The Fubra Blog
Google Maps Free Alternatives
We love Google products much like why we love Apple here at Fubra (apart from those who don’t believe in the great Steve Jobs), they work and work well. But recently they made a change to their Maps API that caused us to rethink our mapping strategy drastically.
Since October, Google introduce a clause in their usage terms that states that if you do go over 25000 user sessions a day then they can start charging you a fee for use. Not such a big deal some may say and Google did note in their developer blog…
Based on current usage, only the top 0.35% of sites will be affected by these limits, meaning that the Google Maps API will remain free for the vast majority of sites.
On the usage statics from a post last year on their blog that means 1225 sites will be affected (probably more).
One of our sites, World Airport Codes, is one of those sites. I suppose it’s nice to be thought of as one of the 0.35%, but not so good that the costs of using Google Maps on this particular site would be more than it earns in advertising revenue.
So our search for a replacement started!
Investing in Solar Energy
Today we are happy to announce the launch of our latest investment: Marble Solar.
Marble Solar is a new business dedicated to the design and build of commercial and residential solar power panel systems. It is a collaboration between Fubra Limited and the directors of the Marble Group, a construction firm we have invested in.
Working with our friends at Bytewire over the past 2 months we have built, what I believe to be, one of the best solar PV estimation tools available online.
Step 1a – Enter your postcode
Step 1b – Draw your roof
Step 2 – View estimated income
Step 3 – Book a survey appointment
The estimator allows you to draw an outline of your roof on Google Maps, and select the orientation. It will then propose a suitably sized system for your roof, and uses either SAP 2005, or NASA solar irradiation data along with panel efficiency information to estimate the amount of electricity you could generate from the system over the course of the year. This data is combined with financial data such as Feed In Tariff rates and some assumptions on future price inflation to give you a projection of the amount of income and savings the system may generate over it’s lifetime.
For me, it’s great to see what our network of small companies can achieve when we work together.
New Intern – Youngest Zend Certified Engineer in the World?
Today we welcome Ollie Armstrong to the Fubra PHP developer team. Ollie has just finished his GCSEs, and is joining us on a 6 week placement over the summer holidays before he goes to sixth form college in September. Ollie worked for us during his Year 10 work experience when he was 14, and since then he has been learning PHP in his own time alongside his studies.
Last week he took his PHP 5.3 Zend exam and passed, which now makes him a Zend Certified Engineer. Ollie’s 16th birthday is not until the end of July, so at just 15 years old I think he must be one of the Youngest Zend Engineers in the world. Do you know anyone younger? If so, leave us a comment.
Furnish.co.uk – how we take payments for sellers but avoid legal liability
In case you haven’t heard of us, furnish.co.uk is a home interiors personal shopper. We take the hard work out of shopping for your home by pulling together the best and most stylish furnishings from across the web. We work with multiple “sellers” and list a selection of each of their products, every one of which is hand-picked by us. Take a look to find everything from modern furniture through to gifts for the home.
We offer several partnership options to sellers, but the one I’ll talk about here is where we sell their home furnishings directly from furnish.co.uk, just like a marketplace. For example, a customer finds a coffee table on furnish.co.uk from a particular seller, adds it to their basket, checks out and pays, all without visiting the seller’s own website. The seller is notified of this and dispatches the coffee table to the customer. We take a commission on the sale. Read the rest of this entry »
Looking for Graduates
Joe recently posted here about us attending our first Graduate recruitment event at the University of Surrey. We are looking to recruit gradutes for the roles of developer and product manager to expand our team to grow both our network of content sites and continue to deveop our existing products such as CatN.
We have set out our stall at the Graduate fair and, for our first attempt, we’re very pleased. If you’re a student and are thinking of attending the event drop by and have a chat.