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Emisonian: Joe Emison's Blog
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The Limits of the Game Layer
Posted by on April 20, 2011
A shorter version of this post appeared on BusinessInsider on May 13, 2011.
Seth Priebatsch’s “Game Layer” TEDxBoston speech is a wonderful introduction to what seems to be a relatively new idea: applying game mechanics to all sorts of situations to make people do what you want them to do. Seth believes that a properly-constructed “game layer” (a term coined by Seth) can solve really difficult problems—like how to improve failing schools—and even says that game mechanics can solve global warming.
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The Advantage of Cloud Infrastructure: Servers are Software
Posted by on March 12, 2011
A version of this post appeared on ReadWriteWeb on March 28, 2011.
More and more companies are moving from traditional servers to virtual servers in the cloud, and many new service-based deployments are starting in the cloud. However, despite the overwhelming popularity of the cloud here, deployments in the cloud look a lot like deployments on traditional servers. Companies are not changing their systems architecture to take advantage of some of the unique aspects of being in the cloud.
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The Next Generation of AVMs
Posted by on January 3, 2011
A version of this post appeared in the February 2011 edition of Live Valuation Magazine and is also available for download as a PDF.
“The most accurate way to value a property is to find out how much someone will pay for it. Unfortunately, sales data is only updated when a home sells. However, building permit data allows us to take property sale values and bring them up to date, thus giving us a newer, better way to value properties.”—Holly Tachovsky, president of BuildFax, a national aggregator of building permit data.
Most automated valuation models (AVMs) estimate property values by looking at the internal characteristics of properties as part of a “hedonic model,” and by looking at historic sales around the properties as part of a “repeat sales index.” In theory, the combination of the hedonic and repeat sales evaluations captures the full range of factors necessary to value a property automatically. In practice, the quality of the data that drives the hedonic model leads to imperfect results. This article describes a better type of AVM using building permit data.
