House hunting? Download these applications first

 

"There has been a revolution in innovation," said Alex Periello, CEO of Realogy Franchise Group, which has sponsored a conference last month with several new technologies in real estate.

Matterport, Mountain view, California, recently unveiled 3D Showcase, which produces high-quality images, 3-d houses that can be embedded in the ads online. Users can walk virtually piece by piece, behind sofas, around beds and past the corners. (For an example, click here.)

Related: less 10 pointed Out cities

Then, at a click of a button, walls peel away from revealing a photographic image of the House with all exposed areas. 3D image can be turned, rotated and zoomed in on.

CEO of Matterport, Bill Brown, said that, so far, list of sites usually contain slideshows of photos but, 'did there were no namespace context as a whole."

Furniture can be erased, leaving empty space. Or, it can be replaced with other furniture to re - organize the rooms. Buyers can see what would look like the place after having buy and put in sofas, chairs and a table they choose.

"This is part of the dream of hunting of the House and takes it to the next level, said Sherry Chris, CEO of Better Homes & gardens Real Estate."

Related: Can how much house you afford?

Meanwhiles, to avoid open houses crowded where you can not get a response to your questions, or agents who do not know the property, a company called BrightDoor offers Beamly.

It uses small Bluetooth devices located throughout the House to send information through their mobile phones or other devices home shoppers. When a buyer goes in the kitchen, for example, they can learn about the devices or the wood cabinets options at their disposal.

 

With Boston CO Everywhere, users with equipped with Bluetooth mobile devices can draw borders around the interactive maps of the districts, they want to enter, and the site will display a table of the contents of local social media Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook in this region. She also posts of the local Meetup and treaty events and coupons to local businesses through sites like YipIt.

"It's like the NSA for real estate," said Tony Longo, CEO of CO everywhere.

Calculator: cost of living: how far will my salary go?

Longo has called a zone of two blocks of Greenwich Village in New York and found 49 people, he was able to connect with at this time. "Social intelligence that comes out of a zone can be rich," he said.

Zumper, which specializes in the rental, has produced Zumper Pro app that helps agents quickly create ads online in a few minutes. Officers using their smartphones or tablets, can take pictures, write descriptions and fill in the details, such as the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet.

Then, even before leaving the apartment, agents can validate the registration online and send alerts to potential tenants with the $ $ app a new place is on the market.

First published: 8 July 2014: 6: 54 et

Making The Most Of Financing Options For Your First Truck

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AppId is over the quota

Preparing to Purchase Your First Home

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AppId is over the quota

House hunting? Download these applications first

 

"There has been a revolution in innovation," said Alex Periello, CEO of Realogy Franchise Group, which has sponsored a conference last month with several new technologies in real estate.

Matterport, Mountain view, California, recently unveiled 3D Showcase, which produces high-quality images, 3-d houses that can be embedded in the ads online. Users can walk virtually piece by piece, behind sofas, around beds and past the corners. (For an example, click here.)

Related: less 10 pointed Out cities

Then, at a click of a button, walls peel away from revealing a photographic image of the House with all exposed areas. 3D image can be turned, rotated and zoomed in on.

CEO of Matterport, Bill Brown, said that, so far, list of sites usually contain slideshows of photos but, 'did there were no namespace context as a whole."

Furniture can be erased, leaving empty space. Or, it can be replaced with other furniture to re - organize the rooms. Buyers can see what would look like the place after having buy and put in sofas, chairs and a table they choose.

"This is part of the dream of hunting of the House and takes it to the next level, said Sherry Chris, CEO of Better Homes & gardens Real Estate."

Related: Can how much house you afford?

Meanwhiles, to avoid open houses crowded where you can not get a response to your questions, or agents who do not know the property, a company called BrightDoor offers Beamly.

It uses small Bluetooth devices located throughout the House to send information through their mobile phones or other devices home shoppers. When a buyer goes in the kitchen, for example, they can learn about the devices or the wood cabinets options at their disposal.

 

With Boston CO Everywhere, users with equipped with Bluetooth mobile devices can draw borders around the interactive maps of the districts, they want to enter, and the site will display a table of the contents of local social media Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook in this region. She also posts of the local Meetup and treaty events and coupons to local businesses through sites like YipIt.

"It's like the NSA for real estate," said Tony Longo, CEO of CO everywhere.

Calculator: cost of living: how far will my salary go?

Longo has called a zone of two blocks of Greenwich Village in New York and found 49 people, he was able to connect with at this time. "Social intelligence that comes out of a zone can be rich," he said.

Zumper, which specializes in the rental, has produced Zumper Pro app that helps agents quickly create ads online in a few minutes. Officers using their smartphones or tablets, can take pictures, write descriptions and fill in the details, such as the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and square feet.

Then, even before leaving the apartment, agents can validate the registration online and send alerts to potential tenants with the $ $ app a new place is on the market.

First published: 8 July 2014: 6: 54 et

The Economist explains: Why the first world war wasn't really

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AppId is over the quota

THE world—or, at least, those parts of it that participated in the original events—has recently taken great interest in the first world war. Its almost casual beginning, between June 28th 1914, when the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by a Bosnian nationalist and the first days of August, when Germany declared war on Russia and France, drawing in their ally Britain, has fascinated historians, while the horrors that followed have fascinated everyone, though in a rather different way. But does the conflict deserve its title? It was undoubtedly a world war. But it was certainly not the first. That laurel belongs to a war which broke out 160 years earlier, in 1754, and carried on until 1763. Though fighting did not start in Europe until 1756, and for this reason the conflict is known as the Seven Years’ War, it was truly global. Every inhabited continent except Australia saw fighting on its soil, and independent powers on three of those continents were active participants.

The first action of this first global conflict involved a young officer whose name may be familiar to some readers. On May 28th 1754 a small group of soldiers from the British colony of Virginia, under the command of a man called George Washington, engaged a group of French troops who were interloping from New France (ie Canada) into territory the British considered theirs. Instead of peacefully repelling them as he had been instructed, Washington ended up killing several of them, including their commanding officer. This campaign in North America then continued, with both sides in alliance with local Indian nations, until, two years later, Britain’s ally Prussia attacked the small German state of Saxony, bringing Saxony’s ally Austria, and thus Austria’s ally France (and therefore France’s enemy and Prussia’s ally, Britain), into the conflict. It is a sequence of events eerily similar to the way that in 1914 an attack by Germany’s ally Austria on the small Balkan state of Serbia brought in Serbia’s ally Russia, which then threatened Germany, which then declared war on both Russia and Russia’s ally France.

The war rapidly globalised. Both Britain and France reinforced their colonial troops in North America, and started attacking each other’s colonies in the West Indies and trading stations in Africa and India. In India, some of the princely states which had recently emerged from the dying Mughal empire also got involved, and Britain ended up taking over one of them, Bengal. The war came to South America when, near its end, Spain joined the French side and attacked one of the American colonies of Britain’s ally, Portugal.

Like the first world war, this global conflict reshaped the globe. Indeed, it is the reason why the modern world is an English-speaking one. As a colonial power, France was destroyed, and did not return seriously to the business of overseas conquest until it attacked Algeria in 1830. All of North America east of the Mississipi became British, save the city of New Orleans, which became Spanish. And the foundations of British rule in India were laid as well. As for George Washington, he ended up leading a rebel army put together by colonials who, freed from fear of French encirclement, unwilling to help pay for the war that had given them that freedom, and frustrated by British protection of the lands of their Indian allies from encroachment by colonial property speculators (including Washington himself), decided that they would rather go it alone.

Dig deeper:
Learning from the first president (June 2013)
A century on, there are uncomfortable parallels with 1914 (December 2013)
Europe's commemorations could end a 100-year haunting (November 2013)

So why does The Economist pedantically insist on calling the First World War the 'first world war', as if it were a descriptive term? Surely it deserves capitalization because it is a specific instance that everyone recognizes as a named event, not a description.
For example, if you are happy with the Seven Years War, because the seven years war might be ambiguous with other wars that lasted 7 years, and you are happy with WWI as an abbreviation, then why not the First World War and the Second World War?
If you insist on decapitalizing these two wars, I shall have to start calling you the economist. Vague and ambiguous? I hope so. If you get really opinionated about only using lower case, I shall call you the e.e.conomist.

First, believing that we do not speak French because of the Seven Years' War is a fallacy. If we spoke French at all, it was going to be because they aided us in our separation from England.

Secondly, French, also German and English (of course) were debated as being the native tongue of our new country. The people back then were far more adept at speaking multiple languages because of their foundations. We are lazy today, and think that this is just bullocks.

Third, "All of North America east of the Mississipi became British, save the city of New Orleans, which became Spanish," is entirely incorrect. New Orleans was never Spanish. Have you ever been there? Goodness son, they're the Cajun French for a reason. Texas and Florida, however, were still Spanish and Georgia was only taken to be a buffer zone between the Colonies and the Spanish, while serving doubly as a penal place for criminals to be sent.

Fourth, as an author, you should make it a point to better reference your broad statements or allow those of us who are Historians, to enlighten others on such matters. This essay/article/writing is a ridiculous opinion on something that has little to no quantitative proof, unlike WWI. This is why your thoughts are dubious at best.

Germany and the first world war: Do mention the war

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AppId is over the quota

THE Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) and the German foreign ministry have organised a series of debates in Berlin to commemorate the centenary of the start of the first world war. For the past few months, historians, authors and politicians from Germany and abroad have spent happy hours debating both “the failure and use of diplomacy” in the summer of 1914 and the lessons that should be drawn from it. In one of the most interesting discussions, Christopher Clark, the Australian author of the bestselling “Sleepwalkers”, and Gerd Krumeich, German co-author of “Deutschland im Ersten Weltkrieg” (“Germany in the first world war”), showed that the question of German blame for the war remains very much unresolved. Whereas Mr Clark underlined the fact that senior military figures in a number of European countries, not just Germany, were keen for war, Mr Krumeich emphasised the enormous quantity of Germany's armaments and its hunger for expansion. He also pointed to its unwillingness to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia that was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914.

Alongside the debates, film screenings and lectures the museum is staging an exhibition linked to the war. Here the focus is violence, rather than diplomacy. The museum, which until 1875 was a Prussian arsenal, owns a huge collection of objects from the period, including uniforms, helmets, guns, gas masks, cannons, flags, letters and postcards, paintings and photos. Many are on display. Of the dozens of exhibitions that will open across Germany this summer, this claims to be the only one offering an overview of the war in both its European and global contexts. The exhibition does not itself try to clarify the Schuldfrage ("question of guilt"), but it clearly shows the atrocities committed by German troops in the occupied cities of Brussels and Petrograd (now St Petersburg) using facts, film clips and photos. 

A gas mask dating from 1917 epitomises another unpalatable part of the conflict: the Germans' first use of chlorine gas in April 1915 against French troops in the trenches, killing thousands. In the "Home Front" section of the exhibition, graphics by Heinrich Zille, a popular Berlin illustrator, and paintings such as “War Winter” by Hans Baluschek indicate the devastating impact that Germany’s ever-growing weapons industry had on the population in the winter of 1916-1917: hunger, shortage of coal and the collapse of the railway network. Elsewhere, newspaper clippings and propaganda posters reveal the support German intellectuals broadly offered the war.

At a time of conflict in eastern Europe and concern about the future of European monetary union (and even of the whole "European project"), there is something oddly relevant about these displays. As Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister, commented during one debate: "A hundred years after the start of the first world war...the issue of war and peace, or of the unity and disruption of our continent, is back on the agenda.”

"The First World War" is at the Deutsches Historisches Museum until November 30th 2014

The picture is of a painting by Fritz Grotemeye (1918) showing German soldiers fighting near Tanga, in German East Africa (now Tanzania)

One commenter has said that WW1 may be a mystery, but I don't believe so. WW1 had multiple, identifiable factors. Gavrillo Princep may have lit the fuse, but he was hardly the reason the powder kegs were there in the first place. A tumultuous Balkans promised to be the black hole it ended up being, magnifying minor disputes and sucking in Great Powers. Germans felt encircled, and they weren't really mistaken in believing so. Nor was their encirclement entirely of their making. An almost churlish failure on the apart of the established powers (particularly Britain) to accept and accommodate Germany's rise also deserves a good deal of blame. The book "Sleepwalkers" details beautifully how, gradually, any assertive action by Berlin was viewed as either sinister or spitefully pig-headed, while the same action by London was morally right and a geopolitical necessity. France's obsession with Alsace and Lorraine and its medieval notions of where Gaul began and Germany ended were incompatible with peace, no matter who was Kaiser. We all know about the Schlieffen Plan, but who knows of France's Plan XVII?

Then there are the structural and cultural problems, such as the convoluted alliance system and a general jingoistic fervor that bordered on mental insanity. Was Berlin completely blameless? Of course not. Not even close. But it is nice to see that the discussion of WW1 is easing away from silly notions of an insane Kaiser and a sinister General Staff plotting together with cartoonish villainy to set the world ablaze and unleash hell upon an innocent and unsuspecting continent.

bampbs Jun 24th 2014 21:15 GMT

At a time of conflict in eastern Europe and concern about the future of European monetary union (and even of the whole "European project"), there is something oddly relevant about these displays. As Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister commented during one debate: "100 years after the start of the first world war...the issue of war and peace, or of the unity and disruption of our continent, is back on the agenda.”

That last paragraph is genuinely silly. Before WW1, war was considered a positive good, a way to promote the "Survival of the Fittest". But WW1 taught that modern war, where the great majority of casualties were caused by artillery, yielded only the random survival of the lucky.

I don't hear any voices in Europe even hinting that war is, in itself, a good thing.

Dow closes over 17,000 for first time

The Dow Jones and S&P 500 indexes have hit several record highs in 2014 as investors search for profits The Dow Jones Industrial Average has closed above 17,000 for the first time, buoyed by investor confidence about the global economy.

The US stock index, which is made up of some of the biggest global firms, rose 92 points to finish at 17,068.

Investors pushed shares higher after a better-than-expected jobs report showed the US economy added 288,000 jobs in June.

Overall, low interest rates have led investors to pour money into stocks.

That has pushed US indexes - including the S&P 500 - to new highs in 2014.

On Wednesday, the Dow closed at its 13th record high for the year, while the S&P 500 hit its 24th closing high for 2014.

Slow but steady

A string of positive economic news, combined with increasing merger and acquisition activity, has buoyed investor confidence on Wall Street.

Continue reading the main story Michelle Fleury BBC business correspondent, New York

It is a big psychological boost, but how significant is it that the Dow Jones Industrial Average has finally cracked 17,000 points?

Certainly, the Dow has had an impressive run, up more than 10,000 points in just over five years.

The magical milestone is a sign that investors believe in the global economy growth story and that more gains may yet follow.

One reason some investors believe the Dow can go further is that it is up 2.9% this year. That sounds good until you compare it to the more significant S&P 500 index, which is up over 7%.

But a lot may depend on the outlook for "cheap money".

The possibility remains of a hard landing or unpleasant things happening in the economy.

So while investors may cheer the milestone, there are reasons to remain cautious.

Thursday's positive jobs figure capped a week of good reports globally, including news that China's manufacturing activity hit a six-month high in June.

"The economic data we continue to get is not exceptional, but it is still positive," Benedict Willis of Princeton Securities told the BBC from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

Investors had been worried that rising stock prices could not be supported by actual underlying economic growth, but Mr Willis said that as long as the data remained upbeat, that should be enough to allay concerns.

He added he expected markets would continue to rise.

"Yesterday's highs are tomorrow's lows - I think the market will continue on its upside move," he said.

Low rates

Overall, investors have been pouring money into stocks over the past year and a half, partially as a result of the policies of the Federal Reserve.

The US central bank has taken extraordinary measures to keep interest rates low, in an effort to encourage banks to lend and thus stimulate economic growth.

Low interest rates, however, have also meant that firms are less inclined to keep extra cash on hand where it is not earning money.

Fed chair Janet Yellen discussed the central bank's views on financial stability at the IMF on Wednesday

That has spurred increased merger and acquisition activity, with firms in the pharmaceutical, food processing, and technology industries all announcing strings of acquisitions in recent weeks.

Some have worried that in keeping rates so low, the Federal Reserve is encouraging a bubble in the stock market.

However on Wednesday, Fed chair Janet Yellen said in a speech in front of the International Monetary Fund that the central bank would not raise rates in an effort to deter financial excesses.

"Efforts to promote financial stability through adjustments in interest rates would increase the volatility of inflation and employment," she said.