The 360-degree views of real estate listings were remarkable for their time, but are giving way to new technology that lets users look at many things at once, says Microsoft Live Labs Technical Fellow Gary Flake, who was speaking last week at Inman’s Real Estate Connect in San Francisco.

“We’re used to Web navigating from one image to another,” especially with video games, said Flake. Microsoft’s PhotoSynth technology lets users zoom in and out of backyards to bedrooms, etc. It is the same technology used by CNN for the Obama inauguration, he notes.

Indeed, Photo Synth, combined with Pivot, a program for collecting information, creates new experiences and allows you to embed them within your own Web site. “It will make you want to change the ways you take photos to take into how you stitch together hundreds of things,” said Flake.

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Realtor.com has gotten 1.3 million downloads of its iPhone app, which launched in January. “It is the fastest growing app in the category,” President Errol Samuelson told Inman Real Estate Connect attendees in San Francisco last week. “The content is free; the attention is priceless,” he added, riffing on the MasterCard ad campaign.

The iPhone app also provides real leads. People using it make 10 times as many phone calls to agents as e-mail. But there is a dark side to that as well. “Seventy percent of voicemail leads are unanswered,” he said. That points to a real problem if agents don’t figure out a way to answer their phone soon, he said.

While Realtor.com has had success with the iPhone, it is also focusing on Android because it supports many more devices. Whether iPhone or Android, agents have got to not only focus on their apps, but also on their Web sites. “People click on an app, then go to a Web site that is not optimized,” said Samuelson.

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Redfin’s apparent progress is seen by some as evidence that the advantage goes to brokerages that minimize their risk (namely, keeping agents around that underperform). With Redfin, agents are on salary and don’t do prospecting. Instead, they focus on customer service, and are paid, in part, based on satisfaction levels.

“We’ve been doubling every year,” and have had a good run for the past 12 to 16 months, despite the bad economy, said Kelman. The past two months, however, have been flat as tax incentives have expired. Kelman further noted that the Bay Area is Redfin’s most profitable market, although Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles are the company’s largest revenue producers.

Redfin got in the national press recently because one of the 10 Russian spies had been employed as an agent. Kelman noted that the Boston-based agent was “a very dedicated person. It didn’t gibe with the person selling homes for us.”

The post Redfin’s Glenn Kelman at Inman: 16 Markets by End of 2010 appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Blog king Robert Scoble, during a presentation at Inman Real Estate Connect today in San Francisco, said we’ve entered “the third movement of information” during the Internet era. All are necessary to boost appearances on Google, he told the real estate oriented audience. In 1998 we saw the introduction of the blog, he noted. In 2006 we saw the introduction of Facebook Fan Pages. Now we have Foursquare.

Location-based services go well beyond who’s mayor of a location, although that is very important, Scoble noted. Already, location-based services and mobile are easily integrated into people’s urban lives. Scoble listed a wide range of LBS-infused services that he theoretically uses on a daily basis, including Glimpse, Trapster, Google Maps, Plancast, Goby, Google Earth, Gowalla, WHURR, TripIt, Craigslist and Taxi Magic.

The post Scoble at Inman: Location Represents ‘Third Movement’ of Info appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Blog king Robert Scoble, during a presentation at Inman Real Estate Connect today in San Francisco, said we’ve entered “the third movement of information” during the Internet era. All are necessary to boost appearances on Google, he told the real estate oriented audience. In 1998 we saw the introduction of the blog, he noted. In 2006 we saw the introduction of Facebook Fan Pages. Now we have Foursquare.

Location-based services go well beyond who’s mayor of a location, although that is very important, Scoble noted. Already, location-based services and mobile are easily integrated into people’s urban lives. Scoble listed a wide range of LBS-infused services that he theoretically uses on a daily basis, including Glimpse, Trapster, Google Maps, Plancast, Goby, Google Earth, Gowalla, WHURR, TripIt, Craigslist and Taxi Magic.

The post Scoble at Inman: Location Represents 'Third Movement' of Info appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.