Buy a house over the web
Last week we saw a rash of medical sites emerging on the web. This week we have a spate of estate agents - or at least two new sites - joining them.
Launching on Monday is www.easier.co.uk The site will act as a property marketplace, where neither buyer nor seller pays fees. Estate agents normally take a fee of between 1% and 2%. According to Easier, that means sellers are coughing up on average around £2,100, including VAT, on the sale of their home. Getting rid of the fees, says Easier, will revolutionise the domestic property market.
When homes go on sale in Easier's searchable database, potential buyers can make contact with the sellers via fax, email and soon by pager and mobile phone messaging. Easier will make its money by passing its users' details on to other companies involved in the house buying and selling process - from mortgage vendors to removal companies.
Colchester businessmen Matthew and Simon Jackson have a similar idea and plan to launch www.homefreehome.co.uk They claimed to have launched the site last week, but when Online visited on Tuesday, there was nothing but a pre-registration page. Let's hope the site runs more smoothly after the launch.
Find your US cousins
Occasionally you find a single web page that proves more interesting than anything in the big, expensive, super-hyped portals. Here's one of them. Hamrick software's surname distribution page shows you how many people per 1,000 share your surname across each of the US states. Type in your name, find out where your kin have settled, and curse when you find it's somewhere hot and sunny.
QuickTime with Spices
Those of us still boring disbelieving friends and colleagues with details of just how great the Spice Girls were on tour last year have a new weapon in our armoury. The whole of their final London gig at Earl's Court was recorded for posterity, and now the full QuickTime video is available for downloading at the Spices' website. The pictures might be matchbox-sized, and potentially ruined by the sight of gyrating geek journalists, but otherwise it's still a spectacular show - if a little expensive to download in full, I found.
Creds and credibility
The concept of online cash is nothing new, and one which has yet to really take off - why bother when you can use your existing credit card? But if you're under 18, and don't have your own flexible friend, e-cash might offer a welcome alternative to raids on the folks' wallets. That's certainly the hope of Y-creds, yet another e-payment system that hopes to become the online currency of choice for teenagers, despite its desperate-to-be-cool-vicar name.
The idea is simple: parents use credit cards to buy credits, which teenagers then use to buy stuff at participating websites (the current exchange rate is 1,000 Y-creds to £10). The crux, of course, lies in how many - and which - retailers sign up to take Y-creds. There were only two shops when we looked earlier this week, but we're promised at least five more soon.
Wearing well
London Fashion Week kicks off this Sunday. Find details of the events at the festival's predictably trendy website at www.londonfashionweek.co.uk
