Traveling in a Confused World
Being a “prominent blogger”, I have recently received two copies of Delivering Happiness, a business book written by Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com CEO, which was recently acquired by Amazon for $1B. I was asked by the author’s team to write a honest review of the book, and I am going to. But meanwhile, since I don’t really need two copies, I thought that it would be a good opportunity to set up my first ever giveaway contest 🙂 Continue reading “Book Giveaway Contest: Delivering Happiness”
We live in a fast age. Fast computers, fast cars, fast food, short videos, micro blogging. And the same goes to they way we communicate online: we chat, tweet, sms, comment, like, share. As long as it has immediate gratification, momentary feedback and fast propagation, we love it. And these are great tools, without a doubt. Never before we had access to so much information and opinions, connectivity to people so far away. But there is something we are losing in this race. We gain in scope but lose in depth, achieve reach but miss out intimacy, gain in novelty but lose in permanence. One of the things I especially miss in our online experience is the ability to have a real and meaningful conversation. Continue reading “Can We Express Empathy in 160 Chars?”
For a long time now I have had an uneasy feeling about Facebook as a company. It seams to me that something very significant is lacking in their cultural DNA. And this defect has the potential to destroy them from within. Continue reading “The Real Danger to Facebook Lies Within”
After almost two years of hosting Innovation Imitation blog (and another blog) on Blogger, I have decided to step it up and move to WordPress. Blogger is a great product, incredibly simple to setup and easy to maintain, but I felt that I have come to the point when I need more control and better design options. Continue reading “New Design For the New Age”
Recently being discharged from the Israeli Navy after serving there for six years, most of this time as a team leader, I thought to take this opportunity to look back at my time there, and reflect on what I learned, if anything, about the job. Continue reading “4 Faces of a Team Leader”
Good news everybody, we are on the intrawebs, and it feels good 🙂
LiveSale is an online consumer-electronics retail store, based in Nazareth Illit. While not especially large, thanks to their convenient prices and good reputation, they enjoy top places in Zap price-comparison engine. Embedding our content on their product pages allows LiveSale to make their pages friendlier and more informative for their visitors. Continue reading “ShopJet Goes Live with our First Client”
Just a week ago I was at friend’s wedding. The bride was beautiful, the music danceable, and the whole event was a great fun. And as always in such occasions, lots of photos have been taken by several people. Usually what happens in these cases is that you come home, and over the next days your receive emails from friends with links to online albums of the event. Usually these are from different providers such as Facebook, PicasaWeb and Flickr. So eventually you end up with several disjointed online photo albums with no way to view all the photos in one convenient place. Continue reading “Yet Another Aggregating Service”
During my participation in Startup Weekend I have noticed that the knowledge I soaked in my recent MBA studies has helped me to develop better presentation skills and some sort of business intuition. So here is my take on why MBA wasn’t a waste of time and money. Continue reading “The Value of MBA”
A friend of a friend told me about Startup Weekend a couple of days before the event. The same evening the tickets were sold out and I was out of luck. But instead of giving up on the whole thing, I did something else: I contacted the organizers and asked whether there are any tickets left. The answer was no, but I entered the waiting list. Next morning I got a message that someone canceled his participation, and I got the last ticket to the event. It was already worth the 175 shekel I paid: I learned a lesson in persistence. Continue reading “The Story of ShopJet So Far”
How’s that for an irony: my idea, that I declared dead just a week ago, was the inspiration for ShopJet – a concept our team has developed into functional demo, which awarded us with the 2nd place in Startup Weekend – a startup competition, I nearly missed. Continue reading “Great news: our team is Startup Weekend’s runner-up”
Last July, when I was finishing my MBA studies, I started to work with my partner on an idea for a product we called tentatively Rich Product Experience. We have written elevator pitch, built a little mockup of the product, talked with some people from the Technion about it’s potential and….well that’s about it. Unfortunately we didn’t move much pass the initial plans and some very preliminary demos. Admittedly, I was more enthusiastic about it than my partner, but I guess I didn’t have enough enthusiasm for the both of us. Continue reading “Rich Product Experience”
Recently I have been invited to participate in a panel of MBA graduates to discuss and share our experience during Global Strategic Management project (which I took last year) with fresh students. The project was supervised by Sid Amster, a remarkable American businessman , with phenomenal enthusiasm for sharing his experience with the students. Friendly, open and informal, he made sure that we felt that this was the most important course in the MBA. Continue reading “The Anatomy of Group Effort”
A friend of mine recently has purchased an apartment in a new real estate project. For some time he has been complaining to me about the low level of service he has been receiving from the company: to find out trivial details about the progress of the construction, numerous phone calls are needed; no one tracks his requirements regarding the finish details of kitchen and bath; he has to coordinate and schedule different sub-contractors (installing bath, kitchen…) by himself, etc.
Recently I have read about an Israeli startup that plans to introduce a product called WebTVplug, which allows to connect the TV to the Internet through a hardware plug-in. The plug-in converts IP data, streamed from company’s server’s, to video signal, consumable by TV, and presents to the viewer a mesh of video clips, collected from the web, grouped by categories and sorted by company’s content editors.
The problem of this product, is that instead of adjusting the content for the TV medium, it simply gives access to myriads of short clips from around the net in YouTube style (without the social aspect of YouTube).
The entertainment experience in the living room is inherently a passive one. Large display, soft sofa, remote control, a cup of tea. People want to relax, to be entertained, to be immersed by the movie they watching or the game the playing. While some may say that playing video games is not a passive entertainment, I would argue that it is in the sense that it does not require mental activities such as reading, browsing, searching, deciding – all those things we do on the web, and don’t do while watching TV or playing video games.
But the service constantly requires our attention and intervention, to select the next clip to watch. Which for short clips happens quite often. Since the amount of content is enormous, sooner or later we are drawn into a decision paralysis. It seams to me that most people would find this experience tiresome, and not fitting with what they come to expect from living room entertainment.
The idea of bringing Internet content to the living room has undeniable potential, but it seams to me that this product goes in the wrong direction.
If I would have tried to bring web video to TV, I would have focused on the following design aspects:
On a side note, the service has an option of connecting the plug-in to PC, and streaming video clips. Its not clear why would anyone want to use this feature, when he has access to YouTube and other popular web video services.
The original post (in Hebrew): http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3782742,00.html
When talking about web video on TV, I should mention of course Boxee, which is a great example of web-to-TV product done right.
How many times you wanted to save some article, maybe a youtube video, or just a link that somebody sent you, for later viewing? The most obvious option in such cases was just to save it to bookmarks. But I always felt badly with clogging my bookmarks with one-time-use pages. Continue reading “Read It Later”
