The housing market is showing signs of returning. According to a recent report, home prices have posted a small gain and economists are suggesting that the housing market might be stabilizing.
Realizing that, and especially considering that first-time homebuyers are trying to capitalize on the government's $8,000 credit, sellers might be more willing to sell their homes than they were last year. If you're one of those folks, you'll want to consult some services on the Web that will help you get the job done. From valuation tools to agent search services, you'll have everything you need to make a deal on your house.
But if your house isn't quite ready yet and you're looking for some design tips to make it more appealing to would-be buyers, check out this roundup I wrote recently helping you do just that.
Sell your home
Cyberhomes: Cyberhomes' main focus is home valuations. Simply input the address of your property and the site will tell you how much it believes it's worth.
But Cyberhomes does more than appraisals. The site also provides a listing of homes for sale in your area, where you can find "distressed" homes you might be able to buy on the cheap, and neighborhood information down to income and demographic data. It's a full-featured site.
Cyberhomes gives you important information on your neighborhood.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Domania: Domania can help you see how your home compares with others that have already sold, which is helpful since most homes are valued based on a number of factors, including recent sales in your neighborhood. It won't tell you the value of your home, but since real appraisals are completed by comparing nearby homes that are similar to yours, Domania should help you find the sweet spot for pricing your home. I was impressed by the sheer number of houses it listed on the site. You should find just about any home sold in your area.
Find out how much your neighborhood homes sold for with Domania.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
A significant redesign is finally coming to the Yahoo.com home page, one of the most well-traveled destinations on the Internet, and the company's search page will follow suit starting next month.
Yahoo plans to let people in the United States start selecting a new, more personalized version of the home page beginning Tuesday afternoon. The revamp lets people select basic applications to use not just Yahoo sites, but also others' such as eBay, Facebook, and Twitter, said Tapan Bhat, Yahoo's senior vice president for consumer experiences.
These applications are available on the left side of the page under a customizable section called My Favorites; hovering over them with the mouse pointer makes each application and its accompanying advertising pop up.
"We're pulling together everything about the user they care about, be it on Yahoo or off, to create a personally relevant experience," Bhat said. "In a world like this, Yahoo needs to make the user experience come first."
The effort is a centerpiece of Yahoo's effort to revitalize its core business: showing content and accompanying advertisements to a large, general audience on the Net. Yahoo's profitability for years has trailed that of its main rival, Google, which depends chiefly on search ads for revenue, and Yahoo faces increasing pressure from Microsoft's online business and new arrivals such as Facebook as well.
Yahoo's new home page permits applications from Yahoo or others. This shows use of Facebook.
(Credit: Yahoo)The company also hopes for more success with advertisers. "We're creating great opportunities for advertisers to target content and context," he said, demonstrating a movie application that showed a prominent ad along with movie showtimes locally tailored for a particular user.
The My Favorites feature will arrive on Yahoo's search page, too, making the search site and results shown on it into more of a portal to access content. Yahoo faces search pressure from dominant Google and now to a certain extent from Microsoft's Bing, too. Even if it consummates a possible search and advertising deal with Microsoft, being able to show its own display ads in applications adjacent to search results could help the company extract more money from its search operation.
Long-coming changes
Newer Web sites change rapidly, but Yahoo proceeds at a relatively glacial pace to change its site, visited by a whopping 340 million people monthly.
Yahoo announced the new front page plan in October 2007, recognizing that people wanted to get to other destinations on the Net besides Yahoo's. It began "bucket testing" it a year afterward, trying variations of the new page on randomly selected users, some of whom squawked at the changes and their inability to revert.
New Chief Executive Carol Bartz has been trying to light a fire under the company's developers, but even this revamp is only is the beginning beta testing on Tuesday. The change will arrive in the U.K., France, and India later this week, in Spain and Mexico next month, and in Asia next year, Yahoo said. Users had no choice about earlier tests, but now they'll be able to select it as default on their own by visiting http://yahoo.com/trynew or clicking on Yahoo promotions for the change.
Yahoo's revamped front page.
(Credit: Yahoo)"The home page was tested by thousands and thousands of people. We got tons of feedback--tens of thousands wrote about what they liked and didn't," Bhat said. "It was really key to helping us figure out what worked and didn't."
The new home page will become default for others when beta testing is done "in the coming months," Yahoo said. The revamped search pages will enter bucket testing in August, meaning that users can't choose to use or not use the new design.
More changes
Opening up Yahoo's content to other sites' operations--and letting other sites use Yahoo data can use such as Facebook-like status updates--is part of the Yahoo Open Strategy. That effort, under way for well over a year, is designed to increase users' activity on Yahoo, to draw more people to Yahoo, and to make the company a better partner for advertisers.
There are about 60 applications available now, and more are being added daily, Bhat said. Users can create their own, too.
Also coming in August will be the ability to select what type of news people can see, with a slider that moves on a spectrum between "fun" and "serious," he said.
In addition, Yahoo is revamping its mobile site. One big feature: when users customize Yahoo for use with regular computers, that customization will carry over to their mobile version.
Bhat wouldn't share details about whether the new home page fares better, either in terms of user engagement or revenue. However, because Yahoo plans to make its official home page announcement Tuesday while detailing second-quarter financial results, it's possible Bartz may be more forthcoming than Bhat.
Bhat did indicate, though, that things are moving in the right direction for the company.
"Our experience in our test indicates that people are excited about this home page. They feel this meets their needs and is fresh new look for Yahoo," Bhat said. "We are designing the page around users. What we do know when design page that users like, they tend to get more engaged."
I have thousands of e-mail messages in my corporate Outlook in-box, and thousands more in Gmail and in my ancient Hotmail account. MailStore Home is a free program that can archive them all locally, and display those archives in an interface that reads like your Outlook in-box.
Why use it? You can clear away old messages and attachments, but easily search to find them again when that inevitable moment arrives. Until universal offline in-boxes like Yahoo's Zimbra Desktop start addressing consumers on a wider scale, MailStore Home is also a good way to read mail offline in areas of spotty Wi-Fi, or to use as a de facto message backup.
MailStore Home's search pane includes attachments and repeat queries.
(Credit: CNET/Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt)MailStore Home can archive a pretty impressive list of accounts and protocols, including Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, Microsoft Exchange, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Gmail, Windows Live Mail, IMAP, POP3. It also supports .EML files. It largely resembles Microsoft Outlook's layout with a side bar on the left--complete with folder tree and search field--and a large reading pane on the right. There are also some small navigational icons along the top that you can use to jump to archiving, burning archives to disk, advanced search, and tools.
The program's management is straightforward. Buttons on the start screen replicate the navigational icons up top, and there are also some stats, like your oldest and newest messages and the total size of your archive. When you archive an in-box, a wizard walks you through special configuration steps and lets you enter folders to archive or exclude if you want some backed up, but not all. MailStore Home skips your spam, trash, and junk folders by default, and it checks for duplicate messages while going about its business.
E-mail search is one feature of note. Using the advanced search screen, you can drill down to specifics--dates, folders, even the contents of e-mail attachments. You can also search for messages with or without attachments, and save queries to rerun the report at a later time. MailStore Home supports Boolean search terms. When you've found your message, you'll have management options like opening, saving, and exporting. Search was speedy and accurate in our tests. Though processing took a few long seconds, we were able to reply to archived Gmail messages via Outlook.
The freeware version for consumers doesn't do it all. There's no auto-archiving or scheduling for starters, so archiving is a manual activity. Initial scanning also takes a long time, and subsequent archives of the same in-box (click "run" to rearchive) start over from scratch instead of offering you the option to pick up from the most recent message date. We'd like to see more, and more nimble, filters on that left sidebar, like to filter only e-mails with attachments. MailStore Home also restricts you to three account profiles, which isn't especially useful if you've got more active accounts than that. Despite these drawbacks, MailStore Home offers a fine free solution for storing e-mail from multiple in-boxes and searching through the archives.
Related story: Three killer Outlook add-ons for office workers
Now that summer is finally here, homeowners will be spending time outside, fixing up their homes' exterior and improving the backyard. Whether they want to do some landscaping in the front of their home, build a deck in the back, or paint the house, they'll be able to design great outdoor spaces with the help of these tools.
Home design tools
Dave's Garden Dave's Garden is a social network for landscapers or people who enjoy landscaping. Once you register for the site, you'll be able to create your own gardening blog to inform other users about the improvements on your home. Dave's Garden also lets you trade seeds with other gardeners who want to barter. It's a neat site that is ideal for landscaping, but I would like it more if it had a more attractive design.
Dave's Garden lets you barter for seeds.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Deck Designer Deck Designer is a great tool for anyone who wants to add a deck to their house. The tool walks you through all the steps of adding the deck, including how tall it will be, whether you want to add benches, and more. Once complete, it produces a full list of all the materials you will need to build that deck. It will even provide you with step-by-step instructions on installing it.
Deck Designer helps you build your own deck.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)DIY Network Gardening At first glance, the DIY Network's Gardening & Landscaping page won't look like it can be of help. But when you start digging a little deeper, you'll find a variety of great how-to videos on landscaping. The site has videos on topics ranging from installing torches in your backyard to adding art to a tomato garden cage. My favorite video taught me how to install a weatherproof cedar TV cabinet.
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Alarm.com's iPhone app lets you see what's going on at home--even when you're not there.
Ever wish you could disarm your alarm system while sitting in your driveway? Or check in on, say, the cat while you're out of town? Alarm.com's new iPhone app lets you do all that and more. It's a freebie for Alarm.com customers.
Designed for homes and businesses alike, Alarm.com's systems (which are sold and installed by various third-party dealers) rely on wireless sensors and GSM/GPRS networks. In other words, they're highly connected.
The eponymous app gives you full control over your system, allowing you to arm or disarm it from just about anywhere. That could come in mighty handy when you're halfway to the airport and realize you forgot to arm the sucker (or just can't remember if you did).
It also provides a wealth of monitoring tools. You can get real-time updates on doors and windows, watch live and recorded video feeds (assuming your system has cameras, natch), and review "event histories." (When did the kids get home from school? When did the maid leave? That kind of thing.).
Talk about a no-brainer. If you're an Alarm.com customer (or thinking about installing an alarm system), this is without a doubt a must-have app. The bigger question: Which is cooler for homeowners, this or the recently announced Benjamin Moore paint color-matching app?
With the housing market in such rough shape, sellers are pressed to make their home as functional and inviting as possible.
For everything from quick fixes and complete remodels, do-it-yourselfers are increasingly looking online for design guidance. These tools will help you create the designs you've always wanted (or at least the ones that will help you move to your next home).
Home design tools
Armstrong makes it easy to pick your flooring.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Armstrong Design Tools Armstrong's Design Tools lets you pick any room in an imaginary home, and mix and match potential wall colors, flooring, trim, and countertops. Once you change everything in the room to fit your desire, you can save the room's design and share it with friends.
Color-a-Room Better Homes and Gardens' Color-a-Room tool lets you change the paint schemes of any room in the house. Once you pick the room, you can choose the color you like for your walls. From there, you can find window treatments and save the room for future viewing. If you want to work on the outside of your home, you can pick the paint colors for your roof, siding, shutters, or window trim. As with the Armstrong tool, you won't be looking at a representation of your home, per se, but it will give you a better idea of what might work in your space.
Deck Designer If you're planning on adding a deck to your house, Deck Designer is a great place to start. The tool lets you choose the size, shape, and color of your deck. You can decide where to put it, add stairs and railings, and save as many designs as you want. When complete, you can print out a full listing of the materials you need, as well as tips on how to install it.
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Yahoo is testing another redesign of its home page, emphasizing news feeds and applications as well as search results.
Yahoo's latest home page redesign (click for larger version).
(Credit: Yahoo)The company is testing the most recent design with certain users, and while it's somewhat similar to Yahoo's current look and feel, it is a bit of a departure from the most recent plan for a redesign shared by Yahoo in March, as noted by PaidContent.org. For example, the new design calls out the top 10 search results at a given time in the upper right-hand corner of the site, a box that appears at the absolute bottom of Yahoo's current site and that was absent from the March mock-ups.
Yahoo also dropped the gray color on the left side rail of the page in favor of a white background, while also adding more choices for users to add feeds from their favorite Web sites and services. That rail also includes applications developed for the Yahoo page that let users check auction results on eBay, for example.
No time frame was given for the arrival of the new design, but further tweaks are probably not out of the question. Yahoo also announced that its mobile site redesign is out of beta and rolling out to a wider audience.
(Credit:
Dong Ngo/CNET)
Backing up data is important and should be done often. But remembering and knowing how to do it is a different story.
With this in mind, Memeo--an online digital company that offers a variety of online services such as photo sharing --has released a backup solution for business users that will help keep track of backing up data. Memeo Backup Professional 4.5 is tied to an online console, from which an admin user can remotely view the status of backups of other users. This means that once it's installed on network computers, a single admin can oversee the backup status for the whole business.
The admin user can send the remote user, via e-mail, a license to download or software to install. After that the admin can view the status and then contact the user of a particular computer if something is wrong, or to make sure that the user is backing up data regularly.
Unfortunately, for now, there's not much else the admin user can do. It would be much more helpful if he or she could initiate the backup itself or make the software send a pop-up message to remind the local user to start a backup. Memeo's representatives say that this is along the lines with what the company is working on for future releases of the software.
Other than that, Memeo Backup Professional 4.5 is a standard wizard-driven backup software that offers a variety of backup options, including backing up to an FTP server and to Memeo online storage. Backup to an FTP site offers an option for you to make a personal "online" backup. It also allows for differential backups and backups to local/network folders or removable drives.
Memeo Backup Professional 4.5 works with all versions of Windows 32-bit and 64-bit and is available now for $76 per license, which is rather expensive considering the limited functionality of the online console. However as this online console feature is rather unique and if you are an existing customer of Memeo's online backup service, this software will make a good addition.
If you just want good backup software, I would strongly recommend GFI Backup Home Edition, which, apart from the online console and the tie to Memeo online storage, offers the same options and more, including the ability to back up to an FTP site. Best of all, it is yours for free.
Opera, announced Thursday that it has inked a deal with Skyhook Wireless that will bring geolocation to its browser. According to the company, those who download the geolocation-equipped Opera browser will be able to share their location with any site that supports it and get information about related products and services in their area.
Skyhook played an integral role in making the geolocation possible. The company's Wi-Fi Position System makes it possible for any computer or mobile phone with a wireless adapter to be located.
In conjunction with the release of a new Opera build that supports geolocation, the company also released an API that will allow Web developers to add the Skyhook location platform to their site, so they can interact with Opera browser users. Download the browser here.
AOL might have enjoyed its best days in the late 1990s, but the company is still the most beloved ISP, according to a new study from Forrester Research. Forrester polled nearly 4,600 consumers about their experience dealing with ISPs. AOL topped the list for usefulness and simplicity. Overall, the company's "Customer Experience Index" rating was 71 percent, putting it atop the list of ISPs across the U.S.
Visible Measures, a company that provides video tracking and measurement services, announced Tuesday that it has raised $10 million in a Series C funding round that was led by Northgate Capital. According to the company, it plans to use the funding to expand its operation.
Mortgage search site, Home-Account, announced Thursday that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from Charles River Ventures and other investors. The company will use the funding to invest in its growth for its recently launched site.
Home-Account is a mortgage-finding service with a little twist. You tell it about your situation (value of home or amount of refinance you're looking for, location, income, etc.) and it gives you advice on looking better to banks, so you get the good rate--or these days, any rate at all. It also monitors mortgages for you, alerting you when a good one comes along. It doesn't make money by lead generation, like most loan-finding sites do, but it does cost $9.95 a month. The longer the company keeps looking for you, the more money they make. You have to trust that if the best mortgage for you is available right now, they'll just tell you and not squeeze you for the subscription fee.
First it helps you get into financial shape, then it finds you a new mortgage.
(Credit: Home-Account)The company is launching at Demo 09.
I do expect that there will be dozens if not hundreds of services popping up this year that aim to save consumers money or improve their financial situation. It's going to be a craze. Look for the books, too. Home-Account looks decent, but consumers should also pay attention to Mint and other services that track finances and generate potentially money-saving offers for users.
