OurielOhayon

Video: One of the most inspiring speech i have ever heard

A must see for all entrepreneurs. Actually for anyone. By Steve Jobs of course.

Technorati tags: stevejobs, apple, stanford

What email sound alert do you prefer?

I was tired of this sound.

Boring Alert that everyone has

So i found a new cool one

Cool Alert less stressful

i found it there and it is really cool

Technorati Tags: sound, email, alert, cool, free, outlook

The WOW effect of Imagini

Sometimes i get this WOW effect. Last time was for ENSO. Today is for the new imagini service called Christmas Gift Finder which suggests you gift ideas based on a short visual test. The user interface is just stunning (maybe a bit heavy on top right).

I also suggest you take their personality test which is really well done and will draw your visual DNA in a few seconds. You can also compare with millions of other users which is fun.

The user experience registration process and simplicity of the service deserves a full 10/10

 

Read my VisualDNA™     Get your own VisualDNA™

 

Technorati tags: imagini, friends, discovery, christmas

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

10 things i learned from Microsoft VC summit

I attended yesterday the annual Microsoft VC summit. Congrats to Barak Shein who put up a great event. I learned a lot more about what Microsoft is doing. Here are some of the points:

1. Microsoft is an incredibly successful company aware of its weaknesses and working on them
2. Microsoft never had a bad quarter in 30 years
3. They are working with startups at the earliest stage from the moment they think there is something good to do
4. There is a strong intention to shift the culture of the company and move away from the arrogance of a market leader
5. Microsoft is doing a lot on search and advertising but is not there yet at all. They say it is a long term game. I am not sure about that
6. Microsoft R&D center in Israel grew from 100 to 450 engineers in one year. WOW
7. No one has a clue about what the web is going to look like in 5 years. and even less what the next killer app is going to be
8. Mobile Web is the next big thing and Cellular Carriers are here to stay,
9. ...but what they don t understand is that they are not content and service providers but only content and services enablers. ISPs have understood that already Carriers will get there too with the mobile web (this one is a personal take)
10. If you had to ask me what is missing most to Microsoft: speed. Speed in their development and roll out cycle. Speed in their application (not talking only Windows/office but most of their web property). This is where Google is today better

Technorati Tags: microsoft

Nieslen finally understands Page View is not ruling anymore

I wrote a post a few months ago, inspired by a post from Steve Rubel on the "Death of Page View".  I was writing

I think it is about time marketers and media agency pay more (REALLY MORE) attention to other parameters like loyalty/churn, user lifetime, time spent on website, time spent per page, ability to lead conversion, level of influence, advertising memory and awareness generation, and other things that we are discovering as we speak.

I am happy to see that Nielsen, a leading online metrics company, has just announced they will finally rank websites according to something else than just page views which is for me far from being a good indicator for evaluating a media and a company.

Although Nielsen already measures average time spent and average number of sessions per visitor for each site, it will start reporting total time spent and sessions for all visitors to give advertisers, investors and analysts a broader picture of what sites are most popular.

I am not saying measuring page views is useless but ranking companies by page view as an indicator of quality is less and less relevant for at least two reasons

• More and more websites use technologies like ajax which saves page refresh
• More and more companies game the system by artificially forcing users to see more pages or use a auto-refresh rate of pages that will increase the counter (think Facebook invitation system)

In the short term some big companies are going to suffer from this, i believe Google will be first, but in the long run i think it will be a fair way to analyze the web.

I hope other metrics company will go the same way (Comscore is starting to do it too, HitWise,...).

Finally i believe a new need will be to measure the traffic of a web property outside its native website and obviously page view will be totally irrelevant : i am referring to widgets of course which enable user to use a service without having to go to the service or even open your browser. Quantcast has just announced they would do that. But i would prefer more reliable 3rd parties which are de facto used in media department to do that also

Technorati Tags: nielsen, metrics, quantcast, page view, statistics

Steve jobs is a pimp

Steve, sorry for the provocative title, but today i had enough!

I love the iPod but i hate this “proprietary” world they are building around it. Not only iTunes (to which i already found a substitute) but also with the accessories industry

I lost twice the iPodUSB cable (yes i know twice is not a mistake anymore this is stupid…) so i had to buy a mere USB cable

I just paid 79 Shekels for that. 79 is about 14.4 Euros. Even more expensive in France. No need to say that cost of this must be max about 1USD shipping not included.

Sorry to say that, but i can understand why i need to pay more for an iPod, but for a stupid cable with an apple logo on it i feel totally fooled (700% gross margin is a bit high).

Steve Jobs, please help your customers keep on loving your company/brand more by making them pay more for the right thing.

Here is my suggestion: for cable use Standard connexions (eg one here). This will also save time to all stupid people like me of where to find your product (i spent half day in Tel Aviv looking for it and internet websites hardly sell them) and leave more money to buy your other great products.

Tags: ipod, cable, steve+jobs, usb

iPhone was born in Israel

As my colleague Daniel Cohen points out, the iPhone was a product and brand born in Israel and acquired later on by Cisco

More details here

Tags: iphone, israel, brand, cisco, apple

Man, top news on Digg home page today

Today is going to be tough for my blog. My iPod/YamiPod post got on Digg and is not #1 position in Tech home page.

My Stats are already getting crazy….I am going to experience again the great unfair Digg Effect

You don’t know what the digg effect is? check out here

I can finally get rid of iTunes

I love the iPod but i HATE iTunes. Not convenient for synchronizing in multiple computers, slow, heavy in ressources for movies you have to convert to their stupid format….

Thanks to Christian from ProCab i have (very lately) discovered YamiPod, a freeware, developped by a student that enables you to manage your music  AS YOU WANT. You can for example add music by simple drag and drop from your folder, the soft is fast, read all features heres.

The KILLER feature. You can copy music from iPod to your computer, bye bye stupid DRM/or other rules that do not let me copy music i bought from my iPod to another computer (at work for example) Works on mac/linux/windows

Now i am friend again with my iPod. Christian, you saved my iPod life

Digg that story here.

update: There is more on the subject here

update 2: you can now share your iPhone apps with anyone easily. Try Appsfire.com we just created