Last week, Inman member Stefan Swanepoel held the opening ceremonies for the first Real Estate Olympics in the Inman Community.  This week, the nominations are in, and the medals are set to be given for, "Real Estate Pacesetter 2008."  There are 8 finalists in the medal round, and your votes are needed to determine the winner.  Here are the finalists:

1) Obeo

2) Roost

3) Condo Domain

4) Agent Sheild

5) Goomzee

6) eShowings

7) Bug Realty

8) Beat You There

All you have to do is go to the Real Estate Olympics post in the Community section, and vote for your choices for the gold, silver, and bronze medals.  The medalists will be announced after the voting closes on Friday.  Show your support for these industry pacesetters, and go vote!

(Photo Credit:  MICHAEL KAPPELER/AFP/Getty Images)

If you're curious about how mobile technology can be used to help market real estate and reach potential home buyers, a new white paper from WAVGroup out today dives into the subject.

Not long ago, the notion of using mobile technology in real estate meant nothing more than agents toting around cell phones and wireless notebook computers. But new developments have opened up a lot more capability for mobile devices to be used to send out property information to buyers and make that immediate connection that's identified as the vital piece to converting leads to closed transactions.

According to WAVGroup's research, mobile search tools can also help improve the marketing value of off-line advertising such as yard signs, magazine ads, newspaper ads and other localized marketing programs.

"Providing buyers with tools to perform their own searches in the mobile environment will
be the next big technology shift in the real estate industry," WAVGroup says.

Realtors using mobile search technology are more likely to convert a drive-by consumer into a qualified lead, according to the research. And mobile search technology enables agents to provide more detailed information on a property, while also giving the immediate response consumers expect.

WAVGroup's white paper lists examples of problems and solutions that mobile search technology could potentially cover for agents. You can grab a copy at this link.

Let's pretend you're one of these homeowners who gets shunted into the foreclosure process without ever contacting your loan servicer (according to lenders, half of troubled borrowers don't). You hear something on TV about some program that might help. Hope something. HOPE NOW, you remember, as you're channel surfing and hear something about Project Lifeline, which has something to do with HOPE NOW.

You miss the toll free number that flashes on the screen (or maybe you write down the wrong one given out at the press conference by President Bush), so you fire up your computer (yes, the ISP is still getting paid, on the credit card) and type "HOPE NOW" into Google.

The very first result* -- which you may not realize is a sponsored link -- takes you to Neighborhoodassistance.com, which is actually a lead generation site "connecting customers with our network of lenders."  Maybe you notice the fine print: WE ARE NOT THE FHA, HUD OR A GOVERNMENT AGENCY. Maybe you don't.

Say you do notice the fine print, and you also have the good sense to ignore the other sponsored links on the right including:

--www.HopeNowUsa.com ("Save your home NOW. Freeze your interest rate")

---www.999Hope.org ("Rate Freeze Program. Info and help on the government interest rate freeze program.")

--HopeNow.us ("Fix your ARM or Get Cashout Save Your Home From Foreclosue")

You scroll through several pages of "natural" search results (the results that aren't paid ads) looking for this HOPE NOW loan program. You see plenty of news stories and press releases from the White House, the Treasury Department, and the Financial Services Roundtable, but you keep looking for a HOPE NOW Web site.

You encounter www.hopenow.net,  "a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) Christian organization dedicated to providing hope and help to the hidden hurting." Nope. Nothing hidden about your hurting, and you can't expect divine intervention, no matter what Jesus had to say about charging interest.

How about www.hopenow.org? Sorry, unless you are a gang member from the streets of Fresno hoping for "a lift ... into the American mainstream," you are again out of luck.

You can search through the first 10 pages of Google search results and you will still not find the official Web site of the HOPE NOW coalition of mortgage loan servicers.

Once you get there, it's obvious why Google's search algorithms don't think the site is very important. It's almost entirely devoid of any content.

If you want to learn much of anything about the HOPE NOW initiative, you have to follow the links to a page over on the Web site operated by the Financial Services Roundtable.

Oh, of course, you say, slapping yourself on the forehead. The Financial Services Roundtable. How stupid of me not to have known that.

OK, so they're getting 4,000 phone calls a day on the HOPE NOW hotline, 1-888-995-4673. So maybe it doesn't matter if Google can't find them. But if they're going to mail 774,814 letters to people, you'd think it would be worth it to create a real, dedicated Web site.

*Note: when I ran a "HOPE NOW" Google search yesterday there was a sponsored result at the top of the natural search results, and four sponsored results on the right. Today, the Neighborhoodassistance.com sponsored link at the top had vanished, and there were only three sponsored results on the right.

Brian Brady does. He's sending his Mortgage Rates Reports out via Twitter.

Amongst the digitally savvy, tools like Twitter are driving a growing trend of microblogging. You tell the world what you're doing in 140 characters or less and so do all your friends.

Sound like a waste of time? Maybe. And while it's fun following what your friends are up to; it does get overwhelming.

But combined with a desktop Twitter Client -- I recommend twhirl -- Twitter becomes a very powerful tool for keeping on top of breaking news.

Think of it kind of like a teleprinter for the 21st Century.

How does it work? Well, take for example, you can now keep track of all the breaking real estate headlines from Inman News via Twitter.

Just head over to InmanNews profile on Twitter, sign up for your own account and click the 'Follow' button. Do the same on any other accounts you find and you'll instantly start receiving automatic updates from them.

I found a few other sources on Twitter you may consider following adding; CNN, BBC, The Financial Times and the New York Times - you may even want to do a search for your local news outlets too (I found The Oregonian, for example).

Do this and you can stay on top of all the news as it hits and never be caught off guard.

And if you're like Brian, and you have something important to say, consider starting your own Twitter stream of news and encouraging others to follow you.

UPDATE: More from AgentGenius.com on how they use Twitter.

Trulia, Zillow, and Yahoo! Real Estate are spearheading an effort to standardize data standards for real estate listings. When they're adopted later this year, the XML-based standards will allow brokers to send the same data stream to multiple aggregators.

Homes.com, Homescape, Oodle, Point2 Technologies, Realestate.com, Vast.com and vFlyer will also adopt the standardized data format, which is open to "anybody else who wants to join us," a Zillow spokeswoman told Inman News (see story).

Hard to imagine brokers would quibble with the concept, and Realogy Franchise Group says Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA and Sotheby's International Realty are on board.

At Real Estate Connect NYC, Sellsius blogger Rudy Bachraty is making history today with the "first attempt at live streaming at a real estate conference that I know of. We’ll see if my wireless broadband connection holds up." Makes prerecorded video seem so ... yesterday.

UpNext.com offers a simulated three-dimensional interactive version of Manhattan, complete with skyscrapers, reviews and business contact information. You can use your mouse to zoom in and out, spin around and click on buildings to view a list of businesses there. Users can specify a category of business that they are searching for, and matching businesses will be highlighted on the three-dimensional map. Registered users can enter reviews.

"Rather than sifting through pages and links of data, UpNext enables you glide around your city, virtually. Exploring has never been easier," according to a Web site description. And if you get lost, you don't need to ask for directions  or hail a taxi -- you can zoom out to get your bearings, or key in an address.

Raj Advani, a software engineer who received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science at University of California, Berkeley, is the co-founder and chief architect for the site. Vik Advani, co-founder and chief technology officer at UpFront, has been a Java developer for IBM and a video game programmer for Savage Entertainment.

Google, too, has ventured into the three-dimensional city-search space with Google Earth and Google Maps, and Microsoft is building up its 3-D inventory at Microsoft Virtual Earth and a photographic tool called Photosynth.

Sifting through the Inman News archives from 2000-2002, you'll quickly meet up with quite a few real estate dot-com carcasses left dead on the side of the dot-bomb road.

Anyone remember JumpHome, Home-Link or the bankruptcy that nearly brought Homes.com to its knees?

We suspect that similar stories may be coming as a number of new applications that have launched to target the industry in the last year or two are finding out that real estate is extremely difficult for technology companies in a normal market, let alone in a struggling market.

The reason is that real estate is probably the most unique industry out there. It's fragmented; there are no standard processes for marketing, finding clients and servicing property data; competitors must cooperate with each in order to get paid. Every MLS is different, which makes the property listing game a sort of Wild West to navigate from a vendor standpoint.

Over the years we've seen many bright-eyed entrepreneurs come in with online listings, online transactions, agent Web site templates. The lightbulbs came on strong but didn't last forever.

"We'll just build it and they will adapt," was the theme of many Web 1.0 companies that faded. Maybe it's not so easy.

This time, we're seeing a different sort of fading due mainly to tanking sales in many markets where businesses may not have been prepared.

We saw the first major casualty of the downturn a few weeks ago when discount brokerage company Foxtons announced it was laying off most of its workforce, filing for bankruptcy and looking for brokers to take over its existing listings.

Then last week, ZipRealty said it plans to trim staff in order to cut costs while the market continues to decline in many areas. Despite the shrinking news, Zip said it still plans to break into new markets before the year ends.

And we won't even attempt to mention all the lenders that have gone under in the subprime mortgage collapse, or related mass layoffs.

Today, we noticed a lesser-known technology company closed its doors: Bouncepad. While Bouncepad never made it to the Inman archives, company officials did come to Connect in San Francisco this summer and we've noticed them mentioned on some industry blogs. (See Future of Real Estate Marketing's write-up.)

Bouncepad offered a way for real estate agents to market listings to consumers using mobile devices. Curious that they would close their doors after our editorial team just finished researching how huge the mobile market is getting.

So long Bouncepad: Sorry it didn't work out, but you're not alone in this exit.

Real estate as an industry has never embraced enterprise class technology platforms. The reasons are obvious - the industry evolved from a national patchwork of local brokerages serviced by local title and settlement providers, all running on mom-and-pop systems. During the "enterprise system 1990s," corporations started to consolidate their disparate operations and systems into the holy grail of a unified platform. But the real estate industry seemed to care less if title data and other documents could even be e-mailed, I remember waiting for my prelim title report sent by snail mail during a 2003 refi. Here's a list of real estate clients using BEA's enterprise solutions - no big names - a perusal of real estate customers at big enterprise system firms like SAP yield a similarly puny customer base.

Generally speaking, every title insurance company settlement platform, MLS system and brokerage system seems to have been developed internally and they don't communicate with each other well. The RETS initiative is a good example of how difficult it is just to get MLS systems to standardize the data fields they use to describe property information.

Real estate is now awakening to the fact that Internet technology is becoming the catch-all solution for marketing, lead generation, processing and aftercare. This opens up the opportunity to get brokerages and lenders to adopt enterprise solutions from technology providers instead of coding everything themselves. The most logical players to take advantage of this trend are the title companies that already provide settlement service platforms. Newer companies like SecondSpace are now implementing their search engine solutions to real estate companies like Florida's St. Joe that will essentially run their online presence.

This trend to providing backbone enterprise solutions is a different business model than selling systems components to the brokerages (example: Leadqual sells a lead qualification system that enhances only a segment of the brokerage's business) or providing APIs to brokerages to custom build new applications. Today at Transparent, I look at one company, Cyberhomes, a subsidiary of Fidelity Title's FNRES, that is quietly building a backbone solution that can potentially manage all the bells and whistles of a brokerage Web site.

--Pat Kitano, Transparent Real Estate

The National Association of Realtors Center for Realtor Technology today announced the release of free software tools that are intended to allow members to access a range of password-protected real estate systems by entering one username and password.

This so-called single sign-on technology is designed to eliminate the need to enter a username and password multiple times to access a variety of real estate platforms.

"With SSO technology, Realtors no longer have to login separately to their multiple listing services, transaction management tools, form and virtual tour providers and e-mail and Web accounts. This streamlines the login process and reduces the number of usernames and passwords required for logins," according to CRT's announcement.

Mark Lesswing, NAR's chief technology officer and senior vice president, noted in a statement that the key to single sign-on's success is cooperation on open standards by industry vendors. CRT's software toolkit provides standardized building blocks for single sign-on technology that industry vendors can incorporate into their own products. CRT developed the tools in cooperation with industry vendor Clareity Security.