BudgetDirect Provides Interesting User Experience over Numbeo Data

BudgetDirect do provide interesting user experience using Numbeo data in their cost of living tool . I'm interested to hear what do you like and what do you dislike in their tool, especially regarding look&feel.

Top 10 Safest Countries in the World in 2013

Japan is the safest country in the world in 2013, according to Numbeo, the world’s largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide.

Top 10 safest countries, according to Numbeo are:
- Japan (safety index 86.89)
- Taiwan (83.74)
- Hong Kong (83.43)
- South Korea (82.60)
- United Arab Emirates (81.99)
- Malta (81.46)
- Luxembourg (81.25)
- Georgia (80.43)
- Bahrain (80.21)
- Singapore (80.02)
- Iceland (77.68)

The full list is available at:
http://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings_by_country.jsp

Numbeo, the world’s largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide, has chosen Iceland as the least polluted country in 2013

Top 10 the least polluted countries, according to Numbeo are:
- Iceland (pollution index 9.85)
- Estonia (16.38)
- Finland (18.53)
- Sweden (18.79)
- Australia (20.89)
- New Zealand (21.80)
- Switzerland (22.97)
- Norway (23.35)
- Lithuania (25.17)
- Canada (26.52)

The full list is available at:
http://www.numbeo.com/pollution/rankings_by_country.jsp

Numbeo: Quality of Life Index by City 2013

ZURICH is the city with the best quality of life in 2013, according to an annual report by Numbeo, the world's largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide. For its quality of life index 2013 it gathered data from more than 76000 people around the world.

The cities which are ranked highest in quality of life are:
- Zurich, Switzerland (score 233.72)
- Canberra, Australia (219.15)
- Adelaide, Australia (214.61)
- Berlin, Germany (213.50)
- Munich, Germany (210.24)
- Edmonton, Canada (208.74)
- Calgary, Canada (202.72)
- Hamburg, Germany (201.55)
- Austin, TX, United States (199.52)
- Dubai, United Arab Emirates (195.49)

Full rankings are available at:
http://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings.jsp

About Numbeo:
Numbeo is the world's largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide. Numbeo provides current and timely information on world living conditions including cost of living, housing indicators, health care, traffic, crime and pollution. Numbeo was founded in 2009 by Mladen Adamovic, former Google software engineer. Numbeo was mentioned or used as a source by many international medias, newspapers and magazines including Forbes, Business Insider, The Telegraph, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, China Daily, The Vancouver Sun and Elmundo. For more information about Numbeo please visit: http://www.numbeo.com/common/about.jsp

Property Prices Indexes 2013

Numbeo did publish it's property price indexes for 2013.

Property Price Index by city is available at: http://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings.jsp

Property Price Index by country is available at : http://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_country.jsp

Cost of Living Index for 2013 - Norway, Switzerland and Australia are most expensive

Based on 48 goods and services, Numbeo's survey for 2013 is made using a data cut on 4th of February 2013. This year data cut contains 367958 entries from 33448 individual contributors worldwide.

The data on city level are showing Norwegian cities Stavanger, Trondheim, Oslo and Bergen on top of the list of most expensive cities. Several cities in Switzerland are also among the most expensive in the world: Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Lausanne and Bern. Among the 25 most expensive cities in the world, our list includes also eight Australian cities: Perth, Sydney, Canberra, Hobart, Darwin, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide. Only a few cities which are not in Norway, Switzerland and Australia made their way into the top 25 most expensive list: Luanda in Angola, Stockholm in Sweden, Arhus and Copenhagen in Denmark, Paris in France, Luxembourg and on 25th place Tokyo in Japan.

List with details on city level is available at: http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings.jsp

On the country level, our data and research suggests that the most expensive countries are:
- Norway (index 173.85)
- Switzerland (151.77)
- Australia (133.66)
- Luxembourg (124.76)
- Denmark (119.95)
- Japan (115.24)
- Sweden (114.47)
- New Zealand (113.63)
- Bahrain (113.49)
- Iceland (112.43)

The least expensive countries are:
- India (30.92)
- Pakistan (33.41)
- Nepal (38.74)
- Algeria (41.49)
- Bolivia (41.50)
- Vietnam (43.21)
- Egypt (44.82)
- Bangladesh (44.83)
- Indonesia (46.14)
- Macedonia (46.48)

Full country comparison table is available at:
http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/rankings_by_country.jsp

About Numbeo:
Numbeo is the world’s largest database of user contributed data about cities and countries worldwide. Numbeo provides current and timely information on world living conditions including cost of living, housing indicators, health care, traffic, crime and pollution. Numbeo was founded by Mladen Adamovic, former Google software engineer in 2009. Numbeo was mentioned or used as a source by many international medias, newspapers and magazines including Forbes, Business Insider, The Telegraph, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, China Daily, The Vancouver Sun and Elmundo. For more information about Numbeo please visit: http://www.numbeo.com/common/about.jsp

Weird Things Learned From Gathering Prices All Over The World

In China, which is consider as among the cheapest in the world, (cow) cheese is usually more expensive than in Europe (and many other places). It might not be available in cities of 500.000 size! The reason for this is that Chinese people don't eat cheese and milk (apart of being young). They cannot digest lactose, milk sugar. Europeans have different digestive system, changed by centuries of eating milk and milk processed products as cheese. Cheese is actually highly processed food and is high in saturated fat and sodium and is considered not healthy for cardiovascular system. A friend of mine recently was diagnosed with cholesterol and doctor told him that was because he did drink 1 liter of milk per day (and he was also a big fan of cheese). Doctor advised him to drink soy milk instead. After looking soy milk which he finds enjoyable he found a chocolate soy milk he do enjoy and now he feels addicted to chocolate soy milk :-).

I've read that in Sri Lanka, prices of potato goes up/down +300 percent during the year.

The explanation for this weird thing was that due to high moisture it's not possible to store potato and therefore when most of potato is available it becomes cheaper and later much more expensive.

Numbeo might show that in certain cities some items are cheaper than country cheapest!

When calculating existing algorithm takes into account only entries which are not classified as spam.
Than it discards the lowest 25% of entries and highest 25% of entries.

That's why a reader of a website noticed weird thing - La Ceiba cheaper than Honduras itself! It happened because those lowest entries of La Ceiba where discarded when calculating average for Honduras.
It sounded like a plan, knowing that website relies on inputs from visitors which might not always be correct, but here it shows a kind of weakness.

In Latin America, I've read from visitors of the website that, for example in Paraguay there are two types of places to rent : 1. for foreigners, overpriced 2. for locals.

Even if you call real estate agency from Honduras you might not know the "real" price because you are out of reach for second types of apartments.

Even Numbeo data has weaknesses, if you purchase the data from provider which uses an employee to gather the data, you don't have guarantees that employee took into account:

- oscillations of price during the year

- prices for foreigners/locals

- the best representative of mid range restaurant, for example

- the best representative for each comparative item or the supermarket in general

Also, employee might make an error when collecting data as well.

Currency exchange changes during the year so comparing values is even more difficult if only in certain months data are gathered for statistical purposes.