It's been a long week

I got back yesterday from KinnerNet 2006, a long-weekend-long unconference camp organized by Yossi Vardi. Long days, short nights, lots and lots of fascinating people, and tons of intellectual stimulation. Some physical stimulation too, as I was trying to avoid being hit by a water gun, misguided missile or a hostile robot.

I attended so many fascinating discussions during this weekend, both during the sessions and one-on-one. Topics ranged from blogging to online advertising, business models, MMO, culture jamming, standards, SEO, digital photography, swarms, economics, robotics... cool.

The Marker's COM.VENTION conference started immediately following KinnerNet, with many of the KinnerNet participants attending this one as well. I attended only a small part of it (someone gotta code around here!), and was pleasantly surprised to hear that Yedda, the startup I'm involved in, was selected as one of the 10 most promising startups in Israel in 2006!

And now, that we've been selected as "promising", all we need to do is deliver the promise :)

Technorati : Israel, KinnerNet, KinnerNet2006, KinnerNet06, Yossi Vardi, COMVENTION, The Marker, Yedda
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Bubbles are cool

3D3R, a small software studio in Israel led by Ohad Eder-Pressman and friends, is preaching for "good, simple and straight-to-the-point solutions". And guess what. This is what they actually deliver.

3D3R just released the first beta of Bubbles - a "Simplified, Stripped-Down & Straight-To-The-Point browser window, that is tailor-made for housing those cool Web apps".

I love Bubbles. It's such a simple, good idea.

The desktop we use was designed with the assumption that most of the apps we use are available on the desktop, and therefore, they can be minimized to the task bar, iconized into the system tray, right-clicked to provide a context-sensitive menu, etc.

But guess what. As more and more of the basic services we use are moving online into cool web apps, I find that a lot of my time is spent inside the browser's (tabbed, if lucky) window frame.

Bubbles bridges the gap between Windows desktop apps and web apps. It creates a small hosted-browser frame for a web site, which behaves pretty much like an independent Windows app.

The window is minimal - nothing but the actual web page, no toolbars, sidebars, status bars, etc. This window can be minimized to the task bar or the tray, uses the web site logo as its icon, and can provide its own context sensitive menu when right-clicked.

It's not perfect yet, but what was done, was done right. I'd love to see the option to have Back / Forward / Refresh buttons for sites that rely on them for functionality, a better task bar double-click logic, and a few other bits and bytes, but hey, it's the first beta release.

Small, simple, makes sense.

Technorati : Israel, browser, cool, simple, 3d3r, bubbles
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Web 2.0, kicking even harder

The local Web 2.0 scene is heating up. Following the Gemini Internet event on January, the informal lunch with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington two weeks ago was another trigger in getting us Israeli web entrepreneurs talking to each other, and trying to form local "support groups". The lunch event was covered in a TechCrunch post (see also Valleywag's slightly different interpretation :), and later by the local Ilana Tamir on the Nana portal (Hebrew. I was interviewed for this one).

Another nice development is the introduction of the.co.ils (Hebrew), by Yaron Orenstein and Yemi Glick, both internet veterans. ("co.il" is Israeli commercial domain name, equivalent to .com). the.co.ils is an independent blog aiming to cover the local 'net-related initiatives - existing and new. It's young (3 days old...) and fresh and looking good!

Plus, Google is opening its first Middle East R&D center in Haifa, Israel. Yes, things are heating up.

By the way, "Valley" in Hebrew is emek, and "Silicon" is tzoran. This knowledge may be useful one day :)

Technorati : Google, Hebrew lessons, Israel, TechCrunch, Yedda, the.co.ils, web2.0
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TechLunch

We had lunch yesterday with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and edgeio in Tel Aviv. It was great meeting the person behind TechCrunch, the blog that in the few months it exists has become one of the central discussion hubs for the recent wave of innovations.

Several other interesting folks were there too - Ouriel Ohayon who (in addition to his other activities) is running TechCrunch.fr, Netanel Jacobsson from Make-The-Illuminati-Seem-Like-Exhibitionists Maxthon, Frank Smadja from RawSugar and some additional folks, including Daniel Cohen from Gemini who stopped by.

Both Michael and Frank, who had early exposure to Yedda, had their fun teasing us about Yedda's public launch date. Yup, we had to push it forward a bit - we received so much important feedback on the user experience from the early testers, some of it we would like to incorporate into the build before the next round of testing, and some of it got pushed further down the road into later builds. We did feel somewhat better when Michael shared that he originally thought that edgeio would be out on October '05. I guess that while the Web's revision number was increased, some basic software developments truths still hold even in Web 2.0 :)

Technorati : Israel, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, Web2.0, Yedda
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edgeio

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch provides early details on edgeio, the aptly-named startup he co-founded with Keith Teare. Actually, due to the conflict of interest, Michael is just providing the links to coverage on edgeio by BussinessWeek Rob Hof. Additional details and manifest are available on the edgeio blog.

From the edgeio blog first post:

We will find edge published listings if they include the category or tag "listing" within the post or content. The listings will be indexed through the blog's RSS or Atom feed and aggregated with other "listings from the edge". Users of the edgeio service will be able to search through listings and communicate directly with the publisher. Edgeio will also make aggregated listings available though a web service to other Internet sites and services that would like to include edge listings.

Turns out Frank Gruber's early guesses were right on spot!

I love the idea, aggregating classified listings from "the edge". Given the unstructured nature of these listings, filtering may prove to be a challenge though. The Structured Blogging effort, spearheaded by PubSub, might prove to be very valuable in overcoming this challenge.

Early (unauthorized?) screenshots are available on Pandorasquared, and look pretty interesting. Clean, focused experience.

The customary register-for-beta is provided at www.edgeio.com.

Technorati : blog, classified, edgeio, listing, microformats, social, web2.0
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Web 1.0 logos

Stabilo Boss (?) posted to Flickr an image incorporating the logos on most of the Web 2.0 companies out there (yes, Yedda is there too! with the old logo though, instead of the cool new one).

Complexify responded with a link to his collection of "Web 1.0" logos, straight out of '99.

A quick look at these two images was enough to reach a clear conclusion - at the very least, from a graphic design point of view, Web 2.0 is a lot nicer :)

Technorati : blink, collection, flickr, logo, vintage, yedda, web1.0, web2.0
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Yedda - People. Sharing. Knowledge.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch posted a short piece on Yedda yesterday.

And the reason I mention it is that I've spent the last few months hard at work on Yedda, the company I co-founded with Avichay Nissenbaum and the amazing Yedda team.

Yedda is about people sharing knowledge. It's going to be a great place for people to ask questions, and for people to provide answers. Note the emphasize on people :-)

At this point it's still Yedda.org, but as soon as those DNS servers around the world are done synchronizing their bits, Yedda.com should also be up and running. But, to tell the truth, Yedda is very much an .org thing… Go ahead, visit it, register for the beta if you're interested, or check out the Yedda team blog.

Can you tell I'm pretty excited? :-)

Technorati : answers, knowledge, questions, web2.0, yedda
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