Terabitz: Real estate and much more
New real estate site enables users to map out all sorts of local information--from schools to weather to crime.
Imagine you are moving to a new city and you are considering different neighborhoods. If you want to find out if there are any cafes in a neighborhood, where the gas stations and post offices are, if there is a cinema nearby and what the crime is like, you typically have to consult multiple sources.
Not anymore. A new Web site set to launch on Tuesday called Terabitz offers all sorts of information in one place. The site is geared toward people looking for real estate, but it definitely will be helpful for a variety of purposes.
I recently moved to a new neighborhood and had resorted to discovering what's in the area the old-fashioned way--walking around. Now I can literally map out the neighborhood with my own points of interest.
The site features a customizable dashboard that lets you drag and drop different information modules with local data such as fast food restaurants, libraries, hospitals, pharmacies, grocery stores, schools and weather. You can also find out what homes in the area sold for recently, calculate mortgage rates, see listings from Craigslist, Trulia, Google and the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) site and even get housing valuations from Zillow.
One click on a tab and your customized data points are displayed on a map. You can take a snapshot of the dashboard to save or e-mail to someone else.
Terabitz Chief Executive Ashfaq Munshi acknowledges that he is entering a crowded field with a real estate Web site, but points out that none of the other sites offers such a variety of local information.
Munshi, who has raised $10 million in capital from the Tudor Ventures, says his now 17-year-old son got the inspiration for the Web site after seeing the first real estate mashup, Housingmaps.com, in 2005. "You might even assert that he hired me to run his company," Munshi joked.
