This Sunday I was scanning the Gadgets supplement in the Sunday Times on my iPAD and came across this latest photographic offering from Microsoft. A free download of Photosynth to your iPhone and away you go creating panoramas and 'Synths'. The product reminds me of something we dabbled with in the early '90's called iPIX. This involved a fish eye lens attached to a digital camera and you took 2 hemispherical photos of a room (imagine standing at the centre of a tennis ball). The 2 photos were then stitched together using some software which you could then upload to the web. I eventually grasped how to add it to a web page but it wasn't easy - or quick. This came to an end when the original iPIX company went bust. The simplicity of Photosynth and the ability to upload to your Facebook page as well as it being hosted on www.photosynth.net means this could be a winner - certainly when compared with iPIX! I'm going to have a go and report back on my next blog post
So the house builders and the lenders have had a meeting to discuss how they can create 95% mortgages. Basically a good thing, as you would imagine most estate agents would say. But what proportion of the housing Market is represented by new homes sales to first time buyers? Also any first time buyer who purchases a new home is then a cost to the second hand Market of who knows how many sales! If I think back 30 years my wife and I as first time buyers were providing a deposit of 10%. To do this we sold her car, saved up by not going out as much and generally committed ourselves to the task of buying our first home together. Ah, you might say, but house prices were so much cheaper then. True but my salary was just under £2,000 per annum with the prospect of perhaps another £1,000 in commission from selling at lease 6 houses per month personally. The first 4 didn't count towards commission but were to cover my costs to my employer! I personally don't think 95% mortgages are ...
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