We were invited to participate in the Israel Web Tour, organized by the California Israel Chamber of Commerce and the Consulate General of Israel’s Economic Mission in San Francisco. This is the 2nd day of the tour, and there hasn't been a dull moment since it begun :)
One the day's highlights was a panel moderated by Michael Arrington, "The Impact of the New Web – Culture, Entertainments & Commerce".
In a room with a few hundred people, Mike asked – how many of the participants live in Silicon Valley? About half the people in the room raised their hands. Then Mike asked – and how many of you were born in Silicon Valley? Only one person raised his hand. I am not sure what the conclusion from this is, as you could draw several different conclusions. But this is clearly interesting.
Mike proceeded to introduce the panel participants – Keith Rabois of LinkedIn, David Tennenhause of Amazon, and Daniel Cohen of the Gemini Israel Funds – as representatives of "the old way of doing things".
Clearly in a provocative mood, Mike posed the first question –
Are we at the end of the beginning of the beginning of the end?
One of the interesting comments on this was from David Tennenhause: He's seeing a good, healthy supply of good people with good ideas. The problem he does see though is with the nature of the exits – because more and more companies get acquired, there are les and less independent companies and hence less companies who are able to acquire the younger ones.
Surprisingly enough, the YouTube topic came up. Mike noted that he didn't think much of YouTube when he first saw them. With no real technology, no funding, high costs and legal copyright issues, how did they end up succeeding? Keith came up with an interesting observation, that the network effect created by the fact that content creators send links to the content they create to their friends was underestimated in YouTube case.
Daniel Cohen noted that he would not invest in any company that bases its strategy on the Amazon S3 storage services, since in his opinion it takes the economics away. This is interesting, it goes against my instinct and what I would recommend to people debating this decision. I'd love to see his math.
Discussing business models and their importance, Keith shared his early PayPal days experience, reminding everyone that initially, PayPal was about beaming "currency" from one palm pda to another. Apparently, at one point they look at the implementation and figured that since they were using unique email addresses as the identifiers in any case, why not allow direct email to email as well. And then, some 50 or so eBay users stumbled upon this capability and added it to their eBay listing. Keith described an executive meeting in which this was discussed, and in which 2 of the executives said "What? Why would they do that? We should block them!". 24 hours later, they understood that they've found their business model.
Check out the Israel Web Tour blog, and more pictures from the event.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Monday, October 30, 2006
Web 2point2, Nov 9-10
I'll be attending the Web 2point2 uncoference (San Francisco, Nov 9-10). The event is organized by the energetic Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club (a project of BrainJams, Inc). Check it out, it's shaping up quite nicely. Will you be there?
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Popup menus - Flickr vs. Google
A few weeks ago Google quietly opened up SearchMash.com.
While SearchMash is not branded with the Google brand, the fact that it is being operated by Google was quickly revealed and widely discussed:
- http://blog.outer-
court.com/archive/2006-10-02-n30.html - http://ajaxian.com/archives/searchmash-googles-playpen
- http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/061002-192616
- http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/10/searchmash-new-google-search-site.html
The most surprising change for me was the behavior of the green link:
Since it looks like a link, and smells like a link, you'd probably expect it to - duh - behave like a link, and take you to the web page it points to.
This is not the case in SearchMash though. When you click on the green link, you get a *gasp* popup menu with options:
Looking at the menu toolbar on the top of the Flickr page, you'll notice a list of links, and a small arrow next to each one of them:
When you click the arrow, a drop-down popup menu opens up with a list of options:
Which is great. But, if you didn't notice the arrow, or you don't understand what is it supposed to do, you can simply click the link:
What's really nice though, is that once you click the link, you get the Latest Photos page - but you also get the same list of links which were in the popup menu listed at the top row of this page, so you're still able to navigate to them.
I find the Flickr choice of user interface a much better balance between retaining compatibility with existing habits and known metaphors, and providing new functionality.
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Podcast me
I've used Talkr to add an automatically-generated podcast to this blog. Check it out, seems to work pretty well. Not sure how useful it is, but it makes me go "cool!", which is a good enough reason to add it :)
I've also switched to Firefox 2. I just love the built-in spell check. A long-overdue acknowledgment of the fact that so much of the content created today is created using the browser's text input box.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
But what if I'm offline?
Sitting in the Office 2.0 conference, after several days on the road, hopping from state to state, from one airport to the next one, from one flaky wireless connection to the next attempt to get connected, the following question posted to Yedda by one of the Office 2.0 attendees stroke a chord:
What happens to office 2.0 functionality when you ...
What happens to office 2.0 functionality when you don't have access to broadband (airplane, cottage, network goes down, etc)
Topics: web 2.0, office 2.0, office20con
Asked by jakerton on October 11, 2006
View the entire discussion on Yedda
The same issue came up in the morning keynote interview, where Dan Farber interviewed Esther Dyson, who confessed she's posting to her blog mainly through email since she's so often traveling and offline and email works so much better in this scenario.
Karen Leavitt pointed out later, in the "Office 2.0, Where Are We" panel, that in the future, there'd be no offline or online, only choosing if I want to be offline or online. Most likely true, but I hate waiting.
We could put together different solutions for different applications - post to a blog through email, keep the Flickr Uploadr window open with new pictures, use an offline bookmarks manager that knows how to sync with delicious, etc. But this doesn't scale. It's not simple enough. It feels like a hack.
Creating a offline client client for each different applications would theoretically work, but is not very practical - it's expensive to build, and I feel that most of us are kinda tired of downloading (and trusting) so many different desktop clients.
Can we do it in a different way?
It'd be great if browsers would be smarter about offline vs. online, allowing the same bookmark to present an offline version when I'm not connected. So, the Yedda Ask page bookmark would still work when I'm offline, but would have reduced capabilities (for example, topics would not be automatically suggested), and would do something slightly different when the Post button is clicked.
It would be great to have the form posted data go into a "offline queue", and be posted to the online URL next time I go online.
But waiting for browsers to support new functionality is not a good idea, since at the current release rate, it means that we'll need to wait a year or two at best before we have this stuff up and running. And I hate waiting.
Can we hack this functionality today? Ideas anyone?
, yedda
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Backto Earth
GeekCon 2006 was packed - people, action, projects, ideas. Loved every moment of it!
See for yourself:
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