Alpha release

The time has finally come, our alpha version is finally out and may be downloaded directly from wordpress plugin directory.

A lot of work was done on the background, like preparing packaging and the various websites that are needed, like the product website, blog, forum and developer site (not all is complete yet).

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.

You are welcomed to try it out yourself, any ideas are welcomed.

Admiting failure, moving on

It is not easy to fail, but I have. In the recent months I tried to raise funds from Israeli VCs.
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.

I got many rejections at the preliminary stage and did succeed to move onwards with some VCs, only to get the rejections later.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

Election is coming, anyone cares?

Election is near, actually coming in ten days, but it seems like no one really cares much.

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.

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?

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).

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.

Maybe it will happen, when the stars align. One can dream...

Startup, Wars, Spam and Cats.

First, no cats will be involved in this post.

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 (in Hebrew - here) .

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).

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.

Readers, 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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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!