I was lucky enough to be in the room for their final rehearsal (yep… it was in the same room that I gave my I/O talk). However, I could not focus on preparing, because their stories were so powerful and inspiring. Each and everyone had a story that kept the ‘wow’ effect. If you have time this weekend… you won’t regrat it. Continue reading
Category Archives: Business
How To Present Your Idea (Like A Pro)
This time it’s a 5min talk that comedian Don McMillan (more good stuff over his site) did back in 2008. It’s still very relevant with great tips on what NOT to do. Some points I took while watching him:
- Less is more – reduce the amount of text on the slides to the minimum. Make sure you have an amazing slides (ya… get quality photos with the wow effect) that drive to the point you wish people to take from each slide. Images trigger emotion and since you wish to tell a story (and not flip slides) images are your friends.
- If we touch the main point of ‘story telling‘, let’s go on it deeper because it’s (one of )the most important aspects. You want to tell an interesting story, provoke emotion and leave the audience with ‘something’ after you done talking. Most importantly, do NOT read what you wrote on the slides.
- Reduce the amount of slides/text so the most important ideas will get the focus.
Startups Best Practices
In the past 18 years I’ve started six companies (the last cool one is HighGearMedia). In this talk, I shared some of the best practices that I learned the hard way. There are few aspects that I did my best to covered, from technology to design to following your dreams with the best tools you can allow yourself in a certain point in time. In the slides, there is a section that is devoted to Campus TLV and what is the role (as I see it) of a mentor that works with startups on a daily bases. If you are going to visit the Campus in the future, please don’t be a stranger.There are many more aspects for building a new company. I guess, one of the most critical success factor is finding the right partners and share the load of the work. It’s one of those ‘easy to say hard to do’ things but this is part of the fun.
Good luck!
Women Tech Markers With Yael Karov of Ginger
Today we published the second episode of GDL-IL Women Tech-makers with Yael Karov (Founder and CEO of Ginger Software). Gingre is a service built from Karov’s 20+ years of experience in the field of natural language processing and machine learning that helps users improve their online English language communication. Here the discussion was with Michal Segalov and Dana Gabel (Software Engineer in Google), about Yael’s experiance in commercial launch of innovative products to market.
Enjoy!
DevConTLV Summary
Last week, I had the pleasure to present at DevConTLV for the 3rd time. It a great conferance that bring to Tel Aviv some rock-stars from companies like: Github, CouchDB, Amazon and many others. The location (Ozen Bar) is a cool place where you can hear live music during the nights and drink good coffee during the mornings. So it is a natural location to such an event. Ahh… and yep, the opening of the day was done with a live rock band! (just like JSConf). Continue reading
GDL-IL On Campus TLV
As you know, this week we open Campus TLV so it’s natural that we will have our Google Developer Live episode devoted to this amazing project.
First, What is Campus TLV?
Campus Tel Aviv is a hub for entrepreneurs and developers. In this special space you will be able to organize events, find mentors and share thoughts with other entrepreneurs.
There is a “hacking space” and device library to test your mobile apps on a range of devices. Other program is “Google Launchpad”: a two-week boot camp for early stage start-ups helping with subjects including user interface, product strategy & technology, marketing, business development etc’. Continue reading
Google Campus TLV Is Open!
Today we (Google Israel) are opening Campus TLV. It’s going to be a great place for entrepreneurs and startups in Israel. We are going to have a big space for events, hackathons and a nice device library (so you could test you mobile apps on all the important devices out there). If you are starting a company and/or working on your idea, you could checkout the Campus site and see what event/meetup will be best for you. The Campus space will be used by developers, start-ups and partners for events, and entrepreneurs will get access to Google’s teams and other experts. We’re also working with tech incubators, accelerator programs and other partners to bring their start-ups to Campus for an initiative called “Launch Pad.” It’s a two-week “bootcamp” for more than 100 start-ups each year, aimed at enhancing existing accelerator programs by providing expertise in user experience and design, product strategy, global marketing, business development and more. Continue reading
The Brain, Entrepreneurship And Life With Jeff Hawkins
I’ve watch this interesting conversation between Jeff Hawkins and Michael Chui. For the ones that are old enough to remember Palm (yep, Palm V!) and Handspring – Jeff was the founder of both but he has since turned to work on neuroscience full-time at Numenta
. In this hour conversation there are lots of interesting points on the brain, his life and some great tips for entrepreneurs. Few points that I wrote down from his thoughts: Continue reading
Great Web App Session
At the last day (for me) in the Javaposse roundup 2012 we started (like any good day) with camp 4 coffee. Then, after you can speak (more or less) we sat to talk on what does we mean when we say: “Modern web app” or as Joel N. said: “Don’t use the word modern because it will become obsolete before you know it”. When we try to define a great web app here are some common aspects we found:
- Self Contained
- Functional
- Immersive
- Interactive
- Works Offline
- Device Aware
- App Styled Navigation
- Client Side Architecture
Few important things we can learn from Amazon web kindle app:- Does it cost more to support browser X than it generates?
- Is the browser older than the mayo in your fridge?
- Is an exorcist required to debug the app’s behavior?
The lesson is to be explicit about the browsers you support (just like Amazon). One of THE success stories about mobile web apps if the Financial times app. You might want to check the slides in order to get the full details of their success story. 
Btw, in you can have this new script to help you popup the message for users to add your web app to their home screen. It will make the engejment of your app better and the user will be able to ‘treat’ your web app as any other app.
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Here are my slides from the lighting talk on Great Web Apps that I gave later this day.
Tools That Make You More Productive
During the first day of Java posse roundup 2012 I’ve took some notes from all the interesting session I’ve been in. The first day was a great start to the conference with two session that were very interesting with lots of good stuff to start and checkout. Here are some of the notes I’ve took from the session about “Tools that make you more productive”.
The first suggestion was (surprise – surprise) Whiteboards with some good tips like:
- Big boards for work in meetings
- Small portable boards that people can take back to their desks
- Pictures of boards for later reference/distribution – good mobile apps for that are:
- CamScanner+ phone-based scanning to PDF, etc.
- Camera+ with its text mode filter.
My favorite editor Sumblime Text was next in line. There are many great tips and ways to make you efficiant using it. I will try to post on that later this week. You can start by using ctrl-p for smart search and improve your knowledge of short-cuts.
Productivity tools:
- Workfloy.com – good for plan/todo anything that need list/sharing and a nice web app.
- join.me – Hassle free screen sharing.
- Evernote/SpringPad – Everything you want to remember on every device you use.
- Plain-text – good for note-taking, searching
- SimpleNote
- Lightscribe pen – It’s not a pure online tool (but it can be uploaded). It’s a good solution for people that like pens but want to be able to have their drawing/writing digitize for future search.
ToDo:
- Any.do
- “do it tomorrow” – for Android
- Pomodoro technique – Tomatoes.com web-site for pomodoro
For the (web/Java) developers among us:
- Standing desk
- large monitor (or even 2-3 of them).
- best mouse, keyboard, monitor you can buy. On every tool that you use daily you want to buy the best.
- SSD (or hybrid HDD/SS)
How to handle interruptions:
- Turn off all distractions: facebook, twitter, IM, IRC etc’
- Work at home
- Headphones
- Go in early – the few hours without people around in the morning are your 1-2 productive hours of the day.
email considerations:
- Establish policy/reputation of NOT responding rapidly/frequently to emails – unless it is something urgent and then the other team members know to IM you or just call.
- Use email header/subject to distinguish FYI, ACTION REQUIRED, URGENT then you can use priority box in gmail (or filters) to make sure you get to the most important stuff first.
- Boomerang for gMail – It is a good extension that let you set the time of sending so people will get the emails at the start of their work day and not in 23:45 at night.
- Separate user account on workstation that has no email access
- Use email search for trouble-shooting hints, etc.
Software (Java) development:
- JRebel – with and without GWT.
- Play framework – It was great to have a session in the zero day with James ward on play with Java and Scala. Very cool stuff under the hood of Play.
- Write more tests – focus on the parts that you don’t want to do.
- Pair programming (in disciplined doses)
Team communication:
- hipchat.com
- Yammer
- Campfire and it’s ‘brother’ Propane apps.
- Google hangouts (with screen sharing) is powerful tool for meetings.
- Skype.
General hints:
- Environmental hooks (e.g. SBT)
- Python scripting
- Command-? on Mac to drive menu from keyboard
- Avoid the mouse; use keyboard shortcuts
- Mylyn with Eclipse
- Time tracking per task
- Reviewing “painful things” per iteration
- Track time spent on interruptions
If you have more, please let me know in the comments or g+
As for the lighting talks, I was able to hack a little site: jpr12ns.appspot.com (It’s JPR12 and NS for ‘no snow’) to hold all my talks since we had only two nights for the lighting talks so I got some talks ready for next year.
