The race is on to provide a seemless MLS desktop, again. But this time – no painful data sync.
MLSs seek Service providers/technology leaders to blur the differences between the connected and unconnected computer – code once, deploy on desktop and online.
If you have not heard the story, Kevin Lynch, a software developer on sabbatical from Macromedia in 2001 wanted to be able to use his computer to see online information offline, so he built a prototype called Kevincloud.
Macromedia was purchased by Adobe, and now Kevin is the CTO of that company. He had a meeting with himself and decided that the time had arrived for Kevincloud to become a product for Adobe. It launched yesterday under the product name Adobe Air.
What does this mean for real estate?
With Adobe Air, rich Internet applications can run on the desktop without going through a web browser.
Perhaps the best example of this technology working today is eBay. You can download free at eBay. Rather than monitoring items on the eBay website or getting attacked by email notifications, eBayers can simply be notified via their eBay desktop application whenever there is a price change or new product made available.
Wouldn’t that be great for real estate? No need to check e-mail or log into the MLS to search for information that is time sensitive to the success of your business? Not only would the agent be notified locally, the data for the listing can be automatically loaded locally into Air. p.s. It will also work on a MAC.
Another brilliant advantage of Air for real estate is that it will make secure data sets available on the desktop without “exporting it” to the desk top. The MLS will still remain in control of the data within the Air application. For example, a data set like the MLS agent and office roster can be made available locally for the agent to access and search, but the data will be limited from use for nefarious behavior, like spamming everyone about a new listing or price change.
Additionally, because Adobe Air uses Flash programming at its core, data scraping is severly hampered.
WAV Group is excited about working with MLS vendors in the adoption of this product. Who will be first to market?
