For those of you unaware, over the last couple of years, we’ve been steadily working on an ambitious web app (code named “Columbus”) that seeks to revolutionize the Real Estate industry on the web, and currently, “we are well on our way.” In fact, today marks a giant step forward in the coming to life of Columbus.
To use baseball as an analogy, the Columbus team (Blackpulp & Poetic Systems of Houston) just signed on another major home run hitter of a client. I’m not sure if we are allowed to announce exactly who it is yet, but let me just say this: if our new client didn’t exist, Google Maps would’ve picked Uganda over Houston to send their Back to the Future mapping car to. Yeah, Houston would’ve been that much smaller.
If you haven’t noticed, I may sound a little proud of today’s new client, but in all seriousness, I AM PROUD! We’ve worked extremely freaking hard to get to this point, and I’m stoked that such a client would even take note of our work. Normally, at this stage in the development of a start up like this, we would’ve been happy if anyone noticed, much less signed up. Even a pinch hitter or two would’ve been reason enough for us to celebrate. But oh no! The Barry Bonds of real estate developers just walked in and decided they want to play for the Columbus team? What!? Like, what does that mean? Uhh.. I guess it means the Santa Maria is well on it’s way to the World Series of real estate web apps? Wouldn’t it be cool if such a thing existed? And on that note, I wish so badly that I had one of those annoying blow horns right now, but unfortunately all I’ve got is this blog and a keyboard…
One more side thought: How in the world do people manage to get those blow horn things into games anyways? People sitting by have to go deaf, right? That can’t be legal.
ANYWAYS, back to Captain Columbo. Here’s a bit-o-background:
About Columbus
Back in ’09, our good friends over at Poetic Systems called us up one day, and said something like: “Hey cool guys, we’re working on a lot of websites for real estate dudes, and we thought of an idea that could potentially make their lives groovy. You cool guys think you can do it?”
Of course, we yelled “Heck Yeah!”
Then, after many…. long nights of blood, sweat, and tears (yes, I cried), the very first version of Columbus was born (that’s when I cried). And it just so happens that I was able to dig up some of the “baby screen shots” of new baby Columbus:
As you can probably guess, baby Columbus kept on growing from there. We went round and round making it better, smarter, more useable, and more functional, which ultimately lead us to the point where we felt Columbus was ready to take it’s first steps into the world.
Columbus: Age 1 (version 1 for the geeks)
For those of you who want to know a little more, I thought I’d write a tad-bit more on just what Columbus is. Makes sense right? Here’s the basic jist: Columbus tracks, and manages detailed info about new communities that are being developed. Sure, you might be thinking there are a lot of other real estate apps out there, so why build another one?
Well, first of all, this is not another real estate app. Columbus tracks the progress of new communities well before information is even leaked out to the web for the other web apps to harvest! It’s the kind of data that real estate agents dream about. How does Columbus do that? Magic. But for those of you who don’t believe in magic, I’ll say this: Mr. Barry Bonds I mentioned earlier has a lot to do with it.
Now, For the Techies: Check out Houston’s Cypress Creek Lakes Community on Columbus
This app is one of Blackpulp’s premier examples of our “mashup” skills. If you don’t know what “mashups” are, that’s okay. But before you go off googling it, mashups are basically web applications that combine multiple public web services in a single unified application. For our mashup, we picked Google Maps. Then, we built a layer on top of Google’s rockin’ mapping API, that did everything we needed that Google maps doesn’t already do.
All in all, Columbus developed into two destinct parts: a portable javascript application, and a RESTful data API.
