You've got to learn to get happy, along the way

Diamonds And Gold, by Langhorne Slim

You can have all the diamonds,
You can have all the gold
But someday you're still gonna get old
You've got to learn to get happy, along the way.
Take some chances, allow yourself to get lost
You're beautiful baby, you're the boss.
You've got to learn to get happy, along the way

There's no road to follow,
only stones left unturned
You must play with fire,
in order to get burned

Toss your misery, out the door
What are you waiting for?
You've got to learn to get a little happy, along the way
It's alright to change your style, it's alright to smile
It's alright to get a little happy along the way

Tough day at the office,
and worse, not at home
Don't wanna talk about it,
Just wanna be left alone
There's no joy in living,
You're giving all and getting none
It's a new beginning,
you thought you lost, but honey you won.

You can have all the diamonds, all the gold
Someday we're still gonna get old,
We've got to learn to get happy along the way

Get your hat
Get your coat babe
Leave your worries on the doorstep
We've got to get a little happy along the way.

(thanks to http://www.lyricsmania.com)

E.T.

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.

Short (Video) Message

I was working on demos for Veodia most of the day.
Cool stuff I could share in few days.
So, as I was doing all these recording, I decieded to do one short message for the Blog.
Because I can.


E.T.

Remember "The Hudsucker Proxy" and "Office Space"?

The last few weeks reminded me some scenes from The Hudsucker Proxy.
Two main associations were:

1. Stocks and Agendas


2. Viral Marketing and Pricing

Get your copy:

And in case you are working for a big enterprise, get this one as well...

E.T.

Getting Real (again...)

I guess 'getting real' is doing a comeback (...) as investors and companies are taking actions.
In a recent post of 37Signals, Jason pointed out some key concepts from the Getting Real eBook (read it free).

Some (relevant) topics from the book:

• Build Less
• Have an Enemy
• Less Mass
• What's the big idea?
• It's a Problem When It's a Problem
• Half, Not Half-Assed
• Hidden Costs
• Forget Feature Requests
• "Done!"
• Meetings Are Toxic
• Seek and Celebrate Small Victories
• Hire Less and Hire Later
• Interface First
• Three State Solution
• Get Defensive
• One Interface
• Less Software
• Don't Do Dead Documents
• Tell Me a Quick Story
• Free Samples
• Easy On, Easy Off
• Promote Through Education
• Track Your Logs
• Feel The Pain

You may like these ideas, or really hate them, but they do worth a thought.

E.T.

John Doerr's pragmatic action points

As a follow up to the previous post (would you stand by me) and thanks to alleyinsider and BoomTown, here are John Doerr's pragmatic action points:

1. Act now
2. Protect vital core of business (surgical cuts, not axe)
3. Get 18 months or more of cash
4. Defer unnecessary expenses (swanky new office, Microsoft Windows) and be tightwad on capex. Re-prioritize all R&D. You now can't afford to do it all.
5. Negotiate. In this climate, everything is negotiable. Including existing contracts, terms.
6. Everyone in company should be selling, even receptionist. (This is not just about expenses, need to grow revenue).
7. Swap cash bonuses and salaries for equity.
8. Pay attention to where your cash is. (Treasuries, not money markets).
9. Look 90 days ahead and assess revenue. If not there, reset plan.
10. Over-communicate: With employees, investors, key customers. Let them know your resolve. Don't sugarcoat the situation we're in.

E.T.

Would You Stand By Me?

The next few months are not going to be easy.
You can read about it everywhere (alleyinsider, gigaom, venturebeat, techcrunch and many more).

And then came the Sequoia slides:

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: depression recession)

As I was reading all these "get-real" posts and looking into these slides I felt as something is missing.

Do you think/feel the same?

In general, as a startup, we can work harder, burn less money, re-prioritize development plans and do all the things you can see listed in the slides.
For example:

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As my 4 years old son once told me:

"If you are sending me home, you need to come with me..."

We are all in this together.

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As we can all agree, the recovery will be long

---

We need to keep working as a team.

As for the phrase I keep hearing "raising an internal round", reinvesting in portfolio companies is 'internal round' as well.

I know great investors and VCs who are looking beyond and investing in their portfolio companies with wisdom, connections and other non-funding ways, helping, as true partners, to overcome these hard days and to be ready for the future.

I only wish they would be more vocal about it and help/make the media balance the current state-of-mind.

So, as you 'get real', look at your investors and ask:

"Would you stand by me?"

E.T.

PS - please read the Blog disclaimer

Sony EyePet

Sony EyePet is a great example for user interaction and design that breaks down the 2D I/O concept and supports cross generation user interaction.
It is so cool to see how every-day objects become part of the virtual world, as the virtual world become part of the physical world...




Not sure when this would be available.

E.T.

Efficient & Useless

One definition of Interaction Design is:

“designing interactive products to support people in their everyday and working lives.”

Yesterday, at San Diego airport I saw this great example for an efficient system that is useless to most of its users.

Persona:

• User A: a person visiting the bathroom
  
• User B: a cleaning crew personal

Task:

• User A: wash and dry hands
• User B: keep the bathroom clean
  

Design:
Position the automatic paper disposer/machine right above the garbage hole. Minor side-effects may include: providing the user A with a wet paper to dry his hands and direct disposal of paper without the 'need' for user A to use it...

User B is very happy with the design. I've actually met him.

E.T.

Gary Vaynerchuk's "Bipolar" motivation speach

I was following the Web 2.0 Expo (NY) and came across Gary Vaynerchuk's (Wine Library) key note. He talked about "Building Personal Brand Within the Social Media Landscape".



Few notes:

• His answer for "What wine goes with fish?" is exactly as mine: "What ever you like".
• Work on things you love. If you cannot make money doing it, either you are not good at it, or you need to keep you day job.
• Building business is tough. Build a real business with a real value.
• Listening to your customers is important. Few actually care about their customer. Show your customers that you care by doing things for them.
• Keep trying.

At the end, I did not know if I am happy, sad, motivated or depressed.
But at least - it made me think.

E.T.

Veodia at Office 2.0 - Humanizing Communication

For the last 3 years, Office 2.0 has been a great opportunity for me to meet smart people, to learn about new technologies, and to experience new ways of getting business done.

I always look for the ‘human touch’ that's associated with this event.

This year, communication has reached a new level.
We are using a wiki to communicate and exchange ideas, and now we can make it even more personal — using video notes.

Veodia is again a proud sponsor, not only enabling the event with video recording of each session, but also allowing every participant to record his or her own videos — making Office 2.0 communication even more personal.

I am looking forward meeting you and having great conversations with you.
View complete Blog on Office 2.0 site.

Randy Pausch Last Lecture

Randy Pausch, the Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose "last lecture" about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, died Friday. He was 47.

"Almost all of us have childhood dreams; for example, being an astronaut, or making movies or video games for a living. Sadly, most people don’t achieve theirs, and I think that’s a shame. I had several specific childhood dreams, and I’ve actually achieved most of them. More importantly, I have found ways, in particular the creation (with Don Marinelli), of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center of helping many young people actually *achieve* their childhood dreams." - Randy Pausch

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E.T.

i<...>

The Blogsphere is full with echo of the iPhone G3 release fiasco, that could be summarized as:

• iPhone 3G
• iLine
• iFail
• iBrick
• iToldYouSo
  
• iDoNotCare...

E.T.

How to reduce noise in your Facebook homepage

Problem description:

You open your Facebook homepage in the morning and see that more than 50 new news/events/photos and other activities were added to your page.
You cannot find interesting updates from your friends...

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Problem source:

1-3 of your "friends" keep sending updates, links, posts, pokes and other "useful" inputs to you.

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Solution:

Find this "friends" and remove them from your list...

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Result:

Read updates and stay connected with people that care about you and appreciate your time. Some may define them as FRIENDS.

E.T.

B1B = Blogging 1st Birthday

Mazal Tov! == Congratulations!

My Blogging 1st Birthday.

75 posts so far == once a week on average.

Thank you for your comments and feedback.

E.T.

Thoughts About Age and the Entrepreneur

Recently I read an interesting blog by Paul Kedrosky (Age and the Entrepreneur).

I have a theory that there are 3 time frames to start/join a start up:

Age 22:
Just finish army service (I am from Israel..). Young and Naive. Following some crazy ideas with some friends. Work hard and play harder.

After you spend some time in a start up, your spouse (which somehow you manage to find while working 16 hours a day) is fed up with your schedule and "ask" you to "find a real job". Or in my case, the start up is closed and/or acquired by a bigger company.

Age 35:
So you spent some time in a big company and learn how to do things, or how not to do things, you feel it is time to do something yourself. You pick up to phone and call your friends. If you are lucky / got smarter - there are not the same from the first start up... And you start your own or join a start up you believe in and know why you should be there.

(Let's hope your spouse is OK with you following this path again...)

Age 50:
Either you spent more than 20 year in a big company or worked for 10 start ups by now, you are ready to lead or support a new idea. You are a domain expert (or at least, other think you are) with no interest to work in the same domain... So you start, join or consult to a start up.

Does this theory work for you?

E.T.

Sixty Second Tech

Sixtysecondtech.com is Cal Evans latest project.


As Cal describes it:

Sixty Second Tech is the cure for BSS

Sixty Second Tech is the only known cure for “Blank Stare Syndrome” (BSS). BSS happens when one of your technical friends starts talking to you and unconsciously slips into geek speak. They don’t realize they’ve triggered BSS until long after your eyes glaze over. BSS is an embarrassing condition but a curable one, just spend one minute a week listening to Sixty Second Tech.

If you are looking for great, short, insightful notes about current technology topics and buzz-words, Sixty Second Tech is a bookmark for you.

You can also download the MP3 files or read the ~250 words segment.

Good luck Cal, I am listening...

E.T.

Web 2.0 Summit/Plane

Although I did not register to the upcoming 'Web 2.0 summit', I got rejected.
( I did attend some in the past... so I guess I am marked man now...)



At times when every week a new record is set and broken and there are so many hypes and peaks, a summit is just a plane.
(so I keep telling my bruised ego...)


source: http://www.teamstraydogs.com/images/RobMilne-VinsontoShinn-7Summits.jpg



E.T.

In-video Search and Ads

I would like to share with you some thoughts and questions I had during the “Under The Radar Entertainment and Media” Conference yesterday.

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Notes:

There is a need for in-video search capabilities, both for people and for business. For people – it will allow finding relevant movies from large catalogs and aggregated sites, and even easy navigation to a specific frame within these movies. For business – it will allow a new type of monetization models on top of user-generated-content.

Some of the issues related to ads within Internet-videos (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll) are very similar to mainstream TV. People do not like ads and would skip them if they have a chance. I know I skip them by using Tivo. (I learned that there are already tools for skipping ads within these movies as well…)
Some ads are not related to the show or even the show content is harmful to the marketed brand.

Most companies I saw so far are using Adobe Flash as the delivery format. Using Flash allows merging the movies and the ads into one experience. The main experience I saw so far were textual ads Vs. multimedia ads (a movie within a movie). Encapsulated experience (the information is presented within the player) Vs. Open experience (the ads send the viewer to a Webpage).

Another trend is developing the ads using an ‘ad market place’ where creative professionals and amateurs ‘compete’ on advertisements projects.

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My thoughts:

• Advertising within content (video, feeds, etc.) becomes more relevant as the content available via many portals (destination sites).
• People will continue to skip ads (manually or with some help from independent technologies) while advertisers will continue to push their messages across channels.
• Advertisement agencies leverage creativity from many sources, with a low cost.
• How can content producers be compensated for their content when it been used as a marketing vehicle?
• From “Who own the channel?” to “Who own the clip?”
  

An interesting example for an ad from my friend Craig Cmehil:

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is the new interesting in-video company I saw.
(http://www.pluggd.com/)
With a very interesting text search capability, based on the audio track analysis, as well as "heat map" navigation concept for the scrollbar.
(And again… where was I…)


E.T.

Technorati Tags video, event, marketing, multimedia, undertheradar

Thoughts on video search and in-video ads

Yesterday afternoon at Supernova, thirteen companies selected by TechCrunch and Supernova presented 5 minutes demos.

ReadWriteWeb coveted the demos very well.

The interesting discussed trends were around mobile applications and experiences, vertical search and in-video ads.

I found the direction of creating an “ad layer” on top of user-generated content very interesting.
The mechanism of adding ‘business value’ at post-production phase seems very scalable.

About 4 years ago, I was working with some of my team members on developing eLearning tools to capture knowledge within enterprises. The concept was very simple.
Take long recording of training sessions, NetMeeting/WebEx sessions and analyze the video stream. We found and indexed video frames where a new side was shown, when a new topic was discussed and so on. We were working on an OCR capability to automate adding labels to the index. The end result was a create tool to capture and generate many eLearning units – used by SAP Developer Network ever since…

Well… These were very simple videos and the eBooks were very structured. Today, the user-generated-videos as well as other high quality video clips are more complex and understanding/mining them can be used for more than smart indexing.

Some of the parameters that could be use to analyze a video could include:

• Tags
• Use tags to find key terms
• Audio
• Voice-to-Text, find key terms
• Theme – could be recognize and tagged
• Video/Image
• OCR – extract the text, find key terms
• Colors – colors could be matched to tagged branding colors
• Refresh rate – indicate the pace of the video and could be use for tagging and matching
• Time
  
• Used to create anchors within the data stream
• Links to this object
  
• Indicates domains with interests in this content

So – by analyzing video content objects using such mechanism, one (or a system) could create a good meta-data level understanding of the content and other parameters which define the content and be able to match it to other content objects (such as ads) with similar characteristics. These days, using Adobe Flash and other multi-media formats, the ‘Ad layer’ could be added to relevant content. The time anchors in the movies provide an opportunity to provide the ads in context and on time.


adap.tv show a great demo of these capabilities.

I was focusing on better service to the users and they found a way to make money out of it... Why didn’t I think about it…

☺

E.T.

Technorati Tags video,marketing,supernova2007,eLearning