BlockAvenue Blog

Come join one of the most exciting startups of 2013 located inside of Boston’s most innovative office environment here at the PayPal Start Tank. We’re hiring aggressively Backend/Rails, Frontend/Backbone, IOS & Android developers. Come change the world with us!

Are you an all-star developer looking to join and be a part of the top 10 founding team? Want to work on one of the most talked about consumer tech companies of 2013? Want to work in the most awesome office space in Boston, and take a scooter to your next meeting? Want to be surround by some of the best entrepreneurs and startups in Boston inside the coolest incubator here at PayPal Start Tank? Well, we’re hiring and looking for top dogs! We are a core team of 5 right now and are looking to double in size this summer. If you are the best at what you do and the below description is in your wheelhouse, we want to hear from you!

What is BlockAvenue?

BlockAvenue is a platform that lets you follow all of the social activity in your neighborhood while connecting you to neighbors who matter most.

Job Description: Engineering

We’re building a platform on top of the original social network, the neighborhood. By aggregating key lifestyle points like place data, transit, crime and combining that with relevant social attribution from more than two dozen networks including Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare and Eventbrite, we are able to do some pretty cool things, including:

• Connect nearby neighbors & small business owners
• Provide a civic platform for the city to connect to its citizens, and vice versa
• Rank the livability of every neighborhood in the world
• Solve the last piece of the online real estate vertical
• Bring transparency to both the good and bad on a block by block basis

Our backend is built using Rails, Backbone, PostGIS, MongoDB, Heroku, Redis, and Resque. We use Code Climate to measure code quality and refactor poor code as we go. We practice Agile Development, and we know we will always need to get better at it. We hope you can help us with that.

We have a web application and an iOS app, both of which provide a distinct experience (ie. one is not a clone of the other). We expect to release an iPad app and an Android app later this year.

You want to work here because we’re going places. The leadership team has successfully launched a number of startups with successful liquidity events. We’ve presented at dozens of national conferences on business and technology. We’ve run digital agencies, real estate businesses, and e-commerce ventures. Now we’re working on building a billion dollar company around connecting neighborhoods: a problem we feel passionate about solving.

We want you to learn from us, and we want to learn from you. When you contact us, be sure to tell us what you can teach us. When you show up to the interview, be ready to school us on something.

Skills we need you to have:

• Ruby, Python, or another modern server-side language
•  Javascript with jQuery
•  Good OO sense, especially with mixin and API design.
•  A modern client-side framework like Backbone, Spine, Ember, or similar.
•  Source Control with git
•  Postgres and MongoDB
•  iOS development with apps we can see and test (if a mobile developer)

Skills you should want to learn or develop:

• Agile development (we use Trello to manage stories)
• GIS and geospatial
• Backbone
• RSpec for TDD
• Heroku, Redis, Resque
• PJAX, Pushstate, and Turbolinks
• PostGIS
• Mongo Spatial
• REST APIs with Grape

Things you can’t be afraid of:

• Newrelic alerts being connected to your phone.
• Hard problems. Really hard. The kind that keep you up late thinking.
• Scaling a service 10,000x this year alone.
• Making a complicated system look simple.
• Tests, but not necessarily test-first.
• Having to prove your designs with data and metrics.
• Throwing away stuff that isn’t working: we pivot.
• Time pressure: we’re a startup that is moving fast in a VC funded world.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer. As such, we measure our candidates objectively. We are looking for the best of the best, whether you’re a student or a 10 year veteran, if this job rec speaks to you, we want to hear from you. Thanks and looking forward to connecting!

Please contact us by emailing us at jobs [at] blockavenue.com, subject: Employment Inquiry.

All Available Jobs @ BlockAvenue | Recent Press | Angel List

The BlockAvenue API is (finally) here and for those of you whom have been asking for neighborhood data … well … pull away!

The Backdrop:  Late last year we connected with Kayvon from Rentenna, who had this uber-cool apartment rental site down in NYC. We were immediately interested in doing something special with the Rentenna team and found some time to meetup with Kayvon at #ICNY in January. Since then, we have been developing our API alongside with Rentenna, and I am very proud to annouce our very first API partnership – Rentenna!

About Rentenna:  Rentenna is the fastest and most beautiful way to find an apartment you’ll love. The team is based out of NYC and is currently serving 16 cities across the US. Learn more about Rentenna.

The API Mashup:  The team over at Rentenna has pulled in several 3rd party resources to mashup on each rental building it has in its database. I think we could coin this implementation as the ultimate rental search mashup. To see what I am talking about check out the Vanguard Chelsea in NYC.

Upon loading the apartment building, Rentenna brings you the basics front and center (and with a stellar responsive design).  The building, address, listings for rent, prices, a clean google maps mashup (both basic map and streetview), some building reviews and their very own proprietary ”Rentenna Score,” which this building happens to have a very good one “90!”

The Rentenna Score is computed from information gathered across the web. It includes renter ratings, neighborhood, value, landlord complaints, amenities and more.

As you can see on the listing, Rentenna goes far beyond the basics and incorporates a deep dive pulling in anything and everything about this particular property.

Where Rentenna really starts to get interesting is in the “Local Flavor” section where they have  chosen to incorporate social mashups into these pages. Scroll on down a bit and here you will see a slick mashup between Wikipedia celebrities who live nearby, Yelp restaurant reviews, Instagram photos and … BlockReviews written by real neighbors who live nearby!

How cool is this?

Just about a year ago, BlockAvenue set out on a mission to help consumers find out what it’s like to live in a specific area (down to the block level) and this API is one of our first big steps toward our goal.

Learn more about our API and future builds including a WordPress plugin we have coming very soon!

[Programmable API Profile]

(Photo by Artvenue)

Whoa, it has been a fast start to 2013. Not too sure where January went, and February seems to be blazing by us as well.

Breaking News: This past Monday, Everyblock, the hyper-local news site which has been around since 2007 (and acquired by MSN in 2009) closed its doors. This came unexpectedly not only to us, but to the Everyblock employees as well.

MSN noted ,”Everyblock, is a wonderful scrappy business but it wasn’t a strategic fit with our growth strategy and — like most hyperlocal businesses — was struggling with the business model.”

The shuttering of this business caused a tidal wave of social activity on the web, mostly from Chicago, but nonetheless a huge following of disappointed Everyblock fans shouted out on Twitter and commented on the many of articles who followed the story.

We liked Everyblock too (a lot), I was a personal fan and follower. We had always intended on bringing a few particular elements of the Everyblock experience into BlockAvenue’s experience, and now after perusing through all of these comments and tweets, we have bumped this up on our priority list. Chicago, we will be in touch soon and hope to bring the next evolution in hyper-local news.

The Latest from the BlockAvenue Dev. Team:

New Markets: Austin, Chicago and San Francisco
We launched our original 3 beta markets late last year: Boston, DC & NYC and this month we have opened 3 more, Chicago, Austin and San Francisco. Although we have data nationwide, we have been focusing on these cities to engage locals to help build our neighborhood platform. We have struck up some awesome partnerships too including Shawn Rooker in Austin, Matthew Gaskill and Mike Peerless in Boston and Alyssa Hellman in DC. Interested in partnering with us to become the BlockAvenue ambassador in your city – give us a shout.

Continue reading…

Today, we are excited to announce that BlockAvenue is now live in Austin, Chicago and San Francisco.

As you know, BlockAvenue thrives to be the best neighborhood search tool on the web, and one of our goals is to help people planning to move truly understand the inner-workings of particular neighborhoods on a block-by-block basis. BlockAvenue has aggregated more than 50M lifestyle data points including: real-time crime incidents, transit options, sex offenders, local amenities (retail & parks), restaurants/pubs and schools. On top of that, we have crowd-sourced thousands user generated “BlockReviews” telling us all what it’s really like to live on that block.

Also, just today, we released a few new features including an awesome “social mash-up” on our place data. Now, when you click on a place in the search results, you will see a mash-up of reviews from Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Yelp all together … it’s awesome!

Screenshot of SoMa, San Francisco

Sincerely,

Melki Ko
Director of Business Development
818-429-5379
melki@blockavenue.com

Keep tabs on us:  @blockavenue | facebook | our blog

PS: iPhone app on the way … coming soon!

(Special thanks to @NikkiBeauchamp for snapping this photo!)

Good morning, New York!

For the past few days, BlockAvenue has been working the rooms of Inman News’ Real Estate Connect 2013 in NYC. We’ve been looking forward to this for months now, and to say it’s been well worth our while is an understatement. In fact, it’s been more like an honor, to be here in New York City among some of the country’s most innovative people.

Thursday morning, Tony pitched BlockAvenue publicly for the first time.

“BlockAvenue is a neighborhood platform that connects people, place and social activity on a block-by-block basis,” said Anthony Longo, the company’s founder. “It helps you and your clients answer that oh-so-hard question of what’s it really like to live there, on that street, on that block, or in that cul-de-sac.”  The site includes more than 50M data points on crime, sex offenders, transit options, local amenities, restaurants, schools and user-generated reviews of blocks along with social feeds from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Yelp API’s.

As real estate’s ‘new kids’, we have been dumbfounded by the incredible amounts of praise and support we have been getting. Check out what people are saying…

• @Century21: Thrilled to see @BlockAvenue at #ICNY! Use their site to get information on a specific block in a specific neighborhood.
• @SeattleDivas: Like the @BlockAvenue idea – especially since we have a ton of newbie Seattle clients. Neighborhood & community are key. #ICNY
• @JoeSchutt: @tonylongo brought it at #ICNY with @BlockAvenue. Sign up as an agent and start being the go to expert on your blocks!
• @ReneeFishman: only 2 companies that have focus on #relationships IMO are @contactually & @BlockAvenue
• @RobinSuwe: @BlockAvenue meshes people, places & neighborhoods to help consumers understand how it is to live in a area. Cool concept! #icny #startups