sites and networks. That’s a big step. Just like the opening of the Google Maps API sprouted myriads of geographical mashups, in 2005 there’s a new opportunity here, another defining moment for the Internet as a crossing point of multiple services and data. Tagzania Services doesn’t want to miss the action, certainly.

Introducing Tagzania Services

February 27, 2008 – 11:43 am

In 2005, a web-development company working with Python and free software called CodeSyntax created Tagzania, pioneer application in geolocation. Over the years, geolocation services and maps on the Internet, and Web 2.0 projects in general, are growing and required more attention.

For that reason, CodeSyntax decided to give its own personality to Tagzania and created a spin-off company that would offer services to other companies. Thus was born Tagzania Services. The new company will take care of the Tagzania.com project, and will work as well for third parties. So far, the projects in which we have been involved are focused on maps, 3D models and Web 2.0 applications. In our Projects section you can get more information. And, of course, you can tune to this blog in which we will report our activity.