Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 4:50 PM
By Mark Heynen, Strategic Partner DevelopmentOne of the things I most enjoy about my job is interacting with small and medium-sized technology companies. It's common wisdom that such businesses are exceptionally dynamic and innovative, and my interactions with some of them over the past several months supports this view.
Google Base offers a unique opportunity for these companies, particularly in the real estate industry. Several content providers are eager to gain more exposure online and have rich databases that are a great fit for Google Base --but they don't have the resources to provide data feeds reliably. Here a data wizard can become a marketing consigliere -- cleaning data, preparing feeds, and advising on how a content provider should present data online. We've even created multi-client accounts and customized sign-on pages to make this as easy as possible. Finally, our API enables vendors to embed Base uploads directly into their client extranets.
In real estate, these folks range from companies that build websites using the IDX standard to companies that deal purely in data distribution to the Multiple Listing Services (MLS) that house the data for the industry. Here's the story from one company, Point2. Undoubtedly there are many other stories still to be told.
If you'd like to learn more about how a vendor or developer in the real estate arena can work with us, please visit http://www.google.com/baseforidx or contact us via email at postmylistings@google.com.
