A question I get from time to time is going around “How can you come up with a good idea for a startup?”
It’s the wrong question. In order to get to an answer you do not want to think on a great idea for a startup. Because this won’t lead you in the right path. It might be a cool idea that you and your friends think is wonderful but if it’s not a real problem in the real world, most chances are that people won’t find it useful.
If it’s not useful, you won’t be able to monetize it and build a sustainable business. After all, a startup is a temporary organization in a hunt of scalable, repeatable and profitable business model. So you want to improve your odds in this hunt by identify a common problem.
It’s not only that the better way is to look for problems. It should be a problem that you have.
The very best startup ideas usually contain three aspects:
You (the founder) want to have it. It’s your personal pain point.
You can solve it.
Few others realize that these ideas worth the time and energy to pursue.
That is the first thing you hear when someone is hearing about this for the first time. In my last two startups, I used it and it works quite good for us. Like in Agile / Scrum and all the other methodologies, you need to try and take what works for you. The magic in Kanban is the ability to keep most of the ‘things that works’ and gain productivity. If you like to do daily stand-ups meeting – keep them. If you push new version to production every week – keep it and the list goes on. The power of Kanban is in the ability to improve the communication and to put everyone on the same page, or a board in this case.
The Kanban technique emerged in the late 1940s in Toyota. It was their effort to invent a new approach to manufacturing and engineering. Line-workers displayed colored kanbans (=cards) to notify their downstream co-workers that demand existed for parts and assembly work. The system’s highly visual nature allowed teams to communicate more easily on what work needed to be done and when. It also standardized cues and refined processes, which helped to reduce waste and maximize value.
In the past six years I had the pleasure to mentor hundreds of entrepreneurs and developers. For some, as an investor and for others as an external advisor or a domain expert. These days I’m doing it mostly as my day job which is really fun!
Here are some of the lessons learned over time.
If you are an entrepreneur who is asking:
“Why do I need someone to mentor me?”
Well, there are many good reasons, but check the graph below. Continue reading →
In the past year, I had the pleasure to work with @JessicaUelmen and the rest of the professional team in Udacity on a course that aim to help developers and entrepreneurs. There is no higher form of user validation than having customers support your product with their wallets. However, the path to a profitable business is not necessarily an easy one. This course blends instruction with real-life examples to help you effectively develop, implement, and measure your monetization strategy, iterating on the model as appropriate. In a nutshell, it will help you make money.
Today I had the pleasure to talk (again) at DevCon Tel Aviv. In this talk, I’ve covered some of the aspects that developer should think about in the design phase, coding phase and after the ‘production time’. It was a good opportunity to put a simple demo page that contain some basic HTML5 features you might want to use. Why? because in cases like the ‘Summary/Detail’ element you get the option to have expendable/collapsable areas without any JavaScript. It’s great to have the ability to communicate to the browser our needs without doing some ‘hacks’ in JS. Other great options like: visibility API, Geo and device orientration are all working on most modern browsers. You can check out the slides and the links to the resources in them. Continue reading →
It was the first meeting of GDG Haifa at the technion. I gave the first talk about HTML5 (new) APIs that front-end developers should leverage. It was a good kick-off event and it seems that this group will produce many more quality events. You can check the demos and the slide at my project site.
Enjoy.
When we thinking on web apps and specially mobile web apps, we wish to make them smooth a responsive as possiable. The main problem is latency/network and luckily we have enough APIs in HTML5 to make sure we can achieve this goal. A good recent example is fastbook (yep… just like facebook but working FAST with HTML5). Here I’ll summaries some of the main points you wish to pay attention when you building your next amazing mobile web app. Start with ‘offline first’ (after all, you are on the right path with ‘mobile first’ already).
Coding
Offline First
You should store all the main assets of your application. There are several APIs you can use:
AppCache – for the main index.html page and all your JS, CSS code. You could also use it for images and other static data.
Filesystem – You have an option to work with files: text and binary data. This is a great option for cases where you have a lot of images/mp3/videos etc’. In order to manage the work with files there is a great library – filer.js
Last night, I gave this talk to Google Developer Group Tallinn about the new APIs that we have today in HTML5 and CSS3. It was (another) great hangout where you can ‘touch’ people that are quite far from your location and speak with them about mutual interest.
Some of the topics that I covered during the talk where: Continue reading →
Let’s start with some cool features you should use in Chrome DevTools:
Device emulation – You can set a new User Agent so your web app will think you are now access it from a mobile phone/tablet etc’. This is a great feature that used to be something you needed to use a Chrome extension in order to have.
Dimension overriding – This is very cool because it let developers debug mobile web apps on different devices and operating systems via the Settings Menu. You can emulate the exact device metrics of many devices (e.g. iPad/iPhone, Galaxy Nexus/Tablets and even BB) so your media queries will run without any bugs.
Touch event emulation to make it easier to debug mobile applications on the desktop. Of course, you can have other simulators (e.g. Android and iOS) but here you have it inside Chrome!
If you wish to play with the latest and greatest features that are under ‘experiments’. You should go to: chrome://flags/and click ‘Enable’ on: ‘Enable Developer Tools experiments’ then in the setting panels of the devtools you will have more granular control on the specific feature you wish to use. For more checkout the official page of chrome developer tools.
You can watch the 10min episode on our GDL-IL page.
As you all know, last week we had the launch of the new Chromebook for everyone. I’m really existed about this new device because it’s a combination of cheaper (249$ on amazon), better (lots of improvements + important security capabilities), faster (well, lighter). Some of the interesting specs are:
11.6’’ screen
0.7 inches / 2.42 pounds
6.5 hours of battery (I had it running for more then 8h – but maybe, it because I was working mostly with email/docs and cloud 9 and not watching movies).
Boots up in less than 10 seconds
100 GB of Google Drive free for 2 years – Yep, 100G.
You can test the water with it on several locations in the US (e.g Best Buy) and ‘feel’ it. I can say that in the past months I’ve worked with a very close model and it was a great device. If you ‘live’ in the cloud and do not need photoshop (like 99% of the internet users) it might be a device you want to checkout. As web developers, if you are using a cloud IDE (e.g. like one from this list) It might be very good option.
The Chromebook for everyone
Compare the new device to his ‘older’ brother
I had an urge to do the same video but then I’m notice this one… so here you go. It’s cover the major differences in terms of the hardware. As for the OS and the new features in Chrome… It’s the same (of course).
A question I get from time to time is going around “How can you come up with a good idea for a startup?”
As you all know, last week we had the launch of the 
Ido Green 