Project Hardtack - One Year Anniversary

One year ago, on Memorial Day weekend, it was finally time to put some of the ideas we had selling to another test. Since early April of that year, I had had the notion of using Boomerang's pattern of scavenging data, refining and distilling it into information, and directly publishing it to tackle a dark corner of the economy: Real Estate metrics.

True you see a lot of information published about real estate, some of it comes out every month. I was unhappy because it had been processed and filtered and "seasonally adjusted". In essence I was getting the feeling that the information was so highly processed that the numbers were saying whatever the real estate business interests wanted it to say.

I decided to build the first version of Hardtack - something I called "Ivy Mike". Named because it was a successful fusion device - the first actually.

Ivy Mike was largely a very primitive experiment with some early Boomerang concepts and code, but as it ran it certainly was able to scavenge and collect the housing data I was looking for, and over the course of the summer of 2006 revealed the early weakening of the housing market and the deflation of the bubble.

In January of this year we decided to move ahead with a full scale system that expanded from Ivy's 40 large metro areas to Hardtack's 300 or so. That effort led by Rob and Kevin is the web site that one year later is beginning to get broader notice.

Hardtack has been a great demo platform for Boomerang, and an excellent vehicle to refine and enhance our platform for hosting Feed technology. My thanks to everyone who has worked to make it reality, or who have given it a look over and learned something new.