Veodia Presentation at the TechCrunch Cloud Event

I was presenting Veodia new HD and other features at the TechCrunch Cloud Computing Roundtable event today.

(switch for full screen)

Veodia - Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?

View more presentations from Etay Gafni. (tags: techcrunch cloud)

Great work by the Veodia team.

E.T.

Veodia / "Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?"

I am presenting in the upcoming “Whose Cloud Is It Anyway?" event.
I will demo Veodia’s services and solutions and will talk about what is unique about the way Veodia is using the ‘Cloud’.

I hope you see you!

Etay

Value Your Work and Bring Value

In recent days, I started see a pattern in some links friends shared on Facebook and Twitter, as well as in business messages.

"You must show value".

As the following examples suggests, you should/must bring value, but also, you must value what you are doing.

For example: onsimplicity.net

"...

Do You Provide Value?

In the end, if you want to feel confident in life—-every aspect of life—-you need to find a way to answer the question of value with a passionate “yes.” You don’t have to change the world. You don’t have to be a saint. But you do need to feel that every room you walk into is brighter and better equipped because you’re in it.

Simple, right?
...?

And Mike Rowe's presentations about Dirty Jobs.



So, value your work and bring value.

E.T.

Hair Cut

Well, it was time for a hair cut.

I have long hair for over 20 years now.
(I did take about 5 years break for the army...)

Anyway - this is the new look:

And if you do not like it, do not worry - it will grow...

E.T.

Siftables - Physical, Natural Way to Interact with Information and Media

Interesting user experience concept from MIT - Siftables.
Presented by David Merrill.

I like it as it makes the 'out of the box' phrase real.
In this case - instead of a 'box'/screen it provides multiple display and interactive objects. This truly it breaks down the current interaction concepts by making the screen part of the interaction and not just the canvas.

"...

Siftables:
Imagine overturning a container of nuts and bolts, then looking through the resulting pile for a particular item. Or spreading photographs out on a tabletop and then beginning to sort them into piles. During these activities we interact with large numbers of small objects at the same time, and they utilize all of our fingers and both hands together. We humans are skilled at using our hands in these ways, and can effortlessly sift and sort - focusing on our higher level goals rather than the items themselves.

Siftables aims to enable people to interact with information and media in physical, natural ways that approach interactions with physical objects in our everyday lives. As an interaction platform, Siftables applies technology and methodology from wireless sensor networks to tangible user interfaces. Siftables are independent, compact devices with sensing, graphical display, and wireless communication capabilities. They can be physically manipulated as a group to interact with digital information and media. Siftables can be used to implement any number of gestural interaction languages and HCI applications.

The Siftables interaction platform is a collaboration with Jeevan Kalanithi.

..."

E.T.

Design, Usability and Web Programing

Today I've learned about Yslow. YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow based on Yahoo's rules for high performance web sites.
You may take the advices the tool provide you or just check your favorite sites...
It is useful and addictive...

Also, I've read the Google Eye Tracking and Heat Maps Blog post and learned how Google uses Eye Tracking and Heat Maps to analyze and understand users activities and needs.



So, overall a very interesting day. I am glad I managed to combine design, usability and Web programing...


E.T.

Updated Messages in the Veodia Studio

I've Blogged today on the Veodia Blog about the updated messages in the Veodia Studio.

Check it out.

My favorite:


And the relevant video:




E.T.

24 Hour Marathon on the Friday Morning Report

Please join the 24 Hour Marathon on the Friday Morning Report organized by my friend Craig.

"...

The Friday Morning Report, for it's first ever 24 hour Marathon starting on February 12, 2009 at 15:00pm CET (Central Europe) has signed up to accept donations on behalf of Doctors Without Borders. We look around the world we live in and realize that it's not a perfect place, we know that it has problems and that we as a community need to be more aware of the problems and do what we can to help provide critical care to those living amid armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition and natural disasters around the world.

Thanks to our support, Doctors Without Borders is at work right now saving the lives of women, men and children in more than 60 countries where people would otherwise not have access to medical care.

Donating through this website is simple, fast and totally secure. It is also the most efficient way to support Doctors Without Borders.

So join us during our 24 hour marathon and help make the world a little bit better and please take a moment to share your comments and thoughts of the show here for everyone to share in!

• Donate Here
• Show Program
• PARTICIPATE LIVE!
• RSVP here

..."

Thank you,

Etay

Zend Technologies Co-Founder Andi Gutmans Named CEO

Congratulations to my friend Andi for becoming Zend Technologies CEO.

You can find the press release below, but I wanted to add a personal note:

Andi is a great guy/husband/father and I am proud to be his friend.
For time to time, he is useful around the house as well:


So - Good luck Andi - Well done.

PS - Maybe now he will get an iPhone and a new car...

---

Zend Technologies Co-Founder Andi Gutmans Named Chief Executive Officer

Zend Technologies Co-Founder Andi Gutmans Named Chief Executive Officer
MySQL Veteran Mark Burton Named Zend Executive Chairman

CUPERTINO, Calif. — February 3, 2009 — Zend Technologies, the PHP Company, today announced that it has appointed Andi Gutmans, Zend co-founder, as its chief executive officer. Gutmans was most recently senior vice president for R&D and alliances at Zend, as well as chief technical officer. It also named Mark Burton, formerly executive vice president of worldwide sales at MySQL, as executive chairman. Harold Goldberg, who held the position of CEO at Zend Technologies during the past two years, will leave to pursue other opportunities.

Cameron Lester, a Zend director and general partner at Azure Capital Partners remarked: “Zend’s probably the most mature, fast track open source company today. Andi Gutmans’ vision and execution skills have played a key role in guiding the company’s strategy and expansion, and have supported PHP’s phenomenal growth to become the platform of choice for over 20 million Web sites. Business customers—especially in our current environment—are increasingly looking to open-source solutions to deliver both cost benefit and business agility, which is driving increasing opportunity for Zend. With Andi’s appointment as CEO, we are now confident that Zend has the leadership team in place to accelerate the execution of its growth strategy.”

“We are very fortunate to have Mark Burton join Zend as executive chairman,” says Danny Rimer, a Zend director and general partner at Index Ventures. “Mark was part of one of the most successful leadership teams in the history of open-source and there are many parallels between his former company—MySQL— and the strategy Andi has been driving at Zend. Mark will take a very active role and will add considerable operational and commercial depth to the team.”

Andi Gutmans stated, “I am honored to take the leadership role at the company I co-founded years ago, when open-source was in its infancy. Zend’s enterprise-grade PHP solutions and our growing customer roster have increased awareness of the high maturity level of PHP and the efficiencies it brings as most applications move to the Web. Going forward, we will continue to expand our industry-leading solutions for developing and running business-critical PHP applications, work more closely with our partners, and maintain our strong commitment to the open-source community.”

Mark Burton said, “I am thrilled to be joining Zend’s board of directors and am looking forward to working with Andi on realizing Zend’s strategic opportunity. Zend is uniquely positioned to take full advantage of PHP’s growth in driving business critical Web applications.”

About Andi Gutmans
Andi Gutmans has been instrumental in building Zend into the company it is today. In addition to building key partnerships with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe, and contributing to major sales engagements, in 2006 he led the company’s largest round of funding to date. Gutmans’ leadership of the company’s open source project Zend Framework has included galvanizing the PHP and enterprise communities around the benefits of standardization and has broadened the professionalism and market reach of PHP and of Zend solutions worldwide.
Gutmans was named one of Computerworld’s “40 innovative IT people to watch, under the age of 40.” He is also recognized from the widely circulated technical publications he has authored and is a frequent speaker on business and technology issues at global conferences. Gutmans is a member of the PHP Group, the Apache Software Foundation, and serves on the board of the Eclipse Foundation. Gutmans holds a B.A. in Computer Science from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

About Mark Burton
Mark Burton has 29 years of sales and marketing experience. His past accomplishments include executive sales roles at MySQL AB and Informatica. At MySQL, as EVP of Worldwide Sales and Alliances, he contributed as the sales executive building a worldwide sales engine monetizing the MySQL open source brand and culminating in a $1 billion acquisition by Sun Microsystems in February 2008. At Informatica, Mr. Burton held roles as senior vice president of Americas Sales and eventually group vice president of Worldwide Sales and Alliances. His contribution helped grow Informatica from $12m to over $150m in sales resulting in a successful IPO in April 1999 and a secondary offering in September 2000. Other positions include several vice president of sales and marketing roles in early stage companies, executive-in-residence at Partech International Venture Partners, and regional sales management at Oracle, among others.

Burton was also recently appointed to serve on the board of directors of open-source leaders MuleSource and Infobright as well as on the advisory board for Jaspersoft.

About Zend Technologies, Inc.
Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP Company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying, and managing business-critical PHP applications. PHP is used by more than twenty million web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic web applications. Zend Framework, the leading open source PHP framework, has been downloaded over 10 million times and corporate adopters and contributors include Fox Interactive Media, Google, IBM, and Microsoft. Deployed at more than 27,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend is headquartered in Cupertino, California.
For more information, please visit http://www.zend.com or call +1 408 253 8800.