OurielOhayon

The Specs of the perfect Birthday App

So many know the situation: your birthday arrive and you start receiving notifications from all over. It is hard to keep track of them all and even worse react correctly.

So here is a free idea for someone to create it. 

• A simple profile importer: allow somone to import all his main channel of communications in one place using the APIs (facebook connect, Twitter connect, Skype [possible?] ...)
• Filter all messages including the words Birthday, Bday, Wish,...
• Reroute all those messages to your mailbox, the central system of your communication life
• Possibility to receive all those messages 1 at a time or grouped per hour or service type (all facebook, all twitter..)
• Create a simple tool for automated answer (1-click link that creates an predefined answer to where it is coming from)
• Or just by answering the email for customized answers that will be rerouted to wherever it is coming from
• A simple dashboard to see how many messages you received, answered, waiting,...

This should save a lot of time and efforts and would also make birthday wishes more pleasant. Again

Any other idea?

Starting Again

A few things are going to change in my life in the short future. I have decided to increase the focus on my projects and will stop working at Gemini Israel funds at the end of the month, continuing to work with Lightspeed on a part time basis . Let me explain.

 

In a recent event i half joked when i was saying i was half investor, half blogger, half entrepreneur. Yes, that's a lot. Earlier this year i made an important decision (and a tough one) to stop TechCrunch France to focus on my day job and my own projects. But over time i realized that what i really want is to spend as much time as possible on my projects especially as some of them are taking a nice direction.

I recently answered to Chris Dixon asking, "Is now a good time to start a company?" that there is never a good time and always a good reason not to. But when you wake up every single day with the obsession to realize something, then it means this is a good time to start a company. This is precisely what i felt 7 years ago when i was in a comfortable job in a great company and quitted everything to start a new startup. This is also what i felt when i decided to move to Israel (a kind of restart in itself), and this is also what i felt when i was starting with TechCrunch.

Today i feel that again. And it means i will start again with a new focus.

From the 1^st of October, i will focus on my projects but i will keep a foot on the VC ground and spend half of my time working with Yoni Cheifetz and the team at Lightspeed Venture Partners. So if you are working on interesting stuff you can still reach out to me.

I don't have enough nice words to say how much i enjoyed working at Gemini Israel Funds and i am ready to bet that nearly every single entrepreneur i met could sense that in our meetings. I specially enjoyed working with Daniel Cohen who trusted from day 1 an unknown french guy, recently arrived in Israel, to take a top job in one of the best VC firms in Israel. Together (Gemini, Lightspeed and myself) made some great investments some of which i am really proud (and a new one to be announced with Gemini very soon). But i also enjoyed a lot working at Gemini. The VC business is often criticized, maybe rightly so. Looking from inside is a total different story. The DNA of this fund is unique thanks to the personality of the great people who compose it. I want to thank them for their trust, patience, and friendship. I think i enjoyed working in a Venture Firm and it is likely one day i'll come back to that full time.

One important detail: Although the Internet lab (the project i was hired for about 3.5 years ago) as such is over, Gemini and Lightspeed will continue to make early stage (seed) investments as they did before i joined. Life goes on the right way.

So what's next?

It's always difficult to extract yourself from your comfort zone and head to the unknown. I am not sure yet how my projects will roll out. They may succeed or not. Get funded or not. Maybe i will fail. Maybe not. One thing is certain i am obsessed with the idea of starting something again and i will do everything i can to make it happen.

So what are the projects i am working on? Some of them have been made public on this blog (you can find links on the right side of this blog). But i prefer not to give too many details at this stage

You know where to find me. More updates soon.

credit picture

The free idea of the day: AppTagger

Every now and then i post an idea i think is worth exploring, but that i don't have the time or the skills to develop. If someones knows anything equivalent or want to jump on it feel free (but remember me if you get rich with it...)



The idea is very simple: in our digital life we have more and more services that we use. Some of them are on our desktop and some of them in the cloud. I find myself installing more and more apps on my mac. Apps that are really well done but that i am not using on a daily basis.

I end up with tones of apps on my computer, but can't remember their name and what they do. Sometimes the name is explicit enough and i can deduct what it does just by crawling the app folder: AppCleaner for example speaks for itself. But many times i have no clue. And i find myself going to the app folder trying to remember which programms does what.

I recently found a method that solves that issue: i add a few keywords description in the "info folder" (avail on right click get info). Those keywords are then indexed in spotlight, the mac search engine and i can find them just by writting the keywords i need. For example: photo editing would give me "Gimp" or "PhotoShop"

The problem

In a word the problem is to find more easily what you have already used.

There are 2 problems to the prior method described above: you need to do that manually for each single soft. And you need to be good enough at guessing the keywords that characterize your needs.

The idea: An automated application tagger

A simple app that detects all your installed soft and populate the description and keyword in the file information about the soft which would be indexed in spotlight. That way i would not need to search for a soft but browse by need.

A kind of internal delicious for applications. This idea is worth for Windows too. And i am not even mentionning the iPhone where you get easily lost. It can be built easily by crawling the app directories out there that have already done the job.




As an extension it could become an personal app search engine, with results taken from your desktop and from your delicious account. If for eg i need photo editing, it would serve me desktop results: Gimp or Online > picnik.

Those results could be split in applications i have already used/tagged and those i don't know, which could become the revenue model (lead generation)

Do you like it? Anything equivalent out there? Someone wants to jump in?

Technorati Tags: mac application software delicious productivity search

Twitter as a platform

This is no secret: i am totally captured by Twitter and the new windows of opportunities to interact with people and services. Services in particular

More and more companies, this is not a secret understand the benefits of using twitter as a platform, just like with Facebook. The only difference is that you have to be very careful in the execution since the Twitter can be very intrusive.

For example some news papers using RSS2Twitter like feature let you get alerts via twitter but that can become disturbing if a news arrive every 30 sec

I am now a DJ a FoxyTunes and i like what they did with Twitter because they give you control on what you can publish. FYI i am a beta DJ with Fred Wilson and Chris Messina on their new service.

Yedda is also using interestingly Twitter. Wefi will do that too very soon

Interestingly i realized that those 3 companies are Israeli: is there something special about twitter in Israel?

I guess that if you are a service that intend to use twitter think how you should give control to your users on what is published in their twitter account.

If i was available today i would seriously think about starting off a company around Twitter and other micro blogging services.

To finish: a smart guy created a FeedFlare Twit this for your feedburner account. I added it on all my blogs. Now you can twit directly a link you are reading or enjoying from my blog RSS

Technorati tags: twitter

ps: i will blog more and more about twitter from now on since this has become one of my first area of interest before online video and search

Wanna make easy money? think skins

This is clearly a big business trend. It was mainly due to mobile phones at first but later one to iPod. Customization of your favorite “toy” is becoming a good lucrative business.

We start to be surrounded by all kinds of gadgets that make also what we are and express some aspect of our personnality. But problem. they are all made the same. So why no just add a twist and give you what you need to make it really yours?

Just type iPod skins in Google and see the number of results to understand what i am talking about. I recently spotted 2 great ideas going that way

Tribbes is creating super skins for your laptop. I think i will by one soon.

Fantastic Brown is creating cool skins to customize your Nespresso machine

Those items are not expensive in absolute but compare to their cost of fabrication and light marketing i would say there is enough margin to make a really lucrative business.

So if you wanna start in that, just spot or anticpate a very popular gadget and create accessories for it. My favourite company in that field is Skinit

Some do it also in digital world with creation of templates for your site or your blog

My bet: iPhone will be massive / twitter should be a lead too

 

Tags: ipod, trend, design, accessories, templatemonster, fantastic+brown, tribbes

Someone please make urgently predicti.icio.us

I am now convinced i was right. A social service around predictions could be hot. So many bloggers (except me maybe, i prefered to have others doing it) are trying to make predictions for 2007. (also here in French)

For some reasons bloggers feel empowered of prediction abilities. Weird and amazing at the same time…

For those who’d ask the picture is that of Nostradamus

technorati tags: predictions 2007 pronostics

One free idea for 2007: social network on predictions

When i see the number of people trying to make predictions and wishes for 2007 at this moment of the year on the blogosphere, i can’t help myself to think that a small website that would aggregate all of those and become the reference for predictors could be a good idea

Not a VC business with IPO at the end. Just a plain good idea with maybe some good buzz and a few easy dollars to make on adsense.

Call it whatever (predicti.cio.us), pull a social network a good text/pic/video editor, ranking mechanism, comments, trackbacks, RSS, widget to export you predictions to your blog or even use blogs APIs to simulatneously post in the website and your blog. That’s it. Fast to set. Cheap to set

it could even be that 43things would be willing to white label their technology for that

Have no time to do it. But if you do, the idea is yours. Prepare it for next year…

If you make some money out of it, invite me for a beer

Here is my prediction for 2007: someone will launch this idea

update: my prediction did not take long to happen…well not exactly. Mashable is encouraging people to post their predictions…

If i was working at Flickr...

One feature i am dying to have at Flickr is selective sharing. All i can do right now is share privately with predefined groups (friends/family) or publicly. But i would like to have the possibility to share photos/groups of photos with only one personn some pictures or with groups of people that i could create simply on the fly(out of an imported contact list for example)

if someone works at flickr and read me, please work on it (and answering, “use the email function” is not a good answer). I never saw that feature in any pic site although i believe it is a great one.

ON A NEWEST BLOG ARCHITECTURE

I just realized the other that most of the interesting posts i wrote will hardly be discovered by a new reader of this (or any other blog). This is quite scary put in regards with the energy it requires. When you publish a book a reader has the chance to know all you want to talk about. NOT WITH A BLOG

Blogs are not built to discover most of the interesting content you are writting. Isn’t it scary? let me explain.

A blog is a daily diary. You update your thoughts and your reader daily or regularly get to know what you have to say. Some of your readers read you everyday, some every week, some once in a while and most of them arrive through Google.

According to my estimation if you are not a A-Lister (TechCrunch, Boing Boing or Scoble are part of those) most of your audience (at least 40%) will arrive through Google requests pointing to one of the posts of your blog.

This leads all of us to read blog in a chronological way. Meaning that the lifespan of a post is very likely to be very short. Meaning that your are not leveraging ALL the potential of your blog. And you know how you can find out this easily: you never get comments.

Blogs as they are built and written today creates an inconvenience that i will try to explain here. As well as giving some ideas of solutions.

• Indeed if most of your audience comes for the first time by a search engine they will read your post and in the best case will get hooked and will bookmark your blog and start reading it FROM that day (even if you are an A-lister blog) 
• If they arrive on your blog by recommandation then they will start to read it from the last day it is updated.
• Some posts are directly linked to the news or a specific date and will loose interest right after that date (results of a sport game, elections, …) some are not and could be interesting to read over time (a book review for example)
• Some posts in your blog will also drive much more interest and interaction than other (comments, trackbacks….) but will get lost over time in the mass of posts.
• Blogs architectures (because of chronolical structure) do not allow to browse/explore very well the posts that drove most interest and the ONLY way to find them is by scrawling categories or calendar.

So what is missing to better explore a blog?

• a post index: a way to see for a period of time a list of all post titles that were published. Something that could be called “most popular posts”
• a interest ranking index: a way to know from first page what where over time posts that generated most interest (comments, trackbacks, links
• a better way to browse blog over time and categories: faster blog browsing including a time tree to know how many posts over a week, month period.
• a new smart tagging mechanism based on time factor relevancy that would be able to know if a post is related to a specific date or not. this would enable readers to get to know all non-time related post
• A tools/widget for blog editors to showcase what they think their best posts are

Those features would help someone that arrives for the fisrt time, out of the reason he came first (google link, recommandation, …) to have a flavour of your blog in 10 minutes instead of having to wait another month to have that confirmation or spend 30 minutes crawling it.

If i was Typepad/MySpace/ Blogger execs or just an entrepreneur i would look in that way.

if you like the story you can digg it

note: i am not referring to WORDPRESS that has all the free plugins to do the above but to mainstream blog plateforms that drive 80% of the traffic

 

PS: last time i gave some indication on improving blogs it leads a few month later to cocomments or co.mments (maybe worth looking at then )

TV ON INTERNET WILL BE BIG

When i see the level of interest my post on FREE TVs ONLINE has been generating for the past 2 days i only can ecourage entrepreneurs to look more into that direction. I am not talking about another YouTube but about a true legal service enabling streaming of all TV channels worlwide premium or ad supported.