MYBLOG by Ouriel

The Laptop/Bathroom situation

I wanted to write this post for a long time but i have just read this great article in Wired about what you should/could do when you work in a cafe with your laptop and that suddenly mother nature calls you to your duties. Working myself often in Cafes in Israel or Abroad i perfectly know the situation. In the article the writer mentions 5 solutions that do not work for me.

1. Solution 1: Leave it there on the table

2. Solution 2: Ask the person next to me to keep an eye it

3. Solution 3: Bring it in with me

4. Solution 4: Bring everything in with me

5. Solution 5: Lock the thing up

Here is my advice: for me the only thing that works, is to take care of what should be taken care of BEFORE you sit down. You might be afraid to lose this great table you spotted. I just ask someone to keep me the place and we re done.

Sorry for the unusual interruption of the blog, you can go back to work

Twitterfone now works from Israel with a local phone number

TwitterFone.com has been created by two friends of mine (Florian Sersoussi and David Marcus) in partnership with Twitter. It enables you to call with no extra charge a local phone number which is transcribed and posted to Twitter instantly (above an example of message). They just opened the service in Israel. I tested it and it works great. Twitter is becoming an interesting ecosystem generator for other companies.

ps: if you wish to have an invitation for TwitterFone just post a comment i have a few with me

Realizing time flies

I met a group of MBA students from the prestigious French business school ESCP EAP accompanied by Pr. Daniel Rouach. I was impressed by the knowledge of those students on the internet. We talked for 90 minutes about different things, TechCrunch and my job. Of course they asked me tones of questions on Israel. I am not sure how much of what i said was new to them. But what i realized is that new generations are internet generation: you don't need to explain them Facebook or Twitter or even Semantic search. They even laughed at the expression Web 3.
0 which is so useless and empty...It is just part of their life. Actually what i am realizing is that new generations have 2 lifes. Their real life and a digital one (Something i did not have when i was young). Internet is not a part of their life. It is their life. Therefore i believe the notion of "Geek" will soon disappear. What we have to learn they don't, They already do it naturally and fluently. New web apps should be design baring in mind that point.

The last thing i realized is that i am not that young any more!

ps: Thanks To Daniel Rouach for his great note and mention in IsraelValley (in French)

San Francisco's Mayor: Tel Aviv "Better" than San Francisco

Always great to hear popular figures talking about Israel so positively. The San Francisco's Mayor in visit in Israel seems impressed and has exactly the same reaction i had when i first come to Israel: the reality here is SO different from the one distributed over the media.

Bahu.com has a great new design

 

Bahu.com just released a new version of its  social network. Although i am biased as investor, and board member i have to admit they have done a great job. The quality of execution of this small team is very impressive for a company of this size. We recently met with a big company (a very big one) that could not believe Bahu was doing so much with such a little team (7 guys). I am not afraid to say that the user experience is much better than MySpace and in some way than Facebook (specially for this age group) although the user base is still small compared to those giants.

I am a big fan of the quality of execution. And i think the Bahu guys are on to something good. Keep on running!

Technorati Tags: bahu

Now i really want to shop at Diesel

Hilarious, Smart way of creating virality using counter rules of advertising (meaning by not mentionning anything related to the product)

Globes.co.il should take "EMBARGO" off their RSS titles....

Respecting Embargos (a disclosure date for a news) is important, but announcing it is one does not make sensse. if someone from the globes is reading this post or if you know someone working there can you pass the message: leaving "embargo" in the title of the RSS feed doe not look good, in addition not to be understood by most people.

I have been observing is for a while. and i don t see changes. here is the feed if you want to test it for yourself http://www.globes.co.il/WebService/Rss/RssFeeder.asmx/FeederKeyword?iID=1397

Picasso in 3D

Quite amazing i must say. via emob

New Hahlo3, officially the best browser based twitter client for iPhone

I usually do not blog about each dicovery i make on my iPhone, but i could not resist that one. Hahlo has released a new version that is simply a masterpiece to let you access and control twitter from the browser. Until now i was using TwitterMobile and PocketTweets, but this goes beyond everything.

Just pay a visit on hahlo.com on your iPhone

What the hell is SixApart is doing about Spam!! [update: SixApart is on it+ TIP]

Just a short note to say that i am not happy at all with Typepad Lately. I have been under a huge wave a spam comments. I have flagged them, i have notified their team, i have talked even with some people there that tell me they do everything they can. But i still receive spam comments every single day. Worse: i am not even notified when that happens. Worse: i don t even receive notifications when someone post a regular comment (or better said, i receive them randomly)

So Sorry about that, i know if affects your reading (this is why i am writting this note), but that goes beyond my control. If this goes on i will have to either close all my comments on this blog or migrate to an external commenting system like disqus or intensedebate (i tried half happy in the past)

bottom line: Six Apart wake up...this looks really bad. Spam should be priority NUMBER 1 before anything else

update: SixApart has taken my request very seriously. Several guys contacted me in the hour and are putting special attention to my blog to monitor the spam activity. I appreciate this kind of reactivity, i just wish for other bloggers that are on typepad could see an improvement without any "special attention". I do not expect 100% improvement, it is impossible with spam, but this should look better soon.

i actually have a suggestion for blog plateforms. Most spam come from comments of posts that are 30+ days old. would be good to have an option to close comments automatically if a post is more than 30+ days old

update 2: i assume this was not a bad suggestion, Typepad just released an option that enables that. You can see it for yourself here. It is available in the configure tab, in the feedback section

Technorati Tags: spam, typepad, sixapart, comments