Category Archives: life

Business, life

Startups Secret Strength

SFO bride to startupsIn this TED talk, Malcolm Gladwell shares with us a new point of view on the famous story of David and Goliath. This new angle to look at the situation(s) reminds us of the state any startup is facing. It takes a lot of work to build a new service/product and sometimes to create or educate a market. However, again and again, startups do it while the significant (well-funded) organizations need to catch up. What looks, at first, as a disadvantage (e.g., limited budget, small teams, members that need to do ‘everything,’ no support from other players in the market, etc.’) is a true advantage when you look deeper.
It forces the startup to be frugal, think out of the box, and be as productive as possible.

There is a nice phrase in Hebrew that, in a direct translation to English will look like this:

“We do the most difficult things immediately. The impossible takes us a little longer.” Continue reading →

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Business, life

Startups Tips

SFO bride to startupsThis week in Google Developers Live Israel I’ve spoke about a topic I’m passion for long time – Startups and entrepreneurship. It’s always thrilling to create a new ‘thing’. It might be a new service, a whole new product or a company that is disrupting a segment in the market. As the founder, it force you, to think and take many decisions along the way. There is a certain risk/reward ratio to any new venture. In most of the cases, it will have an emotional aspect (subjective risk) and a more mesurable aspect that we can quantify. Here are 20 minutes that try to cover some of the main lessons I’ve learn in the past 20 years. Continue reading →

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Business, life

Great Business/Life Books

Views on sun raise Here is a list I’ve saw in the past and I thought it would be great to put it in the ‘air’ and gain more feedback on what you wish to see in a ‘must read’ book list that will open your mind to new ideas (and hopefully improve you in business life).
Please feel free to add stuff in the comments.

  • Good To Great by Jim Collins
  • Peopleware by Tom DeMarco
  • Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Talab
  • The Black swan by Talab
  • Getting More by Stuart Diamond
  • Rework by 37 signals founders
  • Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
  • Malcolam Gladwell: The Tipping point, Blink, Outliers, What the dog saw
  • Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
  • Predictable Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely
  • Small Giants by Bo Birlingham.
  • Stumbling on happiness by Daniel Gilbert.
    He also have a very good TED talk
  • Crossing the Chasm by Geoff Moore
  • Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs
  • Drive by Daniel Pink
  • Getting things done by  David Allen
  • The Silent language of leaders
  • Thank you for Arguing
  • How to Speak like a CEO
  • Content Rules
  • Writing that works
  • Crucial conversations
  • First, break all the rules
  • Imagine : How creativity works
  • Truth about being a leader
  • Confessions of a Public Speaker
  • Team Geek
  • Don’t Make Me Think

I had this list of “must read books” from one of the conferences I’ve attended back in 2010. There are some good ones over there as well. However, it covers more technical books for developers and less business books. Don’t forget “There is creative reading as well as creative writing”.

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Business, life

7 Amazing Techmarkers

google-techmarkersI 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 →

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Business, life

How To Present Your Idea (Like A Pro)

Can't get more London then that...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.
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life

2012 Year Summary – This Blog, Books And Running

This year I have covered a bit more then 1000 miles. Here are some of the stats that nike site is giving you. First you can see I run mostly off-road  This is great not only due to the amazing views but also because it’s quite and give you a chance to think without any ‘city’ noise around.

Screen Shot 2013-01-03 at 12.48.59 PM Continue reading →

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HTML5, JavaScript, life

Frontend Development Sources

Screen Shot 2012-12-18 at 10.34.00 AM

Here are a few new/cool sources I’ve bumped into during last week events (and meetings). It is always a great fun to talk with developers and learn on new tools that they are using in order to do their work. If you have something interesting, please don’t be a stranger and let me know…

HTML5

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Business, life

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 Numentanumenta. 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 →

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life

Chrome DevTools Screencasts (Hebrew)

We had a very productive ‘Google Drive and Android’ Hackathon and during this event, I got lots of questions from web developers on Chrome DevTools. So here is a great reason to sit down and talk (in hebrew this time) on the special features we have today in DevTools that could help you as a web developer to be more productive and smile more. You can go over the slides while you watch (or after it) on devtools-11.appspot.com It was a talk I gave in Google developer day in Berlin last year. However, the main points that I covered in the screen-cast are from the current DevTools that you have today (Sep 2012) in Chrome Canary.

Few of the main features you might want to master:

  • Click on the ? and see how you can be productive with the keyboard. Here is a list of keyboards command
  • On the right-bottom corner you can see the ‘setting’ button. Once you click on it – you can have some nice options like: choose other user agent and get their screen resolutions, mimic touch events etc’.
  • The Network tab will let you record sessions and the cool part is that you can start a recording and then move between few pages (or in a web app – click and move between states). Once you are done with the recording you can take the data by right click and choosing ‘Save to HAR’ then you can share this data and use tools like this in order to analysis your web app in order to tune it and import its performance.
  • The Audit tab let you have a quick and deep analysis of ‘what can be improved’. Think of ‘page speed’ / YSlow but inside your DevTools.
  • The Profiles tab let you dive deep into the CPU utilization, memory (to see where it’s leaking) and what is going on with the CSS selectors.
  • The console is also a powerful feature that give you options to work with a set of shortcuts like: $0 – for the current selected element etc’. The full list of these shortcuts could be nice to save.

Chrome Dev Tools In Hebrew Part 1

Chrome Dev Tools In Hebrew Part 2

Chrome Dev Tools In Hebrew Part 3

The examples for my book on web workers are here: https://github.com/greenido/Web-Workers-Examples-

If you have other tips you like to share on Chrome DevTools  – please let me know about them.

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Chrome, life

Educational Apps On ChromeOS

As the academic year is starting, let’s have a closer look at what apps can make the life of students and teachers better. There are few sections in Chrome web store that will show us the current inventory: Academic apps, Academic resources and Tools for Teachers. From looking around of them you can see some nice example like: LucidChart For EDU, Planetarium, GeoGebra and many more. It’s depend on your kids age and level but you might find good options in the chrome web store from starting to read apps and up to full ‘office’ apps for collage.

If I was in school today, I guess khanacademy.org would take a lot of my time. It’s got the perfect combination of quality content (in ‘eatable’ sizes of 10min each) and a set of exercise that could show me if I really understood a certain topic. Their new Computer Science section is extremely powerful. It will help students to start play with CS and have fun while doing so. The feedback that you get while programming there is something that will make students productive quickly. Another cool web app that will teach you a new language quickly (while you are helping a novel goal of translating the web) is duolingo.com If you want to learn few words before your next trip, it’s very useful. Last but not least, you might want to try lumosity.com which should improve brain health and its performance.

Btw, this is one of the best talks around our education system and what needs to change.

Have a great learning year.

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