PriceMatcher Elevator Pitch

Mike

About 6 months ago I took an Entrepreneurship course as part of my MBA degree. One of the tasks we needed to complete in the course, was to think of an entrepreneurial idea, and write an “elevator pitch” for it. Elevator pitch is a concise introduction, that allows the entrepreneur to present his idea to potential investor, in some undemanding social context – like riding together in an elevator.
I blogged about the pitch I wrote in Auctioning Off Your Purchasing post. Today I want to share the pitch that wrote my study partner, Pavel, based on an idea we developed. Later on, we tried actually to implement that idea, but that’s another story. 

PriceMatcher

Continue reading “PriceMatcher Elevator Pitch”

Looking for Startup Patterns – Dissecting the Web 2.0 Frenzy

Mike4 Comments
Startup Patterns
Startup Patterns

Anyone who follows web 2.0 magazines (like TechCrunch, Go2Web20, etc) and observes the emergence of latest web startups, cannot help but feel that most of them follow similar patters and structures. While different in technology, market and target audience, when striped from all the bells and whistles, often they look and feel very similar. Continue reading “Looking for Startup Patterns – Dissecting the Web 2.0 Frenzy”

Feed your Chi.mp with your social-networks profiles

Mike

Back in May 2008, in post titled Multiple Personality Disorder I talked about the need I felt, to manage and control your online personalities (the professional one of LinkedIn, the social one of Facebook, your dating sites profiles, etc). Today I read about a service called Chi.mp that aims at exactly that.
Chi.mp allows you to gather your social networks profiles in one place, under your own domain name (i.e gorilla.mp), create online “personas”, such as public persona; friends persona; professional persona, and publish and push your updates back to your social networks. Continue reading “Feed your Chi.mp with your social-networks profiles”

Ideas soup 1

MikeOne Comment

We have to prepare an ‘elevator pitch’ for MBA class. Let’s say you have an idea, and you need an investor to make it happen. So you go and prepare a small paper which sums up the idea, and explores its business potential.
So, in order to do that, first of all I have to find some idea to base it upon. Which reminded me, that the whole idea of this blog in the first place, was as a ‘meeting place’ for all the lousy ideas I have (should I call it a ‘burial ground’?). So I thought I would list the ideas I still care to remember. Maybe someday I will want to explore further some of them (but wouldn’t it then be grave digging?)
So, here is one such list: Continue reading “Ideas soup 1”

Utilizing Large Monitor

Mike3 Comments

A couple of months ago I purchased a 22″ LCD monitor. I saw that there is no point in working with maximized windows (of Firefox, Word etc.) since then you get huge margins, that are added to both sides of the screen. So I started working will all the windows in ‘normal’ mode (not maximized) – and suddenly I had lots of free desktop space, and nothing to do with it. Not only that, quickly I found out that moving/resizing windows around a large desktop is an exhausting task. Continue reading “Utilizing Large Monitor”

Can't get yourself go regularly to gym? I have the solution

Mike

Thought about an interesting marketing gimmick for gyms: promise partial refund to your subscribers (or whatever called those people that go to gym on a regular basis) if they complete a training program.
For example, those who show up at least twice a week for a period of 4 months and train according to a program that was compiled for them by gym’s coach, get a 30% discount off their fee. Or maybe get some complementary service for free (pool, sauna, etc.).

Sometimes, fantasizing about girls gazing at your muscular body at the local beach is just not a strong enough incentive. And everyone likes getting his money back.
I wonder whether this kind of scheme is already implemented somewhere…

So you thought you might like to parse HTML

Mike4 Comments

A friend of mine wanted to get a price of a specific product from a price-comparison site in a programmatic way, so he asked me how he could that.
Now, this shopping-comparer service doesn’t have an API, so in order to get the price from a page, he needs to write a script that is able to do the following:
1. Request, and get the page for the specific product.
2. Parse the received HTML page, and understand it.
Continue reading “So you thought you might like to parse HTML”

FoxyTunes reveal the secrets of their success

Mike

Last Wednesday, Technion’s E-Club had organized a meeting with FoxyTunes founders, and I was in the audience.
All I knew prior to this meeting, was that FoxyTunes was an Israeli start-up that developed an add-on for Firefox that lets user control almost any media-player right from the browser, and that recently it was purchased by Yahoo! for a reported $40 million.
I have to say I was surprised by this purchase, since the technology behind their product is quite straightforward, so I wanted to understand what value did Yahoo! see in FoxyTunes, beyond the simple add-on. Continue reading “FoxyTunes reveal the secrets of their success”

Multiple Personality Disorder

Mike15 Comments

All of us (even those, that are not such prominent bloggers as me) have some some sort of presence on the web. And usually this presence is fragmented into many disoriented little pieces of personality. Now I am not talking about people having fake profiles on social networks, so that they can poke and have fun at others. I am talking about different aspects of the “real” us. Continue reading “Multiple Personality Disorder”

So, what this is all about?

Mike

For more than 6 months now, me and a friend are toying with an idea to start up a startup. It seams we have all it takes to be a hi-tech entrepreneurs wannabes: illusion of talent, lack of experience, and excess of free time. The only problem we face is finding an interesting idea: one that could have some potential, is interesting enough to put the time and effort in it, and is easy enough to implement.
So I thought, why not organize all those half-baked ideas that I have from time to time, into a blog.

Actually the inspiration came from the guy behind TechCrunch, after vewing this 15 minutes video.
In this video he is talking about how startups may increase their chances to appear on TechCrunch (and other big web 2.0 blogs/magazines). One way is to have a blog, and be an active participant in the community.
So I thought, I might as well add to the web noise.