Updates galore

Two quick updates on what's been going on in the last few months since we last saw each other:

• In late March (last entry) I had a very bad case of the flu. What I didn't tell you was that I was severely limited on (a) the type and amount of medicine I could take to make me feel better (b) the way my body responded (taking ages to recover) because, well, I was in the early stages of pregnancy. So a belated "be sha'ah tova"/enhorabuena to me.
• Remember ResearchTrail? Well, it shut down, unfortunately. As you may recall, I called it quits late last year (before the first funding round) and was no longer a partner, but it is still disappointing to hear. Good luck to Dudu & Judy in their new ventures in the future...

And some minor tidbits that might shed light on my mood swings of the past few months (compounded by pregnancy hormones, of course).
Here they are, in ascending order of stress level:

• My sister-in-law and three nephews stayed with us for a visit. 13 days and 13 nights.
• Did some renovations to the house (dust, dust, everywhere, and no toys to be found)
• Have not yet completed (ehem, effectively started) handover to my recently hired replacement during the planned maternity leave
• I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up
  
• Bad news: Olmert is still PM. Worse news: Looks like Netanyahu is coming back. Or Barak.
  
• How the heck will I juggle three little monsters when I only have two hands? (No, I'm not expecting triplets, just baby #3)
• My wonderful friends and neighbors A & J just went back to Mexico for "a couple of years". (Yea right. I've heard that one before.) Still crying.
  
• It's terribly hot outside. And inside. Everywhere.
  
• How the heck will I handle three little monsters (and maternity leave) without A & J?
  

Ideas, suggestions and support all welcome.

Thanks, and Goodbye

It was after many, many months of deliberating that I reached decision to stop my active involvement in ResearchTrail. Many factors argued for and against staying, but two won out:

• Evolving professional interests (more on that later...)
• The juggling got too heavy to remain enjoyable, especially since there were far more important things I feared I was just about to "drop"

Letting go of your "baby" is very hard, but I'll always remain a proud parent seeing it flourish. ResearchTrail continues as strong as ever, and I look forward to see it launch very soon.

So to Judy and David, thank you for your trust and openness and friendship.

And to the regular readers of Creativivi, thanks for accompanying me in this rollercoaster. You can certainly expect more life juggling, idea bouncing, and Web & Work 2.0 explorations going forward.

In other words, stay tuned for part 2.

Monetization dilemmas? Stay in the middle.

A note from a packed panel this morning on "Monetization" at LeWeb3.
For the most part, the answers were pretty much the expected ones (no, nobody has found the magic formula):

• Bloggers & Content providers? Be among the top 5 in an industry in your country, or carve a big piece of a (tiny) niche. Otherwise, don't expect to make any money for blogging (or maybe enough to pay for BigMacs).
• Others? Draw users in. Keep them there. Try subscription. And of course, various forms of advertising. And remember, Ecommerce is not making a profit from the commerce itself because the logistics are so expensive; they're good for being in the middle. Try being an intermediary - to offer serivces that either don’t produce the content or don’t do the selling part.

The one piece of advice I don't necessarily agree with: sell virtual products, like that website where 13-year-old girls purchase pixelized clothes for each other. I find it rather depressing. Maybe someone will show me something that will convince me of the viability/usefulness of such?

Israeli startups win second and third place at LeWeb3 startup competition

Congratulations to G.ho.st and PLYmedia (with prize, below) for being the runners up at LeWeb3's startup competition this year. You make us all proud!

The other winners: SplitGames, Erepublik, and the first-place winner, Goojet.

The side feature bears a Company

Twitter's Evan Williams got top marks for an early-morning presentation today. Simple. Short. Fun. Memorable. Come to think of it, many of the same principles he applied to Twitter.

The essence is simple. Pull out features, leave only what you absolutely need. But, as the Scobleizer asked, how do you know when to stop taking out features?


"Don't know when," Evan Williams answered, "but carefully and slowly." When they felt they needed them, the users themselves returned more features (the Hash/tags, the @/link, Twitterific, etc).

The interesting part of the features is the idea that each one can be turned not only into a separate product, but into a separate company. Twitter started from the "status" line of instant message clients. Feedburner is another example - and now a $100 M company.

(photo: the main conference hall before it filled up this morning)

Lessons on Innovation from Google - CCS

What does Google have to say about Innovation? Here's a Google product manager's view:

1. Culture: this is the most important one. According to Nelson Mattos, Google puts users first; profitability is "an afterthought." Also in the Google credo: create a global skills base, as only local engineers will be able to understand the nuances of their geographies (Orckut big in Brazil, blogging big in France but not Latin America, etc) Finally, maintain a non hierarchical structure
2. Collaboration: Some secrets are more valuable when shared
3. Speed: Fast is better than slow. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be fast beating slow. At Google we absolutely encourage people to move at high speed, build a prototype, launch immediately and get feedback directly from the users. And improve over that.
   

Beyond Red Wine/ White Wine geography - or storytelling in a tech world

Just finished a fascinating lecture by Hans Rosling (founder of Medicine Sans Frontiers, and now, Gapminder) on technology, culture, diversity and storytelling. Lots of thougths to ponder:

• "We thought we’d produce pages where people would lean forward and click.
  That does not work. You need to tell stories."
• "There are 10 thousand watchers for each clicker"
• "Every country that has gotten richer and healthier has done it at the expense of CO2 emissions. It’s you, the OECD that has destroyed the atmosphere. But we forgive you. Nobody knew what they were doing. But on the condition that we now count per capita. How can we make Chinese public perceive it as a problem when we are emitting so much more per capita?"
• But we need the storytellers on top of this. It’s the storytellers that work.
• "Start to look at the world as the place where all humans are equal – in choices, in opportunities
• "We don’t want everyone to eat camembert in this world, to eat big macs. Bloggers, consider how all these blogging communities may enforce the ethnic homogeneity of Western Europe, NA. Create contacts elsewhere."

Take Hans' neighbor. He knows all about wine: temperature, food that goes with it, regions, taste. But he also only knows two only types of countries: “western” and “third world”

Now take Hans. He knows two types of wine: red and white. But he knows over 200 countries.

The main problem, says Hans, is that too many people that know wine, and too few people that know the world. Come study the world.

To "Hal" With Privacy

Scott McNealy's utterings caused a stir back in the late 90s when he declared that privacy is dead. Almost a decade later, we hold this truth to be self-evident...

At one of the sessions at the Online Information conference in London today, Invisible Web author Chris Sherman shared the association of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Google's privacy "control" button.
One is green. One is red. Both watch and learn all the time. But we hope that the former, unlike its movie-like counterpart, does not end up killing anybody.

For the record, Chris is one of the least paranoid among the search gurus. He believes that the benefits gained from personalization (which can be as mundane as typical Amazon recommendations) far outweight the threats. Or continuing McNealy's reported quote, "get over it."

The thrill of the chase

One byte from Marydee Ojala's talk yesterday at the Online Information 2007 conference in London:

Information professionals get a kick out of the scavanger hunt. They enjoy the thrill of the chase, the process of finding the structure in the unstructured.

There is a lot of training that goes into this - taxonomies, search techniques, specialized search engines, tons of commands, and of course, interviewing skills. But the basic quality is there: loving the process that leads to the aha moment.

Well, apparently the conference organizers at the Olympia have taken this a little bit too seriously when they planned the maze of corridors and elevators that lead between the conference session rooms and the exhibit floor :-) But other than the lack of proper wireless internet connection (basically, forget it), a pretty enjoyable experience. More coming soon.

Big Ben for Little Ben

One of the few advantages of having a 4-year-old TV-addict is the fact that they become well versed in the world. That is, if they’re watching the “right” programs.

• Take Dora the Explorer for example. English as a second (or third) language has never been easier (despite some of the character's accents in translated Hebrew version). Plus, the feminist Latina in me cannot object to the protagonist’s ethnicity and gender.
• And Little Einsteins. He learns about music, composers, cities and art. It’s a bit too artificially put together for my taste, but hey, Ben’s buying it. Here’s proof:

I’m flying with ResearchTrail to the Online Conference in London next week. When I asked Ben if he wants me to bring him “algo chiquito de Londres” he said,

“Mama, bring me back a picture of Big Ben...For little Ben.”

What more could I ask for?

Yedda founder shares his knowledge - Part 2

(Part 2 of notes from the TIIC / The Coils event Nov 26)

Yedda's Avichai Nissenbaum spent a full hour going over the story of Yedda, from the team's point of view, from idea to concept to angel to alpha to beta to Round A to launch and finally, AOL exit.

10 takeaways from his talk (and a curious tidbit):

1. Leave ego at home. That's true for five guys trying to work together in crowded basements and unbeliavable pressure, and judging from his demeanor, still true for someone who's just made an (undisclosed sum) exit to AOL.

2. You're in it together. Regardless of the outcome, most co-founders end up hating each other. (He stressed it wasn't the case with Yedda, plus Yaniv Golan's nods and smiles from the audience - see pic - sorta proved this)

3. Do you really want to work on this idea for the next five years (or more)?

4. Are you scared? (being scared is okay) But are you more excited than scared?

5. Can you survive (bootstrapped) for at least 6 months? (Consensus was at least 12 months)

6. Quoting Stephen Covey, the main thing is that you keep the main thing the main thing.

7. Ask around. A lot. Anyone you know, trust. Even your "competitors." And...

8. Listen. It will always be hard to have your ideas lambasted, but it's VERY important. A good meeting with a VC/angel/potential partner/guy from the street was not just one in which they expressed interest, but one from which they learned something.

9. Technology is important. But marketing is what makes it happen. "I can't stress this enough," he said.

10. Put together a winning team, who complement each other. Preferably people you know well, and have worked with before. But if something's not working out, cut from the root before it spoils the bunch.

What I will remember about Avichai - he's got five kids. When asked how he does it, he just pointed that his wife was the real hero here.

And for some reason, I believed him.

Yedda founder shares his knowledge, part 1: Investors

Avichai Nissenbaum, co-founder and CEO of the recently acquired Yedda, seems to know a thing or two about creating and running a startup. At today's TIIC/The Coils event, he shared with an audience of some 200 startupers a little of his experience in the Yedda rollercoaster.

Questions to ask yourself before meeting/chosing an investor:

1. What do you want in return?

2. Will the provide value? (actually, they won't have too much time for you anyway)

3. Do you need their help? (investors are looking for an entrepreneur who can run a business, and not someone looking for an angel/investor to run it for them)

4. Do they understand you biz?

5. Will they support the long-term objectives of your company?

6. Full transparency + frequent updates = trust. And relationships are built on trust.

7. Should you take money from friends and family? (Somebody then added a third "f": fools)

8. Can you create a sense of urgency?

9. Traction! Can you prove that you mean what you say?

Startup Me?

A recent post by Guy Kawasaki (continuing the thread of a guest column in TechCrunch by Glenn Kelman) talks about the differences and similarities between the Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 entrepreneurs. Often, he says, it's the same entrepreneur, but much richer, less driven, less suited for the CEO role he/she wants to take on.
Paraphrasing Sequoia's Mike Moritz, he quotes his definiton of the ideal entrepreneur:

“Guys under thirty who are building a product that they themselves want to use.”

Three observations:

• I'm not a guy. Actually, two-thirds of ResearchTrail are women.
• I'm 31 (and actually, the youngest of the co-founders)
• But yes, we're building ResearchTrail the way each of us, with his/her different background and experience, would give anything to use.

Guess we just expanded the definition.

The Journalists view - on one foot

Now for the journalist's point of view:
Fern's talk on Promoting your Startup during last week's MIT Enterprise Forum of Israel meeting was followed by a presentation by Guy Grimland of The Marker.
Guy is a tech journalist. Well connected. Can cut through all the words that ever made it to the better known version of Buzzword bingo. And though he didn't explicitly say it, he's probably sick and tired of the gung ho attitude of us Israelis who think we deserve his coverage because...well... because.

A sobering (yet humble, funny and to-the-point) presentation.

If you don't read Hebrew/don't want to go over the full presentation above/want to learn The Publicity Bible while standing on one foot, here's my summary of the two main takeaways (plus fine print)

I. KNOW THE RULES OF THE GAME
i) Publicity does not happen overnight. A peak is just a peak; real promotion of a business/concept/person is done step by step.
ii) You have to play the game. And part of the game means giving up (at least partial) control.

II. FOLLOW THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT TO MAXIMIZE YOUR CHANCES
i) HOW? email is fine. phoning fine too (but not between 11 and 2 pm, when most journalists -at least in Israel- are fighting their deadlines). And cultivate those relationships.
ii) the WHAT will come from the journalists point of view. Think about what makes you different, and share changes in your company (funding, new management team, big release, etc)
iii) WHO: bring your CEO. That's the person the journalists and the public really want to see.
iv) WHEN: meetings take some 1 to 1.5 hours. Zehu. That isn't really a long time, so be ready. Think about what makes you different.
v) WHY not give up: if a journalist does not return your emails, it's his problem, not yours. Maybe he's working on a huge headline and must remain mum, or turn down otherwise interesting stories temporarily. This does not mean your business will go bust.

Twenty tips to promote your startup (your business, or youself)

Last week, I attended Fern Reiss' talk at the MIT Enterprise Forum of Israel on "Expertizing and Maximizing Media Attention." I did a short course on self-publishing with Fern several months ago, and had also heard her introduce Expertizing in a different forum last year . But now that I'm donning the new "entrepreneur" hat, these tips take on a whole new meaning.

My summary of the talk in twenty tips:

1) Position yourself as the expert in a subject (it gives you instant credibility for the media to find you). Best way according to Fern? Write a book on the topic.
2) Syndicate: your column online, ezines, magazines. Doesn't pay but it's wonderful visibility. Where to submit? Google the following: submit article:[and the subject here]
3) Link to someone's big name (including big competitor if relevant) by giving them a positive mention on your website. Example: Bill Gates wealth calculator.
4. Blog & use social networks (what else is there to be said?)
5. Create the "International association of [fill in your cause here]"
6. Create the "International [theme] Day" and add it to Chase's Calendar of Events
7. Contests
8. Branding. It's really easy to forget this - but keep your brand visible at all times: brand your cocencept, reinforce it (everything from your branded name tags at conferences to tote bags)
9. If you do a flyer, put something useful on the other side so that people will keep it (same goes for givaways). In other words, what do you want people to have taped to their computer monitor?
10. Connet with journalists: press kits are no good (piled up in the back of the room). Same as "mass PR. Consider Profnet.com, the system where journalists ask to find experts on everything. The catch? It's about $7 K annually.
11. Make a PR that's newsworthy - what is the spin that will really interest the press (not "I've got a new manager"
12. Keep track of journalists and cultivate those relationships. Know what interests them, feed them tidbits thoughout, become a (trusted) source
13.Carve out a unique niche and position yourself in differnt directions
14. Enjoy public speaking? Do it!
15. Email newsletters - easy way to cultivate thousands of readers
16. Brand yourself according to either popularity or exclusivity -both work, but not together
17. Offer diversified products: books, audio, consulting, gift baskets, lectures, small groups
18. Sweeten the offer: "if you sign up now, save $500"
19. Remember: you're not selling a product or service, you're selling the DREAM associated with it. This is ultimately what people buy
20. Think in soundbytes. Think of catchy, descriptive phrases you can use and people (and the media) can remember.

More on Fern Reiss here:

Two Lessons from Gogel (ehem - Gogol & Google)

1. I recently attended a short conference where an entrepreneur shared his experience creating and promoting internet companies. ( This is somebody who's been around, knows the industry knows the technology, and uses it all the time.)
He obviously had something to say - but I stopped listening. I was too busy counting the times he said Gogel instead of Gugl, goooogel, gugel or google, whichever way would have made it less obvious that he didn't care to pronounce it correctly. I even started making sketchmarks in my notebook after each time I heard "Gogel."
32 times.
Part of what the speaker had said earlier interested me; other parts (including some of the tactics), I stronly disagree with. But all this takes second stage to that faux pas.
My takeaway? As speaker, it's terrifying to think which "little" things can make you flunk in front of an audience. And sadly, nobody in the audience (including myself), corrected him.

(NOTE: "Gogle" image above is from Ferran's Com blog - in Spanish)

2. Another "Gogel" (actually, it's Gogol, as in the famous 19th century Russian writer) that made an impact on me is one of the main characters in The Namesake. Obviously, there's much more to a name than a string of consonants and vowels (for kids or web 2.0 ventures alike). In names, there are definitely no "coincidences." (And yes, Jewish tradition also emphasizes this.)
Anyway, if you haven't seen that movie yet (originally a novella in The New Yorker, then a book), it's highly recommended.

Information R/Evolution

As someone interested in, working with and pushing for information, this is simply a pleasure.