It has been a great year, filled with tough decisions, happy moments, cool events, meeting awesome people and more, much more.
Next Tuesday, Sep 22nd, I’ll start my new job as VP Sales and Marketing, at a SW company called IntLock, developers of CardioLog – the leading reporting and usage solution for Sharepoint portals. I’m very excited to kick off the new year at a new place, with a talented group of professionals and I can’t wait to start!
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…
RedBeaconwon 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.
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 verylittlespace to navigate and diffrentiate themselves – Winter is gonna be very interesting, that’s for sure.
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.
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.
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:
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.
This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.
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