Those brothers from Melbourne, Adam and Jason Spencer, founders of Street Advisor, are getting ready to present a whole raft of new features at the Inman Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Included will be “surrounding streets” - a recently released feature that allows you to see what people think about the streets surrounding the particular street you search for.

I think this feature is gold.

Actually, I wish it had been around a couple of years ago when I moved into a nice little street in Surry Hills which was just around the corner from a street full of brothels. It wasn’t the brothels that were a problem but the cars that kept pulling up then taking off not long after, all throughout the night. Anyway, I digress…you get the point.

Another feature they’ve just announced is “best streets” which shows the best streets in the area you’re searching for.

While the site still hasn’t crossed the chasm these features should help to give both direct users and partners (such as Real Estate Agents) more of a reason to use it.

Had a quick chat with Alex North of Tiinker and Jobreel fame yesterday and he gave me some info on his most recent project - jamcode. Jamcode has released a teaser video of one of their apps GasBag - which is a mobile app for finding cheap fuel near where you are.

Below is a short excerpt from our conversation (I’ve had to leave some of the details out because of where they are with the creation of the team and development of other products)…

Can you tell me more about jamcode?

jamcode LLC was founded by 3 Aussies and 1 Californian (although now half the team live in CA). The company was founded with the aim of creating high quality applications for the growing mobile computing market.

Is it purely focused on iphone apps?

Not at all, but it is focused on mobile. The iPhone will be the first platform to see GasBag but it will be available on other platforms soon.

Has GasBag released yet?

Not just yet. We’re busy polishing off the user interface - we want the finished product to be a joy to use.

Will GasBag be California focused or will you soon have other geographies covered?

Initially California for a short trial, and then the rest of the US. We’ll bring it to Australia when the federal FuelWatch legislation takes effect. Other geographies just depend on our access to data.

Actually, how do you get the updated info? Do they have a FuelWatch like scheme over there?

No, but the data can be bought from private companies who monitor it. We will also encourage users to submit up-to-date price data from the pump when they make a purchase, so GasBag will have some of the most timely gas price data possible.

Part of their future plans include bringing mobile-based rich local search to more markets than petrol prices and then looking at ways to allow businesses to compete for customers that are nearby and looking for the goods/services they offer.

There’s a lot to like about Jamcode, GasBag and their future plans. It’ll be interesting to see if they can do the trans-Pacific development thing and if they get the necessary pickup of GasBag to reassure them that they’re onto a winner.

Though with petrol prices in my area varying by anywhere up to 10c on some days, they can count on at least 1 customer.

So it seems Chris Saad has had the idea of writing a book for over a year. The (working?) title is “Revolution of Me”. (hope it’s not tied to revolutionofme.com - lol)

You can check out and comment on an excerpt from the book outline over at Chris’ blog

Wonder if the plan is to incorporate ideas into the book - a la Jeff Howe (the man who coined the term “Crowdsourcing“) and his book - or if he’s just after comments.

Let us know Chris…

Interesting movements in the Melbourne RSS world, with Feedity announcing they’ve entered into a “technical and strategic partnership” with Comnicate.

Comnicate provides enterprise users with a solution to securely blend external RSS feeds with internal information.

Feedity generates RSS feeds from web pages without syndication format.

It looks like a nice fit and just might be a good example of what I was alluding to in an earlier post when talking about clusters creating competition and cooperation that leads to competitive advantage.

I’m looking forward to seeing what the two teams come up with.

New technology and old technology can interact in various ways

2 perfect examples: -

Brad Kellett, founder of Obsolete Skills (and the guy who recommended Media Temple to us…damn u ) has used technology to help people look back and collaboratively document skills that have become obsolete. In looking at many of the skills documented, you see that many were tied to old technology and became obsolete as the technology did. The site was started after Robert Scoble blogged on the topic. Scoble then noted that the wiki had started and they got 45,000 hits in the first month. Sure the traffic has mostly disappeared but it showed that people, even geeks, weren’t quite ready to stop reminiscing just yet.

Malcolm Lambert, founder of Intresto, has developed some software called RockSolver that aims to make construction more sustainable by automating the hard 3D geometric shape fitting that is currently being done in the minds of skilled stone masons. It’s a really interesting application of matching old-world skills that are becoming obsolete, with modern technology, to create superior solutions.

Either way, its good to see a couple of Aussies doing well by looking to, rather than forgetting, the past as so many people do when it comes to the tech startup game.

An update on Pollenizer’s plans to create a shared working space for startups in Sydney that we wrote about a little while ago.

Looks like the front-runner is a space on Riley Street in Surry Hills that will go live around September.

Head over to Mick’s blog to leave your thoughts on the location and timing.

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Just letting you know we’re migrating our comments to Disqus.

It’s not a full migration - old comments will be managed by Wordpress, new ones by Disqus (typing that makes me nervous for some reason)

There will be no real difference, everything will be just as easy to use except Disqus brings far richer features to the site.

Anyway, let me know if you have any problems (you shouldn’t but it’s always good to check)

Just posted a reply to Stephen Byrne in the comments of an earlier post and thought the topic was too important to be hidden away there.

Umair Haque is a thought leader on new media (amongst other things). His style ruffles feathers sometimes, but what he has to say is always insightful. History has also shown him to be right.

Now…here comes the link to Australia…with all the talk about the Future of Media Summit and the importance of new media in driving momentum in the Aussie tech industry, I think it’s critical that we look not to what is happening overseas at the moment, but what will be happening everywhere in the future.

Aside from writing for Harvard Business Online, and his own blog Bubblegeneration, he is the director of the Havas Media Lab. They have recently released a Strategy Note titled - “User Generated Context”.

You can grab the file here

The key takeaway point

The bulk of what connected consumers create isn’t content: its context – information about the value of goods and services

Look at his other stuff if you can as well. You won’t regret it. Promise.

The simultaneous, cross-continent Future of Media summit was held today by the Future Exploration Network. Media folk in Silicon Valley and Sydney participated in pan-Pacific panels and roundtable discussions on predictions of Media’s future. The Twitter backchannel was very active as usual. A good train of consciousness summary can be found at Summize.

Future of Media report

First up was Ross Dawson, beamed in live from Silicon Valley to cover off the highlights of the Future of Media 2008 Report.  The report highlights seven driving forces shaping Media:

1. Increasing Media Consumption
2. Fragmentation
3. Participation
4. Personalisation
5. New Revenue Models
6. Generational Change
7. Increasing Bandwidth

The Future of Media Lifecycle with a “Personal Cloud”, “Precipitation of Participation” and “Diffusion of Memes” provides an interesting visualisation of Media.

Future of TV and Video panel

Panelists:

• Mark Goldman, COO, Current TV
• Mark Antonitis, President and General Manager, KRON-TV
• Bruce Meagher, Director, Strategy and Communications, SBS
• Mark Pesce, Founder, FutureSt Consulting

Notes:

Mark Antonitis provided a lively discussion of his vision of media - to make money via world domination.  He obviously has a wealth of commercial experience in (traditional) media, but is perhaps still playing by the traditional playbook.  The basic synopsis of his strategy is media commoditisation: producing the most content at the minimum quality in the cheapest way. He also asserted that combining and editing content was more valuable than the typical User Generated Content production.  The Twitter backchannel disapproved.

He went on to say “you have to have an editor, somebody overseeing the process, a quality control system, to provide a singular view by a person or organisation that’s consumable by you.”  More of the Old Media command and control mindset.

Mark Pesce provided a rebuttal to this with the visceral example that “the watercooler effect is dead”. He says there is a transition from time-based aggregation to salience-based aggregation, based on reputation and relationships.  Mull those deep insights over for a while.

One interesting point that Mark Antonitis made was that one of the values provided by Mainstream Media (MSM) is “discovering things I didn’t know I should care about.”  That’s a fair point, and a common problem for recommendation engines, restricting views vs broadening them.  But there are social media tools including Twitter, Google News and FriendFeed that are just as useful and in many cases more useful for this discovery.

Future of Privacy and Personalised Advertising panels

Panelists:

• Jason White, Vice President of Media and Operations, Traffic Marketplace
• Jenny Williams, Director, Ideagarden
• Shannon Clark, Founder, Nearness Function
• Chris Saad, Chair, DataPortability.org and CEO, Faraday Media

Notes:

Chris Saad started by covering the DataPortability angle, observing that “people own their data, but they don’t have control over it.” There was general discussion around permission-based, highly relevant advertising. Chris also discussed the concept of vendor relationship management.  The discussion from the panel sounded a whole lot like PureProfile.

Global Media Strategies

Panelists:

• Willie Pang, Head of Yahoo! Search Marketing, Australia and New Zealand
• Chris Tolles, CEO & Co-Founder, Topix
• Loic Le Meur, CEO, Seesmic
• Craig Blair, Executive Director, netus

Notes:

Chris Tolles gave a very interesting talk about Topix. They’re apparently an enemy of the state in Zimbabwe according to Chris.  He said they are big in Des Moines and are focussed on hyperlocal conversations.

Loic Le Meur of Seesmic then delivered an entertaining discussion of the differences between Northern Europeans (heavy wikipedia usage, low blogging) compared to Southern Europeans (high ego-driven blogging activity). He also observed that you can’t just try to translate US tools to all parts of Europe.

On monetisation and strategy, Chris Tolles observed that the big advertising dollars are in the US, saying “whoever dominates the US first, wins. Very important in terms of advertising dollars.”

Ross Dawson provided some statistics that highlighted that the United Kingdom has highest per capita advertising spending, with Aus #2 and United States #4.

Talk turned to China and India.  Most of the panelists observed that it will be very difficult for western companies to make an serious money in China (good luck, Seek and Sensis).  Shannon Clark from the audience (and on Twitter) noted that at Supernova2008 he met someone from a Chinese firm with 25+ million active users and was ad supported via Chinese-sourced ads.

Craig Blair observed that it was possible to build a billion dollar business in Australia by partnering with an overseas company and bringing the idea into Australia.

Future of Journalism panel

Panelists:

• Jane Schulze, Media Editor, The Australian
• Hugh Martin, General Manager, APN Online
• Jonthan Este, Communications Director, Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance
• Stephen Quinn, Associate Professor, Deakin University
• Robert Scoble, Managing Director, Fast Company TV

Notes:

A typical MSM-centric conversation, led by Jane Schulze provided to be very unpopular on the Twitter backchannel.  The basis of her argument was that bloggers weren’t good enough to “do journalism” and real journalists didn’t want to be labelled as bloggers.  Interesting, but have you checked out, oh I don’t know your own employer’s Blogs section (40 blogs)?  Your competition’s Blog section (no fewer than 24 blogs)?

The Business Spectator and Crikey were raised as examples of people (Alan Kohler, Robert Gottliebsen, et al in the first instance and Stephen Mayne and Eric Beecher & co in the second) building strong brands for themselves online.

Predictions for the Future of Media CEO panel

Panelists:

• Angelos Frangolopoulos, CEO, Australian News Channel
• Wendy Hogan, Managing Director, CNET Australia
• Mark Scott, Managing Director, ABC
• Belinda Rowe, CEO, Zenith Optimedia

Notes:

The final panel of the formal conference section of the summit began with Wendy Hogan noting (in counter point to Jane Schulze earlier) that CNET employs many journalists, for online only, who blog.

Mark Scott talked about the ABC’s digital strategy and pulled on examples from the BBC. Favourite quote: “We don’t talk much about monetisation at the ABC…it makes people nervous.”

Other coverage

Other early coverage available here:

• Gavin Heaton
• Ben Barren

Many others will no doubt be posting, once the after-drinks have worn off

Another new feature for the site.

You can now (finally) follow TechNation Australia on twitter.

Follow the link or search for technationau