Friday, March 16. 2007

Tatro's FindaHome Matures

That's Scott Tatro, the fellow who's been providing updates on the REAL vs. Sarkisian case (lastest info here). He's licensed the patent that Sarkisian is alleged to infringe and started his own site, FindaHome.com, with partner Frans Bech, a Danish entrepreneur. FindaHome will be offered to agents for $199/month. It's going live this spring, but seems mostly complete. As I understand the business model, for the fee, the app appears directly on the broker's site. The big pitch: This is all legal, so there's no fear of exposure to future liability related to the patent. Trivia: Tatro was the first to license the patent and apparently hung out with the unnamed CEO and a co-founder of MapInfo.

Tatro's been speaking about this site for some time, so this is all expected. Here's the interesting part from a broader perspective:

Companies like Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, and others have been meeting with the company to quantify the kinds of traffic counts that begin to make this company an attractive acquisition based on its Web 2.0 business model.

I'm not sure if this suggests those companies might be interested in acquisition or if they are just looking at "hit" numbers or if this is a statement to the world that Tatro/Bech want to sell. If in fact one of these big players did acquire FindaHome, that'd be another licensee of the patent. There are many others, to be sure, but these are big players in comparison. Would that sway sentiment regarding the patent, which some suggest could be broad enough to cover all sorts of online mapping? More trivia: Mark Tornetta, who owns the patent, has already been in a legal tiff with Microsoft on his patent; he sued Microsoft in 1998 for infringement.

I checked out FindaHome.com. It may take up to 60 seconds to load, I was told once I "clicked the logo" to begin. I did notice that the app seems to be from Neighborhood Match. No easily found info on that site. But I did check who owns the domain: its owned by Neighborhood Match in Las Vegas.

Once Neighborhood Match loaded, I got a Google Map and rather scary set of dialogs/instructions. The search tools worked ok and once I found a property of interest I could click for details and be sent to the local broker. I ended up on a page from Bemis Reality which works in my community with the details on the property. So, does that mean Bemis paid already? Or that Bemis would pay to have the same tools on its site? The mapping tools are nice - estimated drive times by drawing line from start to end point (not sure if these are crow flies or real estimates, though) and there are many layers to turn on for schools, shopping, recreation, etc. in the area of interest. One that was missing - public transportation! There's no "hybrid" view, but you can turn on "satellite map" if you can decipher the icon that does that. Help sends an e-mail to NeighborHood Match. There's no "about" information on the site and I could not make out the copyright, privacy info since it was "cut off" in Internet Explorer. (It was ok on FireFox.)

- RISMedia (press release)