Get To Business.

I just finished reading a post that popped up in my feed about another Vista user ‘upgrading’ back to Windows XP. This is nothing new, I have read such depressing stories before (and people are getting more creative). I got my first taste of Vista just about a month ago, and I can confirm its suckiness is at an all time high.

It’s been over a year since Vista launched, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. Windows 98 and XP had their launch problems and users were slow to migrate, but it was never bad when the it was such a consensus that upgrading to Vista is actually a major downgrade. It’s hard for me to see a good way for Microsoft to resolve this. Besides fixing all the compatibility issues (which is a MAJOR undertaking), do they have any intention of reworking the UI? What if this version of Windows never replaces XP as the main Windows product?

Bill Gates has basically admitted “Yep, it sucked ass” in this video. For how long does will this farce continue?

I feel this is the time for a major OS developer to come forth. Loyalty to Microsoft is at an all time low, with users hanging on to their old (and sometimes key-expired) version of Windows XP. A serious player could make a major splash and maybe even make a dent with a good product (And sorry Linux people, mainstream users are not ready for command-line goodness). Maybe if someone took some Linux build (Ubuntu anyone?) and made a commercial ready product out of it? One can only hope.

Jason Calacanis, the founder of Mahalo has written an interesting post about How to save money running a startup. Reactions to this post were all over the board, from supporting his view (here and here) to labeling him a mad tyrant (here, here and here). Pretty harsh.

While I think that Jason could have worded his tips a little better (he does come out a little fanatical regarding his employees rest time), I basically agree with almost everything he wrote. Reading that post and this one, it is obvious to me that Jason is very passionate about his work. The basic concept I see between the lines of both of those posts is that for a start-up to succeed, it must have a team of extremely passionate and hardworking individuals. Those people should love what they do and work hard because of that.

I know that I think about Octabox all the time. When I’m working, when I’m watching TV or surfing the ‘Net, it’s always on the back of my mind. It’s a passion that burns inside of me and fuels me to work long hours everyday. I wouldn’t have it any other way, and I expect my team to feel the same way about their jobs. If you love what you do and feel the burning desire to do it the best you can, hard work doesn’t seem so hard at all.

Unbelievable. That’s all I have to say about the Patriots losing to the Giants in SuperBowl XLII.

New England, on the verge of an historical season filled with record breaking performances, dropped a low-scoring affair to one of the biggest underdogs in the history of the game. After reading countless stories this week about ‘Mr. Perfect’ Tom Brady, the reigning NFL MVP and holder the single season touchdown record, I watched Peyton Manning’s little brother Eli outplay him on the biggest of stages. I guess now being called little brother might be selling Eli short. Though I had my doubts given his up-and-down history, he certainly delivered when it matters and carried his team to one of the biggest upsets in recent memory.

Credit has to be given to the Giants defense especially, with a dominating performance against the statistically best offense in NFL history. Most of New England’s problems can’t be placed directly on their QB, with their offensive line absolutely outclassed versus the Giants fierce pass-rush.

Kudos to the Giants for turning a possible non-contest into a thriller with a surprising outcome

There’s a process philosophy called DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) that revolves around the notion that duplicate information is inherently bad. The thinking behind it is that duplicate information is harder to change, reduces clarity and is more likely to be inconsistent (since changes introduces inconsistencies between duplicates).
Such philosophy is the base for modern software engineering concepts, but apparently can be also applied to social networks.

An interesting experiment in social interactions has been attempted in an IRC channel (Internet relay chat) in which chat participants are not allowed to repeat any before said sentences. An automated monitoring system (called a bot) automatically mutes offenders for gradually increasing periods of time, forcing them to be original in what they say - or at least in how they say it.

I wonder if such philosophy could be applied in real life…

Needs to come up with better excuses

It’s been almost half a year since our last post… We have been working hard and learned much.
We are getting close to the beginning of our seed funding round, our product is in closed beta with a public beta coming in about 3-4 months and things certainly look exciting.

We are restarting our blogging activities, and we have much to share with you about entrepreneurship, web development, startups, graphical design and more.

Stay tuned

A web analytics tool that I stumbled upon through TechCrunch, RobotReplay supposedly records your visitors activity in JavaScript no less, and stores JS videos for later viewing. The idea is very interesting, the implementation still hasn’t caught up.
We’ve signed up, and right now the JS videos do not really represent real user activity (usually for movies clocking at several minutes, you’d see some jerky mouse movements for a couple of seconds and then the movie will end. Where is the rest?)

Should be interesting to follow, if they could actually make it work.

RobotReplay

On Sunday, Adam and myself attended a cocktail party for Internet entrepreneurs and bloggers as part of Blogference 2007.
Adam had secured two invitations via the.co.ils, an Israeli blog on Internet and technology.

The first order of business was finding the place, which was more difficult than you might expect. Being that we live in Tel Aviv, where the event was taking place, we actually walked from home to the street that was named on the invitation. However, we were staring at a building with a street #6, and a building with a street #2 which supposedly means we were standing next to #3 which was our destination, but somehow it was not presenting itself. We started walking in some vague general direction, stopping to ask innocent bystanders whom we trusted to know where this building might be, and after a 15 minute walk (!) we found building #3 to be in a completely different area. So much for street numbers and common sense.
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This post was originally published at Found|Read, I’m reposting it for our readers.

Continuing from where I left in my previous post: Founding in a War Zone, I and my cofounder Eran Galperin had both just been sent to the Israel-Lebanon border with our Army Reserve units. It was July 2006 and our units were unexpectedly deployed as part of an Israeli military action during the 2006 War with Hezbollah. The timing couldn’t have been worse for us. We had just taken up some web-development projects that were supposed to provide us with some financial support. Uncertain if we’d even make it back to our homes in Tel Aviv, we’d called our clients and told them their projects were “on hold,” indefinitely. They weren’t happy. We did make it back, after 25 days of fighting, and immediately took up the challenge of completing our projects on a much tighter schedule.

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This post was originally published at Found|Read, I’m reposting it for our readers.

Recent developments in Gaza and ongoing violence elsewhere in the Middle East remind me of the instability of my company’s home country: Israel. It is hard enough to run a start-up, and there are plenty of things that make entrepreneurship a high-risk proposition. But there is nothing like the ultimate security risk, life vs. death, to galvanize a team, to re-invigorate priorities, and ultimately, to inspire performance. I live in Tel Aviv, about three hours from Syria and southern Lebanon. Here the Army is a constant–if sometimes inconvenient–teacher of this important life and business lesson. Eran Galperin and myself have gotten this tutorial more than once while cofounding Octabox.

The Army has a huge role in educating Israelis, and played a huge role in making me a better entrepreneur. For starters, living in a war zone matures you a lot. It also breeds a nature for risk-taking. But the Army creates some big obstacles for start-up founders, too.
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