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Business and Technology

Google Voice Review: Now Open Signup, No Invite Required

June 25, 2010

Google Voice is now open for signup. You don’t need an invite. You might be wondering if getting a free Google Voice account is something you should bother with. I think you should. I’ve been test running Google Voice for a few months now. Like a lot of the Google products it is fantastic in some [...]

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Austin Real Estate and Automated Valuation Tools

April 13, 2010

You’ve no doubt heard of Zillow, and know how inaccurate its Austin real estate valuations can be. That’s not completely the fault of Zillow because Texas is a non-disclosure state, meaning when you sell your house, it’s nobody’s business what you sold it for, or what the buyer paid. This results in limited sold data [...]

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Will Web 2.0 Render the Full Service Real Estate Agent Obsolete?

March 18, 2010

I just wrapped up 5 days at SXSW Interactive. It was a fantastic conference with many great workshops, panels and discussion events related to technology, business, the internet and social networking. Much of it was relevant to the real estate business and small business in general, which surprised me.In fact, I attended two discussion workshops [...]

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Austin SXSW Interactive – Much Different Than a Realtor Convention

March 14, 2010

I’m day three of five into the SXSW Interactive “Festival” in Austin. Though I wasn’t at first certain that a convention like this would be a valuable use of time and money, I am now convinced it is, and I know exactly why I’m here. I’m here because I want to gain insight into new [...]

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I’m Attending South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive 2010

March 12, 2010

At the urging of one of my more advanced Tech Guru friends, I am attending SXSW Interactive this year. Matter of fact, I’m here now, at the Convention Center, killing time before my first round of workshops this afternoon. This is the Tech portion of the now three-part SXSW Festival. The Music and Film portions [...]

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Google Buzz – No Thanks. Leave my Gmail Inbox Alone

February 11, 2010

I opened my Gmail account this morning to see a new Label called “Buzz” just under my Inbox label. Hmmm. I clicked it and read the “Welcome” letter, spent a few more minutes looking into it at the Google Buzz site, Read the Google Blog about Buzz, watched a video about it (see bottom of [...]

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Switching to Laptops Full Time and Working Mostly Online

December 2, 2009

With the desktops, I had various cords and plugs, speaker wires, speakers, power cords, etc. running to a battery backup power center. It all took up a lot of space, used a lot of plugs and collected a lot of dust. With the laptop, I have one power cable plugged into the side of the laptop, and a usb plugged in for syncing/charging the iPhone. That’s it.

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How to Get Your Address Corrected on Google Maps

November 18, 2009

Anyone who spends a lot of time looking for addresses knows that the GPS systems and various online mapping softwares have errors and omissions. Newer neighborhoods, even those 3 or 4 years old, often don’t appear in GPS systems. Google Maps often doesn’t have these addresses either. Or my favorite, the GPS systems show streets [...]

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Texas Cities Outperforming Others

November 17, 2009

This information is from the Real Estate Center at Texas A/M newsletter. Tells what we already know, but I think the stats are interesting. Texas metros, led by number one Austin–Round Rock, claimed four of the top five spots and nine of the top 16 in the 2009 Milken Institute/Greenstreet Real Estate Partners Best-Performing Cities [...]

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RealManage HOA Management Delivers Poor Customer Service

August 7, 2009

Occassionally I like to use my blog as a bully pulpit. I’m especially grateful that Google likes our blog and thus pushes blog articles that contain company names and keywords to the front page of search results, such as when we became the Number 1 search result for searches for a mortgage company name after [...]

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