Common Craft guys put together this no-need-of-further-explanation movie. You might want to see this one and that one as well..
After lots of hard work, 3 dead PC’s, 2 child borns, 11 start-upish books, 3,359 cups of coffee (not including the 3 pins of KOPIKO), we are proud to announce the Scheduly public beta launch.
Scheduly - An availability distribution network for smb’s.
Means, Scheduly will distribute only your available time slots while your clients can grab their most convenient once.
Simple as that.
All you need to do is:
and let the scheduling begin…
If you already have your own web site or weblog you can easily implement your availability widget, like we did at our weblog’s sidebar, that way your clients can schedule you from your own web site. cool isn’t it?!?
Go ahead and check the top 5 reasons why to use Scheduly?
We would like to thank all our private betas registrants and sorry for those who didn’t get the chance to help us as private beta users, we just didn’t expect it would be a tzunami 
, yet it was very flattering and it make our belief stronger by finding out how many people suffer from our same problem and waiting for the perfect solution for online scheduling with your service providers.
We also want to thank all those feedbacks from Scheduly (coming-into-being) community, they were very helpful. Thanks.
So what can I say more… you just need to check Scheduly out, and don’t forget:
“Time is really the only capital that any human being has, and the one thing that he can’t afford to lose.” T.Edison
Joy.
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Filed under: Announcements, Scheduly
We wanted to thank Yaron Orenstein and Yaron Adler (thecoils) for arranging the TIIC meeting. It was our second we attended TIIC and we really enjoyed the meeting for the second time around.
The presentation of Avichay Nissenbaum (Yedda) was great and gave us many insights – Thank you Avichay!
For first time entrepreneurs like us it was a great opportunity to meet Israel’s top minds and share insights with them.
We were proud to present our project (which just started a private
beta) as part of the great evening Sequoia funded (thanks again) and you are all welcomed to check our new web site at Scheduly.com.
Cheers,
Oren
Filed under: Entrepreneurship, conferences
On my last post I complimented Microsoft for their once-in-a-while software that does rock your world.
So, this is the post with the opposite scenario.
The image above is Apple’s way of representing Microsoft’s PC server on their operating system – OSX. They sure have great hummer (thanks to 37signals’s founder, Jason Fried, for the post). The thing is Microsoft seems to think the same about some of their products, and here’s one:
For those of you who don’t really follow the tech news: Microsoft has this new product called Silverlight - Microsoft’s “Flash” platform, a cross browser .NET plug-in that enables designers and developers to build rich media experiences. There’s even a cool demo site called Tafiti which demonstrates Silverlight graphic platform with their search engine.
In real life they don’t really seem to think the Silverlight is better than Adobe’s Flash. Check out the message I got while browsing the Zune (Microsoft’s iPod) homepage:
And it doesn’t really stop there. Michael Arrington published a post about the same scenario with the “Windows Home Server” demo.
So, am I missing something or did Microsoft release Silverlight to the world without even intending to use it themselves?!?!
And that’s rolling me to another question -
Is there anybody in Microsoft who really uses the Zune?
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Generally I am not really fan of Microsoft tools, because they’re always loaded with bunch of stuff that you’ll never use and it make the app slower and cumbersome, but… every once in a while they come up with some great tool which worth all the encumbrance like “Windows Live Writer”.
The “Windows Live Writer” came up in a great time for me after I struggled with the WordPress editor and some other free online tools which looks good at start, but didn’t delivered the basic thing - smooth writing to my weblog, with no whooo haaaa included. I just searching for a decent tool which integrate smoothly with my WordPress editor, and by ’smoothly’ I mean:
Installing
After this exhausting search for the perfect (free) tool I came up with the “Windows Live Writer” which is (free) downloadable app which required your weblog user name and password (I know, letting go of your user name and password for Microsoft… scary), and the location of your ‘xmlrpc.php‘ file and you’re set to go…
Plugins
The “Windows Live Writer” is a “Word” stylish app with plugins.
It enables you to write from your PC with no net distractions and with the important needs from an editor which just aren’t there in the online apps (at least not at the WordPress editor) such as: Insert Table - which you don’t realize how much you’ll need it until you’ll need it and try to build it (the table) by yourself with the HTML editor and right after the page refreshes all of your weblog skin disrupted because of some broken tag that you left while editing the HTML, and now go ahead and try to find it and fix it, like needle in a heap…
Another great plugin is the “Insert Video” option, the problem with WordPress and embed videos is that WordPress doesn’t support them in the conventional way of <embed> tag nor <object> tag, so if you think about inserting a cool YouTube video to your post you’ll rather use a plugin app which support it or if you know your way throw HTML you’ll direct an <iframe> object to the desired video (but it’s not supported by ‘Google Videos’). Using the “Insert Video” is so much simpler than that: just insert the video url and there you go. You can of course align and adjust it to your text with simple “Word” functionality.
And there are the “Insert Tag” and “Insert Map” which make it dead simple to attach a Technorati tag (or any other blogs portal site) or “Live Search” map to your post.
The plugins features doesn’t end here and you can even download some more cool plugins from the “Windows Live Gallery” such as:
Save the draft
This writer makes it very simple to save your drafts, save the draft locally by clicking the “Save Draft” button and post the draft into your online editor when ever you’re ready by clicking “Post Draft to Weblog”. Than you can login to your weblog and publish it or even publish it directly from the writer (I usually don’t publish my posts before I make sure it looks good in the preview window online).
Compliment
It seems like Microsoft won’t give up trying penetrating the web community and it looks like this stress upon them by the dominated companies like Google and Yahoo whom develops and supports cool tools for free usage, works for the best and squeezes out of Microsoft great free (for now) tools every once in a while.
Mr. Ozzie, please keep it that way.
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Each one of us knows the effect of trust in personal communications; after one gained the other’s trust, even saying the wrong things at the wrong time can be interpreted correctly, and on the contrary - saying the right things at the right time in a low trust environment might cause suspicious reaction from the other’s side. Marketing process is not a bet; it is based on graphs, numerous calculations, assumptions, and knowledge about your potential customer preferences. As for me and my friends, who spent a couple of years at university learning marketing techniques along with actions and responses to market climate, it was clear to us how to do good marketing. Most of the marketing plans take into consideration expenses, ROI, and TTM, but the main idea is, of course, how to maximize the incoming investments as fast as possible with maximum profit. Facebook’s marketing plan was based on the one thing that we all forgot after too many lectures: it was based on trust! Be honest and believe in your idea and it will gain your customer’s trust. Don’t look for the fastest way to make a bunch of dollars; understand what it is that you are selling and why, what it is that made you fall in love with the idea and the rest shall follow. As you look deeper into companies that grow and develop, you understand that the main thing in their idea is passion. This passion leads to ambition from colleagues and workers and spreads to the customers. This is what makes a great company and this is the basic rule for good marketing.
Recently I read the book “built to last” (highly recommended), which deals with the amazing theory of what makes a great company last (the book analyzes 18 companies with an average age of 103 years). I would like to mention that we are lucky to be in an era in which we can actually take a glance on new emerging companies of which some are based on the structure that this book depicts.
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Filed under: Marketing
Earlier this month I posted “Is Facebook doomed to stay second forever?” (to MySpace of course) but the fact is that facebook already plays in other fields other than MySpace, so the comparison between the two was true for the social networking category only.
The launch on May 25th this year of the f8, facebook platform, which enables every developer to build cool facebook widget applications with the least effort - over 300 custom widgets were implemented in facebook with over 1000 users in approximately one month (here) - was the first step, and with the announcement of facebook’s acquisition over parakey immediately ruled out the rumors that facebook is about to generate the new OS platform.
The vision
facebook’s plan, as Mark Zuckerberg facebook’s founder-CEO presented it at the San Francisco Design Center in front of 800 developers, is to become the next generation of OS, an OS which will build itself by the community spreading power (exponential power).
The basic business plan
facebook will supply the free platform to develop and spread one’s own applications to the users, and by free he meant that every application could advertise over its pages or even subscribe through it while all the revenue would go to the application’s owner with no facebook fees…
With these plans to become a dominate OS platform company using the community power to exponentially grow, the company has a good chance to be the one to free us all ‘Windows users’ from Microsoft’s chains for good.
In addition to all these good news from facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview to Laura Locke of the Time Magazine that they weren’t preparing for an IPO any time soon but hired a stock administrator for the company just in case they would decide to take that path.
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Filed under: facebook
Web1.0 is considered to be the Internet’s historical era (whereas the U.S. Department of Defence “Three terminals” is the pre-historical era), Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, investments in Internet sites looked very promising, and many venture capital funds as well as private investors considered it a bargain. As a result, the Internet was ‘polluted’ with misleading advertisements and deceptive contents in order to attract more viewers. The Web community gradually becomes skeptical regarding the World Wide Web’s credibility and reliability.
Then the “bubble period” – or the “Digital Revolution”, if to use a historical jargon – erupts. Soon after, many Internet sites are closed after spending millions of dollars and earning almost nothing. The Internet becomes a synonym for illusion, a trap from which one should keep away.
The Digital Revolution resembles the Industrial Revolution in that it was inevitable and encouraged the fast growth of economy. Little after the Digital Revolution of Y2K, came the “Social Network Revolution” of Web2.0, just as the Social Revolution of the 60’s appeared (200 years) after the Industrial Revolution.
The consumer is the prosumer, “free” is no longer a word to be used just to draw you to X-rated sited. Niches with common interest consolidate, the Long Tail proves itself, and huge sites such as Amazon and EBay, which have been considered not long ago as a great risk for Web1.0 users who had to give their credit card number even before purchasing a single product, are now considered in the world of Web2.0 as one of the best business models on the Internet.
The “Social Network Revolution” started in 2004 and turned San Francisco once again to the capital of the social world. Here is what Tim O’Reilly (who created the term ‘Web2.0’) wrote in an article in 2005:
and these are my web2.0 comparison to the 60’s:
Now it is easier to foresee how things will develop, taking into consideration the fact that we are only in the Internet’s 60’s. We should probably expect legislation, bureaucracy, and censorship, along with the prosperity of the new world, until the revolution to come, and I’m not implying Web3.0 and not even Web4.0 – the Quantum Web, but Web5.0 – the Nanobiological Web.
Why is the Nanobiological Web the next revolution?
Semantic web is a direct continuance to Web2.0’s endless contents collected in the largest database in the world, the World Wide Web, and the Quantum Web is merely another technology – amazing yet already existent. Therefore, the development of the Quantum Web will be of great help to complex semantic calculations that a simple digital system just cannot execute, let alone with enormous masses of information in a reasonable time.
This leaves us with the biological change, a change we have never experienced before, a revolutionary change.
Filed under: Web2.0, Philosophizing
I recently started reading ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ which is, by the way, the only book I have ever read about business management (and maybe the only one I’ll ever read…).
The book talks about doing business in a new way which is different and unconventional. The approach, the book is talking about, is to ignore the competitors in the market you are about to enter and to focus about building your business creatively while creating your own niche of customers. This niche will represent all the non-customers of the other businesses you are competing in the same market.
A big part of the book is examples from the business world referring to successful companies and less successful companies. One of the examples is about an Australian winery “Casella”. The winery entered a very competitive marked which was dominated by a very experienced wineries with loyal customers who are wealthy and belong to the upper class.
As a result “Casella” decided to address a different market, the “common people” who enjoy drinking without going bankrupt. In a short time “Casella” winery became one of the most profitable wineries in the world with many customers in USA and worldwide, mainly because of the low costs (in comparison to the competitors). Since “Casella” sold light and easy to drink wine they didn’t need to age it and were able to reduce their cost drastically.
And how is this story, related to facebook, you ask?
facebook is the second largest website with over 20 million users. It has simple and friendly and yet elegant design, an advanced and diverse API library (which every web developer can only dream about) and yet it always comes second after MySpace, the unquestionable most popular website.
MySpace, with the horrible design, limited API library, unfriendly usability and the annoying ads is still ahead of facebook with over 100 million listed users (more of the population in Mexico).
Experts have analyzed and compared the two websites while trying to understand the success of MySpace. Many claim that MySpace’s secret is the target audience: teenagers. MySpace offers the ideal place for teenagers to rebel and express themselves using ridiculous icons and pictures. But the thing is the many who visit the website is around 35 and more (according to Comscore ). The same people facebook is trying to attract, the more sophisticated target audience.
So how is it the MySpace is so much more popular then facebook?
In my opinion, a significant factor is the fact that MySpace addresses a more common audience, young as old. This audience has a very specific need: having fun. Interacting with other people while having fun without thinking too much or taking things too seriously.
So is facebook doomed to stay second forever?
If we go back to the “Casella” story we can conclude that if you prefer wine mainly because of its social qualities then you will prefer cheap and tasty wine over an expansive and unique wine. The same for a social website, if you look for a light and casual relationships you will choose a simple website who will enable you to goof around without feeling an outsider.
Apparently, most people are looking for that childish simplicity which disappears once we get older. Moreover, facebook is considered a website which addresses those sophisticated users who can appreciate quality. Obviously, this means a smaller number of users.
Someone once ridiculed me and said:
“A simple website is for simple people”.
I should thank him for this tip.
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Filed under: facebook
Creativity it’s what happens when you take a zero off at the end of the budget.
The fascinating and enjoyable “Garage Web Entrepreneurship” panel, hosted by Guy Kawasaki at The Churchill Club - the Silicon Valley’s premier business and technology forum, discuss about: The secret of success out of nothing.
All the truth behind the garage entrepreneurs who made it on their own - No Plan, No Capital,No Model…No Problem.
Enjoy.
Filed under: Entrepreneurship
This is Clirity's weblog about entrepreneurship, design, code, business, webX.0 philosophizing and things we learn along the way.
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