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Israeli Start-Ups ROCK @ TC50

Published September 16, 2009 Uncategorized 2 Comments
Tags: anyclip, ayelet noff, OpenTable, orli yakuel, redbeacon, tc50, TechCrunch50, trollim, Yael Beeri, Yaron Orenstein

The TechCrunch50 Conference just wrapped up in SF and 3 Israeli (ok, not full Israeli: 1 is semi-Israeli and 1 is third-Israeli) Start-Ups took center stage! I tried following the action as it unfolded, paying special attention to the updates of tweeple friends at SF: Yael Beeri, Yaron Orenstein, Orli Yakuel, Ayelet Noff and Sharel Omer. Also created a ‘TC50 Israel‘ search in my tweetdeck, but there was just too much content to follow…

RedBeacon won Best SU at TC50, receiving 50,000 US$ and most important world recognition. Trollim won Best International SU and AnyClip won Audience Favorite. About the winners (from TC50 site):

RedBeacon is a new service making its public debut today at TechCrunch50 that further streamlines this process by bringing the OpenTable model of online transactions to much broader spectrum of services. During their presentation on stage yesterday at TC50, RedBeacon showed an end-to-end demo, from deciding what you want (cakes) to delivering them, in person, to the audience at TC50 – very cool!!

Trollim lets coders battle for programming superiority, by createing a competition platform and social network for programmers that assesses their coding skills through coding battles. Users are identified as “trolls” on the platform and once a user signs up, he or she fills out a profile that includes their age, location and coding language skills (C++, Ruby, PHP etc.). Trollim then gives the user 3 to 6 pieces of code, or a “test,” to fix to asses their baseline level of skill and based on the results of this test, the user is given a skill level of 1 though 5.

AnyClip is a Search Engine for Movie Clips. People reference scenes all the time in their daily lives, and on the web it’s not uncommon for a blogger to accentuate their post with a particularly relevant clip. But for their popularity, there still isn’t an established site that’s known as the place to find a movie clip. AnyClip wants to be that place.

TC50: The Video (video by animoto, music by Chamillionaire).

Orange StartApp – iPhone Contest

Published September 14, 2009 Uncategorized 2 Comments
Tags: apple, cellcom, iphone, israel, Mobile phone, pelephone

It’s no secret that Apple’s iPhone has revolutionized the mobile scene, in all three fronts: device makers, cellular operator and consumers. In Israel there are some 50,000 iPhones, all purchased abroad of course – the local Apple distributor, iDigital, is not bringing the coveted device.

In July 2009 the 3 largest cellular operators (Cellcom, Orange and Pelephone) in Israel announced they’ll be bringing the iPhone to Israel, and since then the country is in mini-chaos. Rumors are flying, prices are still un-known, apps developers are in high demand, marketing campaigns are on hold and everyone are waiting to see when will the iPhone hit the stores and at what cost. Presumably each operator committed to selling 100,000 devices a year (300,000 together), a serious amount – considering Israel’s best-seller, Nokia’s N95, sold 150,000 devices in 18 months. Since Apple are overseeing the marketing campaign, the main differentiators in my opinion will be the overall packaging and service – which operator will create the best eco-system around it to support its iPhone users.

Orange will kick-off an interesting contest next week, Orange StartApp, in which 3 winning developers will receive 10,000 US$ each and 1 of them will get a full Orange campaign to promote its iPhone application in Israel. The contest will start Monday Sep. 21st for 3 months (until Dec. 21st), and any developer with an account at Apple Store can submit his/her applications in 1 of 3 categories: Entertainment, Business and Location and Local Content.

Orange definitely took a step ahead of the pack, by harnessing the power of the developers community – one of the iPhone’s key success factors. The operator that will build a bigger eco-system around it, will probably win more votes, not to mention ‘calling shot-gun’ on the local developers community. With Apple controlling every move of the launch, the 3 operators have very little space to navigate and diffrentiate themselves – Winter is gonna be very interesting, that’s for sure.

Asaf Ramon

Published September 13, 2009 Uncategorized 1 Comment
Tags: asaf ramon, crash, F16, Ilan Ramon, Israeli Air Force, אילן רמון, אסף רמון, חיל האוויר

God works in mysterious ways and although I’m not a Hasidic Jew I do believe in some higher power. Sometimes, that higher power is just too much to handle.

Captain Asaf Ramon, son of Colonel Ilan Ramon – Israel’s first Astronaut, died today as his F-16 crashed near Kiryat Arba. Asaf graduated from Pilots School with distinction 2.5 months ago and was at advanced training stages. Only 6 moths ago, in March 2009, during the last stages of Pilots School, Asaf made a successful emergency landing after his Training Plane’s engine stalled mid-air.

Asaf – I hope you’ll find joy and peace where ever you are, watching over us from high in the clouds, reunited with your father. RIP.

Links:
Asaf Ramon dies today at IAF crash – Haaretz.com (English)
Ramon’s family tragedy – Haaretz.com (English)
Asaf earns his wings – YouTube.com (Hebrew)

Scratch the N98 – give me a X6!

Published September 5, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
Tags: cellular, facebook, Handhelds, iphone, nokia n97, Touchscreen, X6 Nokia, XpressMusic, אייפון, יורוקום-נוקיה, סלולר, פייסבוק

My bottom-line of the Nokia N97 review I posted last month was:

The N97 is a big leap for Nokia, but a small step compared to the mobile scene and the market’s expectations of the device. I can only hope Nokia will accept my feedback, because I believe the N98 can lead the pack, instead of merely joining it.

I’m glad to see Nokia has adopted some of my feedback, and although not introducing N98, they made some noise in Stuttgart this past week.

[picture of Nokia X6 from Mashable.com]

And allow me to amend my bottom-line: scratch the N98, give me the new Nokia X6. With the X6 Nokia introduced a phone that can truly lead the pack instead of just catching up. Although the X6 is officially the XpressMusic 5800 successor, its looks and specs are right at the top:

the screen is capatitive (like the iPhone)
keyboard is gone
technical specs are roughly the same as the N97’s (with that huge 32GB of storage space)
its thinner, and BEAUTIFUL!

My only complaint still pertains to the CPU, which at 434MHz and 128MB I doubt it can match the iPhone’s 600MHz with 256MB (3Gs). Why not use the 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU deployed at the new N900? Not clear. And that is really a shame because Nokia has taken a big step with the X6 and introduced a phone that in my opinion can become a true iPhone Killer.

What the F**K is Social Media. 1 Year Later.

Published September 1, 2009 Uncategorized Closed
Tags: business, facebook, marketing, Marta Kagan, social media, twitter, טוויטר, פייסבוק, שיווק דיגיטלי

Mornings are an excellent time to read, write and share. Shortly after the morning coffee and toast I head over to my GReader and start browsing the feeds, in a pre-defined order.
Ahuvah Berger recently joined the Blonde 2.0 team, which means we get to enjoy her super writing skills at least once a week (hopefully more dear.. ;-). After her last week’s post on Engaging the Masses comes this post, continuing where she left off, and linking to a wonderful deck at slideshare by Marta Kagan, What the F**K is Social Media. One Year After. In a long (83p) yet light presentation Marta goes over the basics of SM, adding some cool pictures and stats to back her points and strengthening her bottomline (p 53):
SO PLEASE, STOP F**KING AROUND AND GET SERIOUS ABOUT HARNESSING THE POWER OF THIS THING.

Slide 44 onwards highlights some business insights that are relevant to any company, like ‘93% of social media users believe a company should have a presence in social media’ and ‘85% of social media users believe that a company should go further than just having a presence and actually interact with its customers’. Innovative approaches, I know..

The entire deck is hilarious (although the language might not appeal to everyone) and the 83 slides are going fast, but all convey an important message, and I only hope that a fraction of the 128,000 views this deck received were made by corporations and business executives and not just by us marketers – we’re already advocating this F**King thing too.. 😉
[RSS subcribers: Please read this post at my blog to view the embed deck]

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

Dvir Reznik | The (old) Blog

Archive Page 24

Israeli Start-Ups ROCK @ TC50

Orange StartApp – iPhone Contest

Asaf Ramon

Scratch the N98 – give me a X6!

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