Competition, what competition?

Well, every time you think of something there is a slight chance that someone else is thinking about the same exact thing. Although this may sound like bad news this is normally far from the truth. I am now thinking about this as many of my friends who know what I am doing has referred me to an article about a competitor (similar market and basic approach, different goals ,technology and howto market).

There are a few advantages to competition, for starters it gives you some sort of validation, which means you are probably on some right track. More than that, you are given the option to ponder and answer a few very important questions - like why am I better? How can I prove to someone else that my solution is superior? (may it be an investor or a future client) and if you don't have conclusive answers - you are given the chance to improve.

There may also be a few bad sides to competition, in my former company it seemed like the competition did many things which were counter productive (to say the least) and instead of focusing on improving they focused on demoting our product - saying it was illegal (rubbish) broke their patents (complete rubbish) was not as good as theirs (weird that clients bought it in that case) and in the end they resolved to copy our technology. However - they were much better than us in raising money and in a way helped us raise money too (the mee tooo of VCs that I might discuss at some future post).

To sum it up, if you are a startup - you are probably better off with a competition than you are without it, it proves you are on the right track, help you get funded and even allows you to focus and improve. Viva la competition!

The answer

As stock market world wide are plummeting, I am quite sure my readers could not help it but ask themselves what the answer to the riddle was.

Well, without further ado, the answer is Google Translate service, which recently launched hebrew support. The results are extremely poor, as the original text meant "A team of entrepreneurs that are simply awesome". Unfortunately - mix-up of literal translation of a phrase that means awesome with very wrong ordering of words has created that anomality.

Will Google Translate improve over time? I'll keep my eye open. As for now, I won't recommand it for trying to read Hebrew sites, not even to get a clue.