OurielOhayon

TechCrunch France now in default feed in Yahoo messenger

thanks Shamir for the trust. this is great news.

France is getting Hot

• France is hot. really hot. more than tel aviv and with no air conditionning
• France is hot because back in business on football. Watch brazil France on saturday.
• But france is hot also on internet and web2 and i met for the past 48h fantastic entrepreneurs, VCs, bloggers…

The list would be too long to mention all the people i met but on the short list

Pierre Chappaz, Gilles Babinet from Eyeka (fantastic project), Yann from Fon France, my friend loic, Mihai CEO of Glowria (who will rock soon), Pascal from Aelios Finance

Tomorrow lunch with Tariq, founder of NetVibes.com and more people to meet also but not enough time…

This trip was like an electrochoc for as i did not feel that atmosphere and energy for a long time (is is combination of weather, football and internet?). France is waking up. Keep on going…

OFF TO PARIS FOR A FEW DAYS

Meet me there if you re around.

JAZZCAST: Tribute to Dark side of the moon

Roger Waters from Pink Floyd was in Israel last week. I did not go there as i prefered to go to Yaron Herman jazz session. But it just reminded how much i liked and still like some of their album among which the Dark Side of the moon.

I recorded a close version of the Great Gig in the Sky you will surely recognize as you will listen below or download it here

A voice would have been welcome in that recording (but the only option i had was mine and you don t want to listen to it) The amazing thing with that tune is that there is NO melody, but just an underneath melody. It is mainly composed of chords (and on the original of the great voice solo improvisation. The minor sounds and silent and suggested melody are of course here to evoque the “Dark Side” of the moon.

You can listen to the orignal tune in my radioblog

Don't tell my mum i am a geek freak..she thinks i am a VC

should i worry?

EXCLUSIVE JAZZCAST: meeting in personn with Yaron Herman

A lot of “first” those past 24h. Last night for the first time to listen to Yaron Herman in live Jazz concert. Thanks to Eran (big thanks man) i had the chance to spend some time with him the next day for a podcast. And this is the “first” podcast i am broadcasting here. So please apologies for imperfections (sound, me speaking maybe too much, mixing,…)

yaron (on the left) and i in a tel aviv cafe

Yaron Herman is a very talented (and very cool ) young jazz pianist and i must say i was impressed by his level of maturity for his age (24) but mostly by his unusual approach to music (he started at age 16!). We talk about how he learned jazz, his inspirations, his projects and his new disc. Enjoy the podcast (Here to download)

 

Yaron also gave me persmission to include an extract of his first album. I chose the first minutes of “Hatikva”, the israeli national song.

Yaron just released a new solo album we are talking about in this podcast. You can find here in France (at this moment out of stock….) or here.

 

 

 

 

 

All the pictures of concert and podcast with Yaron Herman here

1st post from my blackberry

If this works this is great

My Session on Web2.0 at the Technion Institute of Technology

I had a tremendous time yesterday at the Technion Institute of Technology (the israeli equivant to MIT or Stanford for science) where i was invited to talk to a group of students and entrepreneurs on Web2.0, Internet, business models, startup, technologies, TechCrunch, Lgilab and VCs.

After i managed to find my way through Haifa (believe me it is not an easy thing)i arrived at Technion university.

I discovered a very nice campus but mostly very interesting people with sharp brains and excellent awareness of the internet industry. I was positively impressed by the level of maturity of those young guys. Another indication for me that Israel has the potential to create more world class internet winners.

I recorded the whole session that you can listen below and you can download the Slide presentation (in english) i used here (most of what i said is not in the document)

For me it was more than a challenge, first because i had to present in hebrew for an hour (actually it turned out to be 2 hours including passionate debate and tough questions) a concept that is not easy to explain (even in my own native language) second because i was dead tired after a tough week and intensive meetings the whole week (specially at IVA2006).

Therefore i had some difficulty to present clearly and correctly and i hope i was not too much out of focus. I also hope the students liked it and got inspired for their next steps.

Thanks to Gilad and Tal for their invitation. I was really delighted

 

JAZZ: Tomorrow concert with Yaron Herman

If you are in israel during the following week don’t miss the concert of Brilliant jazz pianist Yaron Herman. 

Yaron Herman is israeli but lives now in France. He is one of the most brilliant and creative young jazz pianist today and his first record blew me up when i discovered him 5 years ago.

He has a nice clean site and you can even listen to some music here

What is REALLY amazing is that Yaron started to study piano at age 16 and is only 25 today!!!!!

I will go to his concert in Tel Aviv museum tomorrow 22/06 and i even might have a chance to meet him personnally soon. I really hope it happens and if so i will try to podcast him.

Concert programm is here

Announcement: WIKIO opens and i am part of it

Tonight opened Wikio, the new project of Pierre Chappaz (founder of Kelkoo sold to Yahoo for about 500mUSD but also board members of Photoways, adviser at Index Ventures and Investor in NetVibes). Wikio is in French for now but should be available very soon in 5 languages.

It is a news search engines scanning media sources and blogs in addition to be totally collaborative (publishing/sharing/voting/commenting). A news search engine managed by users (thing Google news in local + digg but scanning 10k sources includes media and blogs). The baby is really rocking and it is one of the best news search i have seen so far (first feed back is amazing)

For those who read french, Guillaume Belfiore covered it in TechCrunch France

I am also a private shareholder of Wikio (and i prefered not to publish that post on TechCrunch).

Pierre asked me sometime ago to become shareholder of Wikio with other great guys like  Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky (founder of FON), Jeff Clavier, Freddy Mini (ex ZDnet and founder of Musicme). This was announced today but happened before i joined officially LightSpeed Gemini Internet Lab.

It is an honour for me to be part of this and Wikio team has made a fantastic job.