It's been 7 weeks since the public Bay Area Teleport release (see the original announcement) and we just pushed out a release number three. Getting into a rhythm! I wanted to share three things about this one:

How to create smart links to help other people run Teleport searches New data layer: search by Lyft coverage We're now officially in Beta

Becoming Integration Friendly

One new feature in the Bay Area Teleport is a bit hidden under the hood: you can now trigger specific searches from other websites, emails or chat messages.

First, we believe this is useful for humans doing tasks like these:

A Twilio recruiter sends an email to a new hire and includes this direct link for that person to find an optimal place to live around the relatively new Mountain View office;

Y Combinator office manager includes this other direct link in the onboarding materials for the new batch to highlight how much better their teams could do than living in SoMa while participating in the program;

A designer working for Square shares this link in her team's Slack chat to kick off a conversation about pluses and minuses of moving from Mill Valley to Temescal.

Furthermore, these links are even easier to generate programmatically. As a software startup we'd love to work with other people building things and help your users find their best location as part of whatever you are trying to help them with: browsing your job ads, using your real estate site or considering a transfer to Bay Area inside a large corporation.

Here's the simple syntax for linking to Teleport: Just start with

https://bayarea.teleport.org/prefill?

and append a few parameters, separated by "&" signs like in the examples above:

Parameter Example Description al=<angellist_id> li=<linkedin_id> domain=<domain> al=teleport-3 li=3854483 li=teleport-inc domain=teleport.org ID from either the startup profile on AngelList or LinkedIn company page . Or just the company domain, which we try to solve against LinkedIn AngelList too.

One of these is mandatory. We fetch the company name and logo icon and link back to whichever profile page we got them from. work=<zip> work=94304 ZIP code of office location to be highlighted on the map.

Mandatory. name=<office_name> name=Teleport%20at%20StartX For overriding the name of an office, for example to clarify which building of many.

Optional. If not present, company name is used. home=<zip> home=94013 For prefilling also the user's Home location.

Optional. If omitted, Teleport asks the user for her home location as the first step.

This is just a first stab at our more developer facing features of Teleport, so there isn't much elegant error handling or fancier documentation. We do hope you find some use for it though, and do let us know how we can make it even better for you.

And while we are at the topic of sharing links, if you don't want to deal with all this geekiness, you can still simply:

copy the link to whichever interesting Teleport search (like this one) you're working on from your browser and send it to a friend

share a link to the detailed view of a specific search result (like Los Gatos for the above example)

manually remove the "/query/<long id>" bit to share a link to a specific place without all the search context (and this is what plain vanilla Los Gatos page looks like)

Edit: LinkedIn support has been deprecated due to the API changes announced recently.

Where Can You Hail a Lyft?

While the selection of filters you can apply to your Teleport searches has stabilized a bit after adding schools and trains (see the announcement here), there is one new thing this week: in addition to Uber coverage, you can now also filter your places to live in Teleport by having access to our personal favourite car sharing service Lyft in the Bay Area.

As a pro tip, this could well be what you should have in mind when tweaking our commute range limitations for "car" - why would you really own one in this day and age?

Please do keep your feedback coming regarding what other cost & quality of life parameters matter to you when choosing the best place to live. Just click the purple button in the corner anywhere on our sites - and we hope to get new data in front of you soon.

From Preview to Beta

As another small thing from this release, you might notice that the label on the logo badge in the product has changed. When we released the Bay Area Teleport back in November, we called it a "technology preview" to indicate how early we know we are on our path of building software to help startup people on the move.

Since then, we've heard two things from you:

The product has already started to become useful for you when looking for the best place to live in the Bay Area, despite its infancy (yay!) The "Preview" label is somewhat distracting, as you don't know if you should really believe the results or not.

Just to make it clear: our data about cost & quality of life is real and the search results are the best we can give you based on this data. That said, we are still working actively the make the product better in every aspect. So let's call it a Beta version for now (as it is more traditional thing to do).

Thanks for your early support and hope to hear from you soon!

Sten

CEO