tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8750572112049977952024-03-13T02:30:01.025+02:00Transposh blogOfer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.comBlogger37125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-32286484162503086442013-07-27T04:02:00.001+03:002013-07-27T04:04:18.914+03:00Finally, proxy is ready for alpha testing<div>
It has been two year since I last posted here. And the proxy was long overdue but now it is ready for general alpha level consumption.<br />
<br />
How can I use it?<br />
<br />
Try going to <code>http://ps.transposh.net/<lang>/yoursite url.</code><br />
<br />
Alternatively, you may set <lang>.yourdomain to ps.transposh.net as a cname record in your dns file.<br />
<br />
Here is a short FAQ:<br />
<br />
Will it work?<br />
Maybe<br />
<br />
How do I change the language?<br />
Notice the widget in the bottom right corner of your page<br />
<br />
I want the widget like in this page?<br />
There are instructions for that (three lines, and I am too lazy to write them here now)<br />
<br />
How do I edit?<br />
Enter edit after the language in the URL<br />
<br />
Will Google see my site?<br />
No on ps.transposh.net, yes for the DNS method<br />
<br />
Why did it take you so long to get this out?<br />
Did I mention I was lazy?<br />
<br />
How is Transposh for wordpress advancing?<br />
Been recently focused on this, but code goes between the projects when deemed useful, I assume the k256 line was crossed, but because of the issues at wordpress, I'll have to double check.<br />
<br />
The future?<br />
Its coming up.</div>
Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03680021639723642702noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-13297236982406555752011-07-27T02:13:00.003+03:002011-07-27T02:22:09.484+03:00The 64,000Running posts at the rate of exponential growth in the number of downloads seemed like a good idea at the time, however - this time it took 8.75 months to double the number of downloads again and to reach the 64,000 goal.<div><br /></div><div>The community of users is constantly growing, and we would have made more released of the plugin in the near future had we not been working our <something> off, on getting the proxy code out, you can notice the small translation widget on the side of this blog, which might actually lead you to the alpha pages of the service.</something></div><div><br /></div><div>We'll probably do some more posts here and on our <a href="http://facebook.com/transposh">facebook page</a>, probably before reaching the 128,000 goal, which will hopefully take less time this time.</div><div><br /></div><div>We will finish with a small poem for our dedicated readers:</div><div>grow, grow, grow you project</div><div>make it support the stream</div><div>happily happily happily</div><div>this is not a dream.</div>Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03680021639723642702noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-52972359773082119482010-11-08T00:56:00.002+02:002010-11-08T01:07:03.562+02:0032,000 downloads, and another postHello there,<br /><br />Yes, about 6 months later, the milestone has been reached, and now it seems like there's a healthy community of transposh users. Lots have changed in the plugin and the code is constantly improving (although not as fast as I hoped, maybe I should hope for no progress and be positivly surprised at the 64k post).<br /><br />So far the revenue model has proved useless, and the total income is below $10. Many users decide to either keep the links (thanks guys). Write their own widget, or simply have no ads. All of which I am happy with. The downside of this is that no money makes progress slower, and I hope that it will change in the coming months.<br /><br />On other fronts, a personal issue I had has slowed development considerably for the last few months, this has now passed ( ;( ) so now I have more time for the project, and I am using it to think of the coming directions. One of the decisions was to do a full trac scan and create meaningful milestones. This is work in progress, but I really enjoy it as there's so much information and directions in there that are so exciting, I wish I could implement each and every request but I am trying to keep things in focus.<br /><br />What will the next version bring? The next major will hopefully be a UI redesign, with many of the tickets on the trac closing there, this milestone is marked as 0.7 and will be the best milestone to date. Any ideas, bugs, money will be happily accepted.<br /><br />Don't worry, be happy now.Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-44772192538714450102010-08-02T02:56:00.003+03:002010-08-02T03:04:12.086+03:00Is there a revenue model?Well, there might be one, but I will have to keep looking for it, or at the least be very patient with the implementation of one.<br /><br />The recent attempt made was to offer users to exchange the link in the widget for some ad replacement, after a few days this has not yet proved its worth as a solid business model. I guess I'll have to wait and see.<br /><br />On the product front, progress has never been faster as more and more features creep in and more and more bugs are weeded out. There are still so many things to do and so little time....Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-33691441701310628932010-04-22T17:53:00.002+03:002010-04-22T18:09:04.873+03:0016,000 downloads postYes, promised a post at 16k, and here it comes. This time it took 4 and a half months to get to this milestone. With the current rate of growth, it will take 6 months more to get to the 32k milestone.<br />The product is beginning to shape up nicely, becoming better and better, and I am starting to think about if this will ever be able to grow into a service that is monetized. I have received many offers for donation in exchange to the backlink removal. I am not going in that direction, as this will not be substantial and will not make a living of this. The idea is to provide a real value added to bloggers (and/or readers) so that they will be happy to purchase this service. A few ideas exist, but nothing has not hit me as the holy grail yet, if any reader have his own set of ideas, this would be something I would love to hear.<br />Next up is more, yes, more of everything. Better integration with wordpress will be coming soon, including themes and comment integrations. I also hope that we'll be able to provide support for third party widgets and support another CMS besides wordpress in the coming future. The features continue to creep in as well, and the improved interface for translators will be the main goal there.<br />We are more "social" than before, you can follow us on <a href="http://twitter.com/transposh">twitter</a>, <a href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Transposh/196338859122">facebook </a>and here too. Show your support, it helps.Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-55422753271871283132010-01-27T00:26:00.003+02:002010-01-27T00:38:08.945+02:00Disasters bring people closerI have just finished releasing v0.4.2 for Transposh, aka the answer ;) This release brings in the support for Haitian language. Which was released by the <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/translation/archive/2010/01/24/announcement-haitian-creole-support-in-bing-translator-and-other-microsoft-translator-powered-services.aspx">Microsoft Translator Team</a> two days ago. The reason they released it is probably the horrible earthquake which struck Haiti about two weeks ago. First, kudos to them on their efforts. This is the first time the MSN translator team has beaten Google translate to a language release that I know of, this has reminded me the not so recent release of Persian support by Google following the Iranian election scandal.<br />It seems like world events help bringing people closer together, and there's no better way than translation tools, as I guess that the mutual goal of everybody in this field is to achieve better understanding (and world peace, maybe).<br />I hope both teams will add support for more languages, without the need for bad stuff to happen.Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-11433565218845750802009-12-31T23:51:00.002+02:002010-01-01T00:01:21.355+02:00Happy new year, 20102010 is going to be an exciting and crucial year for Transposh, just two days before it started I was happy to assist my Brother and his company <a href="http://colnect.com">Colnect</a> in participating in the TechAviv peer awards, getting to second place with a margin of a single vote. The key was this presentation that I have helped him to create (I do have a fetish for building card towers ;)<br />So without further Edo, just watch this and have a great new year and vanilla biscuits.<br /><object width="445" height="364"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/VCku7FHF-Vs&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&border=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/VCku7FHF-Vs&hl=en_US&fs=1&rel=0&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="445" height="364"></embed></object>Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-3398140027941241912009-12-03T00:15:00.002+02:002009-12-03T00:28:04.395+02:008,000 downloadsI promised, and I am here ;) The 8k mark was crossed on the 30th of November, about three months following the 4k mark so the rate is improving. Taking into account the long dry period I had this is not half bad.<br />The latest version added a feature which I am really proud of which is support for search in the translated version. This feature took a relatively short time to come to life. A day of thinking about it, two days of coding and a day of testing ;) I have had the chance to implement there a nice algorithm which I can describe here.<br />For each search term, find original strings that are translated into something that includes such term, than search for those strings in the original content.<br />A nice optimization here is that you don't actually need all the strings, but only the ones that are contained within others, for example if you searched for the word "cat" and got the two originals "cat walk" and "the cat walked" the search for the first one would suffice in finding the relevant content.<br />I hope I'll be able to come up with some more nice stuff, and in the meanwhile, some nasty bugs need my attention, mainly with the feed generation which works "sometimes".<br />See you again at the 16k mark :)Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-75877128521348577472009-10-30T23:24:00.002+02:002009-10-30T23:35:10.230+02:00End of dry season?Yes, this blog have been quite dry for the last couple of month. Things are progressing but slower than I hoped for.<br />Some things have happened with Transposh which might keep the reader interested.<br />The first one is that Nokia used Transposh in its official ovi blog, and later seem to have stopped. Really wonder why, so if anyone have a clue you are invited.<br />The second was the announcement from a startup called mojofiti, the startup which claims to have ~10 people involved in it has taken transposh and used it on top of wordpress mu to provide multi-lingual blogging service. They say flattery is the best form of imitation (actually the other way around, but who cares) so its kind of imitating to see one using your slogan and software to break language barriers ;) I think it would have been wiser to cooperate here so both parties would achieve more but no expectations.<br /><br />The skies have finally opened where I live, I hope this signifies that the dry season is coming to its end and I'll have more news to tell.Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-60709202445884727812009-08-26T20:59:00.002+03:002009-08-26T21:04:13.550+03:004,000 downloadsI'll be reporting in multiples, so don't worry - next time is 8,000. It took two more months to get to 4,000 downloads yesterday. There have not so many releases in between, and the current rate seems to be somewhere around 20 new downloaders a day. The rating on the wordpress site has improved as I guess a few users probably read the how to donate section (mainly - vote your opinion of the project). I hope that as the summer vacation comes to an end, the release train will be back on track and that the new goal will be reached faster.Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-14151175174007035832009-07-28T09:27:00.003+03:002009-07-28T10:24:43.287+03:00FocusIts not very easy to keep going by yourself, but that's not the only problem. The problem I'd like to write about is maintaining focus and keeping on plan.<br />The original plan included raising money from VCs, which has failed and got reverted to plan B of doing it by myself. So according to the development plan I originally issued, we started with the wordpress plugin, and I guess that by now we probably have a few hundreds of sites using our plugin (a google search for transposh revealed over 1,000,000 results). The good thing is that we get lots of feedback. The problem is that some of it subverts us from the plan.<br />An example would be the usage of .css sprites for the flags used in the widget. This is a very nice feature, which is really nice to have, however it took me over two weeks in coding and testing (mostly testing) which were taken from more important features like advanced interface and more platform integrations. This delay will be carried for a long time, but I don't see a way to make sure that I keep focused (so many cool features to implement are requested).<br /><br />Conclusion? none, focus is important, having fun is important. Balancing them is hard and tricky and I just hope I'l prevailOfer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-48092045604739585072009-06-25T02:09:00.003+03:002009-06-25T02:19:31.972+03:002,000 downloads<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPZBVAtVDwzxX80RTBTnlBXY8rOzgVfnDcB324Dr8SQDbxXPB0S_GWb7NHt60-yXX4_2IUfOwr1GTm7M4j0cqWDb0BQAsapi_gHCL2NRvKUnLKT_EOMlJdFUYUdx4BQqlQXJbMsjSUzWk/s1600-h/2000.png"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 341px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPZBVAtVDwzxX80RTBTnlBXY8rOzgVfnDcB324Dr8SQDbxXPB0S_GWb7NHt60-yXX4_2IUfOwr1GTm7M4j0cqWDb0BQAsapi_gHCL2NRvKUnLKT_EOMlJdFUYUdx4BQqlQXJbMsjSUzWk/s400/2000.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5351037740195835250" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br />This is not an accounting blog, but I still like numbers ;) only one month was needed to double the number of downloads to 2,000 after passing the 1,000 goal, this was aided by the previously mentioned 100 downloads day. Still a long way to go, seems we are on a good track overall.Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-72885909499444241612009-06-21T00:57:00.001+03:002009-06-21T00:57:00.594+03:00The first 100+ downloads day<p>The first version to cross this bar was 0.2.6 which did this achievement on the 17th of June. The numbers are adding up nicely and I am very happy of the progress that we have made in the last couple of months. There are active users with streams of bug reports and suggestion that are beyond our capability to handle at this point (although we are doing our best). Still – the road ahead is long and seems like its worth walking it.</p> Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-36255709612661994232009-05-24T22:02:00.003+03:002009-05-24T22:07:50.774+03:001,000 downloads milestoneToday marks the 1,000 downloads mark for the Transposh wordpress plugin. Since the 0.2.0 release things have indeed started to move a bit faster.<br />However I did discover (yet again) a regression bug that crept back into my code.<br />I am staring the code for the client side of things, if this blog gives you weird alerts and errors, this is me at work :)<br />The google numbers now stand at 64,700 for the transposh search, the numbers were double that figure last week, and I guess they'll keep growing soon. Anyhow its much better than the 5 results transposh had before we started working :)Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-80088858656306803192009-04-25T20:33:00.004+03:002009-04-25T20:55:30.928+03:00Winner of Startup 2.0I am happy to inform my readers that <a href="http://colnect.com/">Colnect</a>, which was our beta site for our technology has recently won the prestigious European <a href="http://startup2.eu/">Startup 2.0</a> competition.<br /><br />Amir Wald has presented <a href="http://colnect.com/">Colnect</a> to an enthusiastic crowd at Bilbao, Spain.<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3550/3470014027_8f67c04298.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 500px; height: 332px;" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3550/3470014027_8f67c04298.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />And was able to best the other 10 finalists with the following bright video presentation:<br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/rxB9mLUnEFk&hl=en&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/rxB9mLUnEFk&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />We at Transposh were very happy to be able to help <a href="http://colnect.com/">Colnect</a> get translated to 35 languages and believe that it was a part (even if a small one) in its recent success.Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-69410350591741630962009-03-26T11:06:00.002+02:002009-03-26T11:09:43.157+02:00Small stepsToday we have reached 250 downloads, and progressing nicely. The product itself is moving forward, now supporting better integration of automatic translation which is quite unique.<br /><br />Our plan is to keep the release train going fast, as it helps us receive feedbacks from real users and get things better, an example would be a bug report regarding integration with other scripts which allowed us to have a more compatible plugin, after some detective work ;)<br /><br />See you at the next milestonesOfer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-87446283018442946012009-02-22T14:04:00.004+02:002013-07-27T03:33:49.276+03:00Alpha release<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The time has finally come, our alpha version is finally out and may be downloaded directly from <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/transposh-translation-filter-for-wordpress/">wordpress plugin directory</a>.<br />
<a href="http://trac.transposh.org/export/801/tags/wordpress-0.0.1/plugin/transposh/screenshot-3.png" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" src="http://trac.transposh.org/export/801/tags/wordpress-0.0.1/plugin/transposh/screenshot-3.png" style="display: block; height: 610px; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; width: 965px;" /></a><br />
A lot of work was done on the background, like preparing packaging and the various websites that are needed, like the product <a href="http://transposh.org/">website</a>, blog, forum and <a href="http://trac.transposh.org/">developer site</a> (not all is complete yet).<br />
<br />
The product is still alpha quality, but it works rather nicely and gives any wordpress site owner the option to translate his site to any language quickly - while getting help from his users. The idea behind such a release is to receive feedback and improve accordingly.<br />
<br />
You are welcomed to try it out yourself, any ideas are welcomed.</div>
Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-13598401724548500202009-02-12T20:30:00.003+02:002009-02-12T20:42:38.335+02:00Admiting failure, moving onIt is not easy to fail, but I have. In the recent months I tried to raise funds from Israeli VCs.<br />Many told me not to do it, for multiple reasons, with the top one being "the market is low, and so are chances". And indeed - they were right.<br /><br />I got many rejections at the preliminary stage and did succeed to move onwards with some VCs, only to get the rejections later.<br /><br />In themselves rejections are divided to various groups. One being - we don't care or not really into investing these days - please go away. Another is the rejection that comes from finding the flaws in the plan (there are no flawless plans) and pointing the simplest one out. This is probably the reason for tip #1 of the day - never start dealing with any VC on the associate level, it leads nowhere.<br /><br />The third type of rejection is the one that comes from smart people, that have really sunk their teeth in your plan and could not get themselves to invest, this is the type that tells you - please prove me wrong and we'll meet in the next round, which although is quite annoying is still better than the first two types.<br /><br />However - there are some good news, the process was lengthy and I learned a few things from it. It helped me think of what we'll do next and what goals I should reach.<br /><br />We'll bootstrap transposh, and with a little luck be able to announce our alpha product in the coming weeks. Funding will wait till we mature a bit.<br /><br />If anyone wants tips and tricks regarding Israeli VCs, contact number of various partners and just a bit of knowhow - feel free to contact me - its a free service for fellow entrepreneurs :)Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-69793452813417181592009-01-31T22:39:00.003+02:002009-01-31T23:30:39.080+02:00Election is coming, anyone cares?Election is near, actually coming in ten days, but it seems like no one really cares much.<br /><br />Every single election - which are coming in Israel almost every other year, I have changed my vote, mainly because I was disappointed from the results achieved by the party I voted for. And now the time to vote is coming and I am almost out of options.<br /><br />I thought about giving my vote to the green party, because I believe that environmentalism is something we should all try to push forward and can use some representation in our rule making systems. However - in a typical Israeli move, instead of one green giant - we have two small parties which will probably not make it, so why waste my vote there?<br /><br />In order to help me decide I watched an event where questions from "youtube" were coming to the three major party leaders. However - no much help there as they all seemed very prepared (I guess their advisors can see the questions on youtube before they were asked live) and questions like biggest mistake were answered in a similar manner to the one that you would answer the question about a drawback in a job interview (tacky answer).<br /><br />There was a review in Ynet regarding where parties stand with regards to technology. Nothing is there actually. And I was wondering, in a sectorial democratic system such as ours, what would be the chances for a hi-tech party, aiming for goals such as technlogy for all and advancing the terms of virtual democracy.<br /><br />Maybe it will happen, when the stars align. One can dream...Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-87454465455156512262008-12-29T19:01:00.003+02:002008-12-29T19:59:33.275+02:00Startup, Wars, Spam and Cats.First, no cats will be involved in this post.<br /><br />At first - I wanted to post regarding a new spam law that was passed in Israel recently and have finally made Israel join a list of countries which actually take active part at fighting the war against spam. I even thought about including my own mail server statistics regarding spam (which were dramatically reduced) and giving an honorable mention to the first lawsuit that was already filed based on the law (<a href="http://www.themarker.com/tmc/article.jhtml?ElementId=skira20081229_444">in Hebrew - here</a>) .<br /><br />However - as important as this subject is, I noticed the terminology I used - (war, fight, against) and actually a real war is brewing just outside, in Israel's southern border. Which is probably a little bit more important and I thought that I'll share my point of view (which is why startup is included in the title).<br /><br />Wars are normally bad for business, investors get even more reluctant to invest. People get drafted and much worse than that. The general mood, which was not too high considering the recent economic crisis drops even lower.<br /><br />However, I will contribute my share by explaining how things look from here. Not so long ago - Israel left gaza strip completely and fully. This action had my total support as I believe the Palestinians are entitled to their own land to do as they please with. Actually - almost as they please, creating a rocket base to shoot civilians at Israel isn't what a normal country would do, which can't be tolerated, period. This rocketry isn't being done by some unsupported eccentric organizations of weirdos in Gaza, but rather by their elected goverment and their militray forces.<br />One such rocket has hit Kiryat Gat, a small city in the south of Israel in which I personally almost started my previous company. I hate to think what would have happened if the company was really started there and I have had to face this recent turn of events.<br /><br />After receiving over 60 rockets Thursday Israel has finally retaliated and although the death toll may seem high to an outside observer or out of proportion, I will say that first - there is no proportion, and second - if you decided to join or support a terror activity - be prepared to pay a price and Last is that if you don't value human life on your enemy side (that would be us) nor human life on your own side (by placing rocket repositories at normal neighbourhoods) no number means anything.<br /><br />I dream of peace, I wish for peace and I hope my children will not have mandatory army service, I guess that sometimes the tricky road to peace leads to war with evil regims. I hope we are on that road.Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-1861292723995872622008-12-04T15:03:00.003+02:002008-12-04T15:18:39.975+02:00Readers, where are you?Writing a blog is an interesting affair. Sometimes you get that eerie feeling that you are completely alone, no one is reading your blog and nobody bothers.<br /><br />On that time you usually get a comment from a reader regarding something you have blogged about and you feel lost. Where did he get that? how does he know that I'm involved in this or that? When at one time I asked about that, I got the answer that it was me, I blogged about it and it was read, and I was a bit surprised and a bit proud. Maybe there is a point to this and we are not alone.<br /><br />On other news, I had an interesting bubble discussion today, about the hi-tech industry bubble which I am probably a part of, yet very aware of it unlike many others. Some theological questions popped up after that discussion like will there always be a bubble? is our bubble special? what actually defines a bubble? and I lack the answers.<br /><br />When bathing the kids, I make extremely large soap bubbles for them which they enjoy popping, which always leads me to think of the industry bubble and what is actually more fun, the creation of the bubble or its popping? who knows...Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-35079216520168179142008-11-13T11:20:00.005+02:002008-11-13T11:58:34.092+02:00The convention theoryThis time I wanted to write about a few conventions I have been to last week. First one by google, the google Israeli developer day and the second was the garage geeks that were hosting yahoo (followed by a yahoo event the next day).<br /><br />The google day was a disappointment for me, even though my hopes were not too high to start with. The problem was that on one hand google were forcefully trying to be cool (putting chess boards, lego cubes and cushions everywhere) and on the other hand they had nothing meaningful to say and that was said by the wrong set of people.<br /><br />Maybe its just me, or I had bad luck at picking sessions, the only reasonable session was the one about google gears. Other were either just bad (Google gadgets) or terrible (The open mic session).<br /><br />Luckily, a few days later I was able to compare it to a different event at the garage geeks. Yahoo people came, gave a short and insightful presentation, and were later available to talk about the subject. Sure - it was not as fancy, and I got no free <a href="http://usbpeople.com/USB.php">usb-people</a> dok. But I was able to get meaningful interaction.<br /><br />The good impression was slightly dimmed the next day at the hack day event which was poorly organized (my registration did not catch, and I think many of the people registered didn't bother to show judging from the amount of lonely name tags). And the presentation was quite the same, nothing too deep and nothing that resembled a hack day. It didn't look like many hackers actually made it to that conference. I did cut short and went home earlier than expected, but the food was good :)<br /><br />I have decided that I'll submit a hack to the competition as I had a nice idea that I guessed would fit the time frame, and with the help of my brother in law we have created a small search engine on top of boss that we called <a href="http://search.islands.co.il/">FocuSearch</a>. I don't believe that we'll win, but it was fun doing it, which is enough for me. The winner will probably be a company which have done a better job and is in higher need of PR.<br /><br />Another good point of that event was the fact that I saw a presentation by a direct competitor. I think they are not focused enough on their goals, but they seem like nice people and I wish them luck.<br /><br />Last item on this long post is the fact that the network on google day was hacked. I am quite surprised this didn't make <a href="http://valleywag.com/">valleywag</a>, <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/">techcrunch</a> or <a href="http://slashdot.org/">slashdot</a>, but who knows.Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-67758859226318174682008-10-27T14:44:00.002+02:002008-10-27T15:00:43.823+02:00Competition, 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).<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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!Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-62211149259103454912008-10-12T16:23:00.002+02:002008-10-12T16:28:36.609+02:00The answerAs 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-875057211204997795.post-76927971384960931792008-09-28T13:23:00.002+03:002008-09-28T13:25:56.836+03:00Weekly riddle for the childrenWhat generated the following phrase "<span style="" onmouseover="_tipon(this)" onmouseout="_tipoff()">entrepreneurs rope team on time"?<br /><br />One of our solvers will win a rope that is rope on time by itself.<br /></span>Ofer Waldhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01717295623900006044noreply@blogger.com0