2010 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 Colnect 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 ;)
So without further Edo, just watch this and have a great new year and vanilla biscuits.
Showing posts with label competition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label competition. Show all posts
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Thursday, November 13, 2008
The convention theory
This 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).
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.
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).
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 usb-people dok. But I was able to get meaningful interaction.
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 :)
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 FocuSearch. 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.
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.
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 valleywag, techcrunch or slashdot, but who knows.
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.
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).
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 usb-people dok. But I was able to get meaningful interaction.
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 :)
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 FocuSearch. 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.
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.
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 valleywag, techcrunch or slashdot, but who knows.
Monday, October 27, 2008
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!
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!
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