Property investment in information age with Google Earth and Google Maps

Mr Ho Chin Soon (何振顺) recent talk in The Edge Investment Forum on Real Estate 2010 has enlightened me about the use of Google Earth and Google Maps in property investment.

Google Earth enables us to zoom in to the property of our interest, survey its surrounding environment and nearby township, assess the road systems and buildings, measuring distance from city center, know the nearby amenities, etc. You can also watch Panoramio photos and/or Youtube videos of selected locations uploaded by contributors in the Internet.

One of the powerful feature of Google Earth is it Historical Imagery, which enables us to view the historical satellite images of the location, and see its change and development over time.

For example, we are able to see the rapid development of Kota Damansara on the northern part of Klang Valley, by looking at its Historical Imagery in 2004...

and compare with its most recent image taken in 2007...

Meanwhile, Google Maps is directly accessible with your web browser, and enable you to easily switch between Satellite view, Map view and Terrain view.

No doubt that Google Earth and Google Maps can help you study the area of interest, find out the township developments and conditions of the surroundings, before you actually pay a visit to the site. They can also give you a clearer picture about the present and past developments and constructions of a location, and probably let you discover some growth area that you might be interested to invest in.

The most reliable laptop brands are...

If you are planning to buy a new laptop or a new netbook during the PC Fair or otherwise, you might be interested to read this.

SquareTrade, the largest independent warranty service provider in US has, in 16 November 2009, unveiled a report that analyzed failure rates of over 30,000 new notebook computers manufactured by 9 leading brands (with minimum 1,000 units of each brand sampled) over the past 3 years.

The report concluded that:

• 31% of laptop failed during the first 3 years. 2/3 of this failure (20.4%) came from hardware malfunctions, another 1/3 (10.6%) was reported as accidental damage.
• Netbooks have a 20% higher failure rate from hardware malfunctions than laptops.
• The failure rate is inversely propotional to the market grade (and price) of the laptop.

And the most reliable laptop brands are Asus and Toshiba which scored almost equally.

So, if reliability is important to you, you might probably consider laptop than netbook, with preferance to the more reliable brands above.

Click here to read the full report of SquareTrade's Laptop Reliability Study.

The most reliable digital camera brand is...

If you are planning to buy a new digital camera during the PC Fair or otherwise, you might be interested to read this.

SquareTrade, the largest independent warranty service provider in US has, in 31 March 2010, unveiled a report that analyzed failure data from a sample of over 60,000 new digital cameras purchased by their warranty customers.

The report concluded that 11% of digital cameras fail over the first 2 years of ownership, whereby 6.6% of failures coming from malfunctions and 4.1% from accidents.

Interestingly, they also found out that the failure rate is inversely propotional to the price of the camera. Cheaper point-and-shot digital cameras are more vulnerable to malfunction than the more costly Digital SLR cameras.

And the most reliable point-and-shot digital camera brand is... Panasonic.

How about the DSLR? There is no significant difference between the reliability of Nikon and Canon.


Click here to read the full report of SquareTrade's Digital Camera Failure Study.