Newpad started out as a mess of hacks, a quick-fix to a real problem: apartment hunting via the classifieds is a miserable experience. The major sites can filter by price and size of apartments, but fail at the most important criterion: location.

When Newpad's map search first came online in 2010, it grew a solid user base fairly quickly despite a near lack of promotion. People were telling others how great it was and how much easier it was to search for apartments when you could use a map. Innovative for its time, Newpad won an award from CIRA in 2011, and even got its thirty seconds of fame on CBC TV's "The National" in 2012.

Housing maps mashups are a dime a dozen now, even Craigslist has ceased to sue them into oblivion and responded productively by launching its own version. Times have changed, and Newpad isn't the cool shiny new thing it used to be. Using it over the course of the past two years has revealed a lot of potential for improvement. When the data feeds broke again in early 2013, a decision was made to redesign the service, and to bring it to new level of usefulness.

Newpad is not funded, and does not quite have a business plan yet -- you can count on development being done in after-hours spare time. The new version is coming, and it will be great when it arrives, it might just take a while. In the meantime, we would love to hear from you -- feel free to email newpad.ca@gmail.com with your thoughts.

Thanks, and stay tuned,

the Newpad team

ps. You can send some bitcoins to 1G3NJLiVD2SpnekaSMFYs6sTZZ26zGdAy9 if you'd like to help out.