Archive for 'Social Media'
Virtual Worlds….Really?
We have a few pieces posting on Tech Ticker today and Monday that parse through a lot of the first quarter venture capital data. I’ve never interviewed that many people in studio at once and not sure how good of a job I did 🙁 (Video on the jump and more on TT)
Anyway- among the biggest surprises to me was how hot virtual worlds were in the first quarter. (and how hard it is to say “virtual worlds”) Wha???
I heard a lot about virtual world companies in Europe and Israel, but
my impression was it wasn’t a US phenomenon any longer. Some bets were
made, Club Penguin did well, Second Life– eh, we’ll see. I just don’t
think virtual worlds are like social networking where everyone will one
day use one in some way. In short, because they’re don’t meld your
online self with your offline self– it makes them more distinct. That
seems so at odds with how the Web is developing to me.
I’m sure there are some niches and some good bets, but $185 million worth in one quarter? Sheesh. Do you want
to lose money, Sand Hill Road? Assuming it has mostly been momentum
chasing the kids space, which is an untapped area of development
online. Still…let’s get our heads back in reality here.
MeeMix Changes Music Listening & Sharing
I met a number of entrepreneurs and venture guys in Israel over the past couple of weeks. The Garage Geeks event was also full of start-ups. There are far too many to cover them all but I’ll be talking about the ones I most resonated with and would be likely to personally use over the next couple of days.
We also saw a few that are still in stealth mode so I can’t write about them yet, but as things develop, I’ll cover the ones that gave me aha moments. One is in the 3D space and tries to combine elements of SecondLife, SceneCaster and some of the sites solely dedicated to 3D online shopping.
As a lover of music and the Pandora concept, I was really impressed with MeeMix, a personalized Internet radio community, built to reflect and engage unique taste preferences.
MeeMix encourages users to saturate their personal spaces on the web with expressions of their own one-of-a-kind taste in music. Members communicate with a slew of other social networks and friend communities, by making live song recommendations on Facebook, posting favorit songs or reviews to Twitter, placing Mee Widgets in sites and blogs presenting Favorite Artist, Favorite Station or using one of their applications in Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, and MySpace to present their music style in local profiles.
They’re unique in several ways. MeeMix looks at your invested user experience and adds a community nature to predict music you’d likely be interested in. Some of the other sites in this category that aim at taste prediction strive for detailed classification of music and rely mainly on musical attributes to estimate a user taste.
MeeMix tries to identify personal taste by giving the human factor more consideration and combining that with musical attributes. They are not interested in classifying all of the characteristics of a song but are constantly refining the attributes they classify to better relate them to a user preference.
In contrast to competitors, if three members ask for the same artist in MeeMix in creating a personalized station, chances are that their stations will be very different upon completion. The reason will be the human factor. Their algorithm takes into account demographic and geographical aspects. If the same artist is picked by a 16-year-old girl from Minnesota and a 34-year-old man from Spain, their musical tastes are probably not similar and those their playlist will be comprised based on very different characteristics.
Their home page is pretty simple making it easy for people to get started quickly without a lot of effort or having to sift through a complicated set-up process. It almost looks like a search engine for music.
It’s worth checking out and I’m sure they would love to hear your feedback. Below: me with their quick witted and engaging CEO Gilad Shlang after a start-up dinner in Tel Aviv.
One voice: meet up—Craig Newmark and One Voice group
The boy is late teens, handsome and fair, and his eyes are earnest as he talks: “In One Voice we don’t call it peace anymore; we want to bring about an a agreement that will bring bout comfort and a more stable situation than they have now. It’s not peace, it’s divorce…the metaphor says now we are pre divorce and we need to balance the situation…this is the difference between one voice and the normal peace movement that talks about peace and friendship.”
It’s a weekend morning, in Tel Aviv and Craig Newmark, JD Lasica and I are meeting with the director and a group of student leaders from One Voice , a powerful, grassroots peace movement that has engaged Israelis, especially college students, from all over Tel Aviv, Ramallah, and Gaza, as well as drawn in members from the US, the UK, Canada, and other parts of the world. The group is bright, committed, and right now, engaged in making sure this group of American bloggers and funders (Craig is on their board), understands how they work and what they have to offer.
Basically here’s what I learn:
The universities are flash-points for OneVoice recruitment, as are the occupied terrorities. The movement tries to educate through lectures and events, then recruits at various levels of engagement, from signing up for a newsletter (over 100K people in a country of 7 million) to attending events, to joining as an organizer. For the students involved, One Voice clearly offers a change to discuss, a change to create change, but mostly importantly, a means to hope.
Here’s some of what the students tell us:
Marina: This movement involves the public so they can have an opinion for themselves and think about what they support.
Tal: We try to enrich student understanding with lectures and knowledge; we also take the message of OneVoice and careful optimism and take it out on the streets, where we want to mobilize the students and the city residents.
Another student: We ask citizens what would you do to end the conflict? People can become policy makers, instead of just consumers of policy
.
Talking with this group, they make it clear to me that what engages them so deeply is the feeling of being empowered in a frustrating situation where it is so hard to effect policy changes. Because OneVoice is a participatory culture, with youth councils, leadership councils, and local action, it provides a means for these bright engaged students to avoid dispair, as well as to educate and inform.
Listening to the talk flow around me, and seeing the passion in these fresh eyes, it strikes me that like the African National Congress (ANC) for South African Doris Lessing and her fellow progressives in Johannesberg, so long ago, OneVoice provides a means to survive and hang on in an impossible situation by becoming a force for positive change. It strikes me that OneVoice is a great group, not only for what it offers in terms of the conflict, but the positive vision it offers Israel and Arab youth, and through them, their parents, families and neighbors
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Making Time for Silence
At last, I found a caf? in the center of Tel Aviv without air conditioning, without English menus and without an English speaking waitress. Now in my silence, I can think. I can hear. I can see. I can absorb and I can feel.
I taught my waitress the word straw in English. We laugh. She yearns for more interaction as do I. This is a different side of Tel Aviv, the side of town where tourists and trendsetters don?t hang out. I?d love to spend many more afternoons watching people pass by this little caf?, over an iced coffee, the kind with thick frothy milk on top.
For about a week, I?ve been traveling with nine other bloggers throughout northern and central Israel in an air conditioned van to visit companies and organizations in air conditioned rooms. In my travels abroad, I rarely have to deal with cold fabricated air like I do at home and its almost always a pleasure. People here seem to love refrigerated rooms and buses as much as the yanks do.
What I realized today was how little I?ve traveled in a group setting inside or outside the U.S. in the past ten years or so. There?s an occasional side trip with a group of friends or people I know inside a community but these are often short and center around food, drink and bonding.
The bonding on this trip has been wonderful, between learning about each others worlds in more intimate detail through conversation and observation and twittering silly and ridiculous updates to each other, none of which could possibly be understood by anyone else who follow our feeds, and yet we all decide we don?t care. We don?t care because we?re 10,000 miles away from home and can?t stop laughing.
When I travel outside the states, I never travel in groups. I tend to go ?walk about? by myself for hours and sometimes days. I rarely understand a country unless I do. ?Walk about? time allows me to hear a city or town?s soul.
It allows me to listen to its silence and to its noise: its music, accents, car horns, police or ambulance sirens, TV shows, radio chatter in almost always more than one language, passing buses and cars, taxi hoots, a shopkeeper yelling at a vendor, and the way waves crash up against its shore compared to the way waves crash up against a shore I already know.
Americans are not very good at silence, nor are they very good at being alone or making time to be alone. We?re always in a rush to go somewhere else other than where we are. We rush through a meal and applaud restaurants that can get us “in-and-out” rather than ones that encourage a four hour experience.
We?re also often in a rush to try something new and different, which makes us great at innovation, business, science, medicine and biotech. And, we often rush through a conversation rather than being in the moment, sitting still and quietly listening.
We have rushed around so much and for so long, its no wonder that yoga and meditation centers are exploding around the country and Carl Honore?s book In Praise of Slowness was such a hit. We?re starting to learn that there?s value in slowing down and spending time alone, with ourselves.
Despite our hunger for independence and freedom of expression, Americans tend to tour in groups more than they tour solo, rally around sporting events in groups and spend more time in chains, whether they be food or retail chains, than they do in smaller less mainstream alternatives.
Starbucks is almost always the first suggestion when I meet someone for business even in New York and San Francisco where we still have a wide selection of eclectic coffee bars.
I?m not suggesting that all Americans are shallow or don?t take time to reflect or appreciate a unique perspective or experience, but what I am suggesting is that as a culture, we?re more about movement and speed than we are about solitude and serenity.
Israel is birthing some of the same cultural energy for many of the same reasons America did one hundred years ago. People often forget how new Israel is because of the way Israeli business executives and government present themselves to the outside world.
There?s a tremendous amount of support for Israel commerce in Silicon Valley and because of this dynamic, we engage with Israelis on a more regular basis than the rest of America (NYC may be an exception). They live among us, VCs set up shop on Sandhill Road, Israeli engineers move their families across the world to be close to the action, and they hunger for success and the American dream in a way that Europeans don?t.
JVP?s Erel Margalit hit the nail on the head when he said, “Israelis don’t think about what they can lose but about what they can gain. Unlike Europe, they don’t have a plate on their door in a town where their family and history was rooted for 1,000 years. Israel is new and full of immigrants from all over the world.”
Because of this, the country is breeding risk takers who are moving at tremendous speeds and with a lot of energy. In a country that is constantly at war, entrepreneurs don?t fear failure because fear of survival is much greater than a failed start-up. As immigrants pour in, they are learning to live with diversity in the same way we did as a nation 60 years after our birth.
Like America, Israel is a culture driven by movement and growth rather than tradition, status quo and silence. They voice their concerns and opinions loudly in the same way the yanks do. People often view them as abrupt, even moreso than Americans because they don?t have the same infusion of puritan cultures that came over on the Mayflower.
These cultures taught us to be reserved, dress conservatively and not ?rock the boat.? Now, we?re a culture that says: ?ask for forgiveness later,? ?do your own thing,? ?be your own person,? ?speak your mind,? and yes, ?take over the world.?
We?re a competitive nation. So is Israel. They want to win, whether its in war or in the boardroom. Rosenthal in her recent book The Israelis, put it beautifully: “to Israelis, the word ‘no’ is a dare. For example, when I tell an Israeli entrepreneur “the deal is dead,” he answers, “how dead? Is it still breathing?” There is no such thing is a dead deal. Israelis always try to find another way. You close the door on them and they jump in through the window.”
And as I sit here inside this quiet Tel Aviv cafe and reflect in my silence, I look around at the diversity and energy around me. What does it mean to be Israeli? Like a street scene in Manhattan, I see and hear faces and voices from Russia, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, England, Austria, Czechoslovakia, America, Poland, and Chile. And it doesn?t stop there.
I see Arabs that look like Jews and Jews that look like Arabs. I see a country yearning for peace but afraid that the other side doesn?t, so they hang on tightly to their freedom, to their space, to a land they now all call their own even if not everyone in the world agrees.
We all need to call ourselves ?something,? or at least we think we do. And although the world is getting smaller and cultures continue to blend and cross pollinate, we all hang onto a clan we can call our own. It is within the walls of this ?clan? that we ?think? we?ll have peace and where we? think? we?ll find acceptance. At the end of the day, it boils down to three things. Everyone wants to be respected, understood and loved.
While a clan may provide some of this, its only part of the answer. As these lines continue to blur, we?ll all learn that we can find a clan anywhere we go if we choose to wear peace and love on our sleeves rather than fear and hate. Only then will we become citizens of the world, where our clan is each other.
Next time you go abroad, be sure to listen to the silence.
So What Did We Accomplish?
Our visit, sponsored by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, was a pilot experiment to see what would happen if we could turn bloggers and podcasters loose to write about Innovation in Israel. This is a pioneering effort to utilize the connectivity and immediacy of the Web in service of extending “knowing” rather than just knowledge about Israel.
The number of blog posts, twitters, videos, podcasts and photos is prodigious and will grow over the next month as our traveling geeks consolidate their material. These people worked hard to produce a wide range of work that has been collected and will be easily accessible on the tg.planetlink.com/ site.
The site itself, built by our volunteers, is an example to the government and other organizations who wish to connect people to Israel of what can be done with the new technology to represent Israel. Hopefully, it may affect how technology is used to build community through interactivity on the web for many organizations. It is different than traditional media in that it is informal, personal, experiential, interactive, visual, and immediate (real time reporting).
Tens of thousands have followed the twitters (posts by the bloggers picked up by people following their activities); thousands more will see the postings, photos, and videos and will hear the podcasts. This should increase general awareness and knowledge of Israeli life and innovation.
Perhaps the most important accomplishment is the personal connection for each participant to Israel and Israelis. As Robert Scoble said,” I knew Israelis, but I did not know Israel and I want to come back.”
The generous hospitality of of our Israeli hosts enabled each member of the group to connect individually to Israeli peers?formally and informally. Our women bloggers had a special meeting with counterpart Israeli women bloggers?from that meeting there will be further connection that will reverberate from what people will do with each other.
Hopefully, connecting people everywhere to Israelis through our personal experience on this trip,? then using the web to extend those experiences to the awareness of many?will do good for a long time to come.
My Friend Ish
The impetus for this journey began when I met Ishmael Khaldi, Vice Counsel for the Israel Consulate in San Francisco (covering the Northwest US) at Gina and Dan Waldman’s house in Tiburon. We spoke about blogging and began to develop the idea of bringing well-known bloggers to Israel to report on Israel Innovation.
Over the course of a year we struggled through many setbacks and delays, but remained resolute together. Once the trip was approved by the Foreign Ministry Office in Jerusalem, we spoke daily for months to hammer out the details. In Israel, we became like a pair of Kayakers paddling together over many rapids?hey, these are Bay Area metaphors?we came to trust, respect, and count on each other.
In addition to our close association and friendship, Ish has given me a great gift of understanding something important about Israel that eluded me during many past visits for Jewish organizations and activities. Israel is a pluralistic society and its non-Jewish citizens compose a critical element?Israel will succeed and be secure to the degree they feel at home there living as citizens with Jews?they can be the best ambassadors of Israel’s justice and vision. I came to understand that perspective through his love for Israel from my friend Ish.
I will always be grateful.
(Photos of us will be posted)
The Traveling Geeks Revealed
The Traveling Geeks became a community during our five day visit. We partied in the evening with Israeli hosts and were schlepped in vans from site to site during the day to meet with Israeli VC?s, entrepreneurs, and innovators. We schmoozed, ate, laughed, and kvetched together?so I have come to know these people.
As a group they are bright, funny, curious, passionate and savvy about trends and technology. They are all practitioners of a new electronic journalism that is more experiential, informal and visual than traditional print and broadcast media. Chosen for their audiences and credibility in the technology field, they are as competent and knowledgeable as one could hope for to comment on Israeli innovation. Please read their blogs and view their photos and videos to gain their perspective.
In no particular order, here are my revelations on each of them:
Craig Newmark: One of the best known personalities on the Internet for his Craig?s List, Craig has an amazing following and reputation. He began to Twitter (posts of what he was doing at any particular moment) that had a thousand people for each post within days of his beginning to Twitter. Craig was the resident comic who had us in stitches with his self-deprecating, dry wit. On several occasions he showed what a Mench he really is. Highlight was taking cover together during a rocket attack alert in Ashkelon. So Craig, “We will always have Ashkelon.”
Robert Scoble: One of the most followed bloggers on the Internet, Robert is as cool and funny in person as he is on line. Hard at work or play, Robert has a curiosity and intelligence that just does not quit. He lives, breathes, and snorts technology; his knowledge of tech trends and innovative businesses is awesome. We all agreed Scoble writing for Fast Company is a perfect fit.
Renee Blodgett: Great spirit and lots of energy. Renee is fun, free wheeling, and friendly. Her writing and visuals beautifully tell stories. Her blogs reveal her self and her experiences. She is a great example of the experiential blogger who seeks knowing rather than just knowledge.
Susan Mernit: First time in Israel, Susan may have had the greatest personal transformation of the group. Her personal background combines poetry, creative writing, business, anthropology, arts, and a dozen more interests. Writing from a personal style and interest, Susan brings the social scene and personal interests to her readers with wit and insight. Warm, funny, and bright, Susan is a Techie with heart.
Cathy Brooks: An extrovert, Cathy fills the room with her presence. Her writing is insightful, cool and heartfelt, but her skillful use of visuals and video distinguish her. She is a dynamo. Losing her voice from Laryngitis early in the trip, Cathy still could dominate the conversation just with her facial expressions. Her connection to Israel was awakened a few years ago and this trip had a personal and professional impact on Cathy that you will see in her blog posts.
JD Lasica: A veteran journalist who has focused his talents to expand the reach for groups through the use of technology in the media for social and cause based organizations, JD combines visuals and writing masterfully. JD also blogged on the human side of the Israeli/Arab conflict. He was responsible to get the Traveling Geeks website up and running and made a major contribution through that effort, working with Susan Mernit and her contacts.
Sarah Lacy: A savvy business writer and blogger, Sarah can weave her personality and experience of the moment into her stories. She is about to publish a new book on Web 2.0 (if you want to learn about Web 2.0 check out her book) and understands as well as anyone the potential for business with these new capabilities. Ironically, the moment I will always remember to distinguish Sarah is not from her awesome business and writing acumen, but how emotionally affected she was during the prayers of the Christian pilgrims in the Jerusalem Room of Christ?s Last Supper. Her spontaneous emotion revealed more about the power of the religious experience in Jerusalem than any words or visual images could portray.
Deborah Schultz; The most connected, knowledgeable, and active person with Israel and Israelis among us, Deborah is the best to bridge US and Israel reality in her writing. She knows and feels Israel and her writing shows it. A New Yorker who now lives in the strange land of the SF Bay Area,, her passion, insight, and familiarity with Israelis and new technologies make her the perfect blogger to highlight Israel Innovation.
Brad Redderson: As the only podcaster among us, Brad?s work will be mostly developed from the interviews he conducted with thought leaders and tech innovators on his own time away from the activities of the group. Thoughtful, steady, and dependable, Brad was my volunteer partner in putting the trip together with the Israeli Consulate. He contributed greatly to the project. There were lots of bumps along the way before and especially during the trip when Brad and I could easily consult each other about how to solve problems.
View and read the work on Israel Innovation from these extraordinary people at tg.planetlink.com/. Collectively we hope to contribute to the better understanding of Israel Innovation for those in technology and for those who just want to know more about Israel.
On my way home from Israel
I have a TON I will say about my Israel trip, but in the meantime I just wanted to shout out my fellow travelers who’ve already been doing awesome blogging and stuff about our trip. There are going to be spinouts for weeks from this trip. Heck, just look at the list of tools that alpha geeks use (which was produced on this trip).
I’m too exhausted to do any blogging. Might explain why I’ve been doing so much Twittering. It takes far less effort to write 140 characters at a time than to put together a cogent post.
The Floor From Hell
I seem to be on the floor from hell in a Tel Aviv hotel chain the night before Passover weekend kicks off. It seems as if every American who ever wanted to experience Passover in Israel all arrived today at the same time. And, they all decided to bring their kids and stay in my hotel. Since they clearly just arrived from the airport, their body clocks are still on U.S. time, which is either noon or 3 pm depending on where they came in from.
The kids must have drank a ton of coke on the plane, the kind with caffeine since dozens of them are running up and down the hallways screaming, laughing and pushing elevator buttons.
The other interesting thing about this holiday weekend in Israel is that items that are normally available suddenly disappear. For example, tea kettles are taken out of rooms since kosher rules dictate food and liquid availability over the next several days. That means that milk goes away, which isn’t really a big deal for me since I can drink my tea without it. There was no dairy on our buffet table tonight although the chocolate flan cake certainly tasted good enough to have cream running through its heavenly layered walls.
The kids are still screaming. Where are their parents I’m wondering but then I hear them yelling too. Time for the Bose headset and another blog post. Brasov . 
A Chat with JVP's Erel Margalit
JVP’s Managing Director Erel Margalit talks to our blogging group this week about start-ups and innovation in Israel.
Their Jerusalem outskirts office is not unlike a Silicon Valley-based VC office except that the printers and fax machines might be a tad older and like every other Israeli company kitchen, they’re well stocked with Nescafe instant coffee. The latter is an integral part of the culture here in the same way it was 20′ish years ago.
We learn about their DreamWorks-like initiative Animation Lab, which extends beyond a typical technology play. “The line is blurred between where technology ends and content begins,” noted Margalit. As the former head of MSN Israel, he has a background and perspective on digital rich content.
Erel and his team ‘get’ social media. We were introduced to three stealth mode companies and saw ‘on-screen’ demos. I can’t talk about them just yet, except to say that they’re dabbling in virtual worlds, interactive games, social networks and online video.
When asked about entrepreneurship and why there’s so much innovation coming out of Israel, Erel says, “Israelis don’t think about what they can lose but about what they can gain. Unlike Europe, they don’t have a plate on their door in a town where their family and history was rooted for 1,000 years. Israel is new and full of immigrants from all over the world. So its much easier for us to take risks.”
JVP is currently the king VC in Israel, having launched between 20 and 40 companies, with most of their exits in the communications and media space. “We’re on our 5th fund,” he added. English to Armenian “The key is to make a few home runs in each fund.”
We got the impression that they’re on track and that the climate was ripe with opportunities. Eran continued to rave about the opportunities that Israel has over Europe and the states…..and why. “Silicon Valley is very engineering driven versus the rest of the world. Not having that as a major driving force gives us an opportunity.”
He sees other opportunities in Asia where they’re developing a lot of interactive content. During his last trip to China, he observed that 500,000 were playing online warfare games. In LA, it was all about broadcasting entertainment. In Europe, mobile continues to take a leadership role.
I captured the tail end of his interview on video – see below (also uploaded to Flixwagon.com). Click play to tune in.
