OurielOhayon

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Win a Free ticket for LeWeb3 conference on iDrink

We are giving out on iDrink a free ticket (worth 1136 euros) to assist LeWeb3 conference in Paris next Dec 11/12. LeWeb3 is the largest (and probably one of the best) European conference on the internet. Check out the program or the workshop sessions (i am moderating some of those) you will understand why.

All the details are explained in the blog post featured on top of the site. You have until next monday 12th november to participate and tuesday 13th we will announce the winner. in order to participate you need to join iDrink and follow the rules.

Last year a few isrealis were attending among which...Shimon Peres who gave a memorable and very much acclaimed keynote. From what i hear this year there will be a lot of israelis going there.

Good luck

ps: special thanks to my friends loic and geraldine (the organizers)

Technorati Tags: idrink, leweb3

Congrats Yaron

This is a great news for the Israeli Internet ecosystem. Quigo was founded by Yaron Galai who created Outbrain in which we (internet lab) invested

I can only hope we do as good or even better

Technorati tags: quigo, yarongalai, outbrain

Yaron Herman: Toxic - Full Version

Sometime ago i shared a few seconds of the jazz version of Toxic (Britney Spears) by Yaron Herman. He allowed me to share with you the full version. Enjoy

 

 

 

ps: his disc is doing not bad at all and he told me his agenda his fully booked over the next weeks.

Technorati Tags: britney spears, yaron herman

Execution is the key: 5 Simple ideas to track your competition

One of the key elements for a startup is to know its environment composed among others of competitors (direct or not). It is very hard to get intelligence on what a startup is doing for obvious reasons: the company is young and has very little public track record.

I am asked so often about that question that i decided to disclose some tricks i used (not all of them of course) over the years and that prove successful (i am saving you the obvious stuff like reading their blog, tracking technorati, reading news....)

• Who are your competitor: 7/10 people i met don't know their competition. If you don't know who they are you should and to find that use internet directories like BuzzShout or museum of Modern Betas. This is usually not enough. find blog posts about one of them, usually in comments you'll find way more (check any random post on TechCrunch for example)
• Get Analytics: do not stop at Alexa that is not reliable and even wrong most of the time. Get free alternatives like compete or quantcast. The best data is from Nielsen Comscore or Hitwise. This data is not free. So one tip: track their blogs, they are full of free public data.
• Track job boards: the startup page but also major vertical job boards (check out crunchboard, amazing how much you can learn from it) so you can see if they recruit (usually a good sign) and what kind of skills they need to build their company
• Attend conferences attended by your competitor: usually they will gladly share presentation if they sponsor including details. If you can't go there check out the video podcasts or slide presentation available on the net
• Meet them: this is often the most obvious and less used approach. A competitor is not an enemy and they will probably answer positively to a request for meeting. Of course you won't talk about your respective business plans. But if you have a good intuition you can guess a lot of good stuff out of it.

All those tricks are free and can be used right away. There is a lot more ways to find out very specific infos. I could share them, but then i would have to kill you :)

Corporate blogging is a tough thing

see why here in one picture

Open thought on OpenSocial; Why is Google really doing this

Google made a very smart move by enabling social apps to interconnect via the APIs they are providing. Soon all participants will be able to create or host social apps for third parties, not just for Facebook. This is exactly what the world needs. And Google once again did it. I won't add much to what is already said (discussion here)

However i just have why question that i could not find the answer to until this morning: "Why is Google doing that?" i mean, what is Google really getting out of all of this?

After all those will be sets of Apis where Google will not appear on the front end. I think there is one obvious answer and one less obvious

• There will be able to leverage a new real advertising estate within those new built social apps that will profit to hosts/developer and....Google of course
• They will be able to build the best people search in world by having direct access to the largest social graph in the world and being able to get very quickly to a massive critical size of users across platforms

Do you see anything else?

Technorati Tags: google, opensocial

iDrink in Yediyot Ahronot. Are we geeks?

The israeli newspaper just published an article on iDrink called "iGeek". since i can't really read hebrew i asked my self if the title was any representative of the crowd that is attending iDrink. I am still in search of the true meaning of the word "Geek".

What i can say is that most people attenting iDrink are passionnate about the internet (this is our slogan on our site btw). They come because they are curious, because they want to interact and they want to connect, know more and sometimes do business. Is this being a Geek? Maybe.

I see the article makes a parallel with the branding of Apple products. This was indeed part of the rational behind the name. "iDrink" was born in my mind out of several thing:

i for Israel
i for internet
i for interaction

Thanks to Yuval for the article. What do you think about it by the way since i can't understand it ?