OurielOhayon

Twitter Geek joke of the day

apologies to all. i won't do it again (click to enlarge)

Valse avec Bashir: Merci la France!

I was disappointed at the Oscars, but the brilliant French people (ok i am a little biaised) recognized the brilliance of the Israeli movie Waltz with Bashir. It won yesterday the Cesar (french oscar) of best foreign movie.

Bravo to Ari Folman, i hope to interview soon when he s back to Israel!

Technorati Tags: waltzwithbashir movie israel cesar award

Tweetizen: nice web app for smart twitter usage

Since twitter is growing fast, once of the pains Twitter is not solving for now is the growing noise at all levels. For now they let other services do that for them. By noise i mean things that do not really matter to you. I discovered this morning Tweetizen, a brand new new clean service that helps you find on the go messages of interests for you.




The way they do it is very simple: they let you create groups by keywords, this group will represent a filter of the twitter messages published. For example you can create a Tech group with the tags: Google, youtube, Twitter will only see messages about this group. Once this is set up you are all done. All you need to is focus on the feed which can be auto updated. They have also predefined a few groups so you can start off right away (sports, politics,....)

They are a few key features missing

• Filtering the groups on my friends timeline only
• Suggested keywords
• Search for existing groups
• Notifications of unread messages by group
• Groups by users would be also very useful i believe (just like in Microplaza.com that i like also a lot)
  

But the interface is easy to use and nicely designed. I believe that for succeeding a twitter app should as much as possible avoid taking you out of your current Twitter Interface. What would be great is that Tweetizen would enable notification via Twitter itfself by letting getting subcribe to a virtual twitter users (@Tweetizen/mygroup). So i don t have to come back to the site.




From the site the official launch date is march 1st. But you can already enjoy it.

Btw: just a tip for web app creators, if you want to notify bloggers on your existence, sometimes a smart twitter follow notification is enough. I received this am an alter of @Tweetizen following me. Thanks to Topify i saw what the service was about on my email and got curious. Checked it. And that's it.

Technorati Tags: Twitter Tweetizen

Google will buy Twitter

There, i said it. It is marked. I have been saying that for weeks on twitter and before the series C round happened with Benchmark and IVP i have had a private discussion with a very respected VC in the Israeli scene. He asked me who could buy twitter: i answered without a doubt Google. Why? John Battelle has today a post on he matter.

Twitter is a new generation tool for conversation but mainly for search and discovery which is Google's Business. I find for example myself asking more and more questions on Twitter and getting very high quality answers. Things Google would never be able to bring me, even if i was investing half an hour of expert search. Like i said Twitter is the best Q&A service

Some say it is a threat to Google, i think this is ridiculous. You don t change a mindset and a reflex just like that. But it is a great complementary service. I would love to see my Gmail split in 2 parts with my mail on one side and Twitter on the other. Twitter is already occupying a big part of my email with alerts, notification and upcoming Topify.com (disclosure a service i have been working on) and other gadgets. This would be just the logical evolution of the email as a social dashboard

But twitter would be a must addition to Google open social and Google Android. The recently acquired Jaiku was dead the day it was acquired because it just did not have the community traction, one other thing Google can't ignore.

So the question is not "if" but "when". Probably not in the next 6 months. I assume the moment they start to push their business model (probably search related), Things will heat up. And even if the founders declare they won't sell, it is always difficult to resist the temptations of a big check.

Let's see what happens

Technorati Tags: google twitter

Twitter: the land of friendly competitors

Isn't it nice? Discovered via @labnol and via @orli

The Appstore friendly for business? Think twice

Apple definitely hit something big with the AppStore generating millions of dollars of sales. Its revenue sharing is also fair to the developpers. But when you look at it closely you understand that there are a few major flaws in the system that make the AppStore business unfriendly. Like any sales channel, there are a few simple things on which you need visibility to manage successfully your business as a product manufacturer.

The most important one is the relation with the end customer. I remember having started my career in big FMCG firms (Reckitt, Danone), manufacturers had to deal with retailers in order to get some field feedback beyond pure sales number. Retailers eventually control all the key parameters for sales, even if by way of negotiation manufacturers can influence this or that: listing, pricing policy, merchanding, promotional campaigns and other things...Eventually the manufacturer has to take the retailer word for granted, and of course this is not enough. Since the retailer claims he owns the customer, he also owns the intelligence around him and rarely share it. Of course Manufacturers do not stop here and contract with 3rd party companies that can provide better intelligence: Nielsen is one of those companies able to give you a better point of sales snapshot on pricing, merchandising and even competition but those are based on samples.

With the Appstore things are very similar maybe a little worse. Once your app has been approved there is very little you can actually do to control how your business will go. All you have to do, is pray that things go well and if you are good in online promotion you can drive better sales to the Appstore. But you'll do it blindly. For example

• you do not have any form of control on the merchandising of your app, meaning how it is displayed in the Store vs other Apps. For example how can i get on the home page, are there internal mechanisms that help me do that?
• you do not have any form of promotion mechanism if you want to do a try and buy, or offer your app for free or for a demo. For example many app creators sent me generic apple vouchers to buy their app to try it, but i could have bought anything i wanted
• you do not have ANY information on the customer buying your app unless you ask him to register once he installed your app. Apple won t share the iTunes profile
• you do not have any form of virtual advertising to promote yourself in iTunes explaining the large numbers of online app directory. You can if you want embed a 3rd party analytics system (like Pinch Media) to understand how your app is used but this is not enough
• you do not have any form of analytics or dashboard with the activity around your app (except download and sales), For eg: how many users visited my page, how much time they spend on it. Did they buy the app on the computer appstore or on the mobile appstore?
• you do not have a test platform to really measure the pricing elasticity, except by doing it manually, day after day

In other words, the Appstore is a point of sales on which you have rather little way to understand what's really happening and influence really your performance. You have to rely on outbound maketing activities.

A very small % of the apps are really making big money. most apps dont deserve to make a lot but i am sure many would do much better if the app store what not a black box and if it was a little more "open" and feature rich. It could really become a great efficient market place. But, beyond all appearances, it is not.

Are you an iphone app creator? do you agree? do you have more comments or suggestions to make to apple?

update: Fred Wilson in the comments and on his blog is pointing us to a great presentation by pinch media, that only some good analytics tool could lead to. I recommend you read it below

iPhone AppStore Secrets - Pinch Media

View more presentations from pinchmedia. (tags: pinch media)

Technorati Tags: apple itunes iphone appstore

DoubleTwist my new favourite app on Mac

I just can't really explain you well why DoubleTwist is so great. You just have to try it for yourself to understand why this app is so cool to share content from you computer or connected device with your friends. The user experience is gorgeous. It is for now missing two key elements. iPhone compatibility (already available on windows) and Twitter integration. The mac version has just been out






What Doubletwist does is a very simple thing: it spots content on your computer and enables you to share it online with your friends. It is perfectly integrated with your contact book and scans well your media file and it works so fast. It reads all the format. You can publish in a click content to Facebook/Flickr/Youtube or just mail a private link. It hosts and streams the file online. Just try it (or see the demo)

I wonder how they will eventually manage all the hosting and bandwith. I guess a premium version is on the way.

update: the news is now on techmeme. 1st reactions are rather ++

Technorati Tags: doubletwist

Oscars 2009: a little disappointed

So i was not far from a 100% good bets when i predicted a couple of weeks ago the oscars winner. Slumdog took all it could. Kate Winslet is the best actress and Penelope Cruz secnond best. WALL E is best animation.

But Mickey Rourke did not take best actor. Sean Penn did. He is good in milk but nowhere near the outsanding performance of Rourke in the Wrestler.

And Waltz With Bashir did not make it. Everybody was expecting it. Even /Film, the TechCrunch for movies is saying so.

For me the oscar awards ceremony is a kind of black box. I wonder what would be the results if the choice was given to a group of movie lovers, not involved in the movie business.

Technorati Tags: oscar

No oscar for "Waltz with bashir" according to a leaked results

If that was not because the Oscar of the best foreign movie did not go to "Waltz with Bashir" i would put a very high rate to this unverified leaked Oscar winners list for 2009. Looking closer (here full) at the document i would say it is likely to be a fake (paper effects...) although the results are themselves very credible. Actually very close to my own bets.


Let's see later on. Whoever did that was very smart about knowing what to do to generate buzz (someone in the organization to bust TV rating??).

The worst case scenario that i can imagine: this is actually a fake, casually created but just happening to be correct. then everyone will think it was actually leaked...

update: looks like it is a fake.



Technorati Tags: oscar movie buzz leak list results

FoxTab a must have Firefox plugin made in Israel

I stumbled upon Foxtab a few days ago, and this has become one of my favourite Firefox Plugins. You can see a screencast of what it does below: it helps you navigate through your tabs in a convenient and gorgeous way. It will remind you of the cool experience of Cooliris for pictures but also of the Vista Aero app browsing.

Screencasts and videos online

I read somewhere that Firefox 3.1 should come with something similar. But i doubt this will be as nice.

Now the cool part is that this plugin is just in very early alpha and more is coming soon. The even better part is that it is made here in Israel and i am proud to see that we are here able to such a great level of execution. The founder told me more and better is coming up soon.

Technorati Tags: foxtab browser plugin cooliris