Techno-fille

Welcoming 'Snippy Bon-Bons'

People just fall in love with Snippy, the creature from the logo. It's a great logo work with from a marketing and brand point of view, simply opens an endless array of opportunities.  We've wanted to do a unique line of artistic Snippy collectibles for a long while and it's finally taking form. I'd like to welcome the first item we are making available:  the 'Snippy Bon-Bon'; A one of a kind hand sewn, stuffed Snippy, slightly smaller than a basket-ball.

Here's the model (alpha version):

Snippy Bon Bons will be mostly won as award by our eSnippers, and will be also sold on the site.  More on who will receive the eSnips Bon-Bon coming soon on eSnippers den.

NEW: You can now create slideshows on eSnips

Hagit, our VP of marketing created a great slide show of the Social DNA launch event.  The slide show is a new feature we just launched on eSnips. The background song was performed by Genise at the launch event. She just has an amazing voice. You could listen to her for hours.   For more from Genise go here.

The slide show is on the eSnippers' den blog, but it's so beautiful, i wanted to have it here too. 

eSnips Karaoker at the Spotlight of Social DNA launch party last night

We've done many version launches by now, but this was the first time we did an event to toast a launch. There's simply a lot of excitement around it.  We had around 120 guests, journalists, friends, colleagues and key figures from the Israeli high tech industry.   The venue was amazing.  It's called LalaLand it's right on the beach of Tel Aviv.

Rather than us telling everybody at the event what eSnips and Social DNA mean for our users, we thought it would be better to invite an eSnipper to tell in their own words, who they are, how they discovered eSnips, what they do on the site, the people they met, and their thoughts and experience with the newly launched Social DNA. We approached a few of the singers from the Karaoke Community and Genise Gee from Scotland agreed with delight.  She was definitely the highlight of the party.

Here's the audience enthralled by Genise performing Tracey Ullman's 'They don't know':

   

Genise simply wowed everybody from the production team who's heard it all before, to the last guest in the event. She sang 2 Abba songs that we requested of her and one of her own favorites. And then out of the crowed came Catalin, an eSnips karaoker that knows Genise from eSnips, who we discovered lives in Tel Aviv. At first he was really shy but eventually got on stage and sang a duet with Genise.

We'll upload more photos and a video from the event will be on eSnips soon.

Social DNA reviews in top web 2.0 blogs

Great review of Social DNA by Kristen Nicole today on Mashable. Kristen clearly spent time playing with the product and the post makes it obvious how well they know their space.

Marshall Kirkpatrick convered Social DNA and eSnips on Readwriteweb and took a different very  interesting, angle:  Social DNA high monetization potential.

WebWare's Josh Lowensohn of CNET Webware also wrote a great post on Social DNA.  Josh was well on the point that quizzes in not something new, but the integration of the platform within your social life on a site, provides for a different user experience.

Mark Hendrickson of Techcrunch wrote a pretty short post about Social DNA too, but thought of it as dating service attempt and as addition to an already non-clear, or not differentiated enough eSnips offering. Would have loved to see a more in depth review though, even if it's not a positive one...

I just came across this great review by Graeme Thickins on Tech Surf Blog.  This is how it starts:

"You knew it had to be coming: a way to map your online social self. My god, how did we get along without this till now? Thank you, eSnips (I think)."

Great feedback. We're excited!

eSnips Social DNA; Discovering likeminded people version 2.0, launching tomorrow.

Things are so busy around here that we are hardly finding the time to update our blogs.

Much of the activity over the past few months has been around the development of a new social platform within eSnips that we are all TOTALLY excited about.  It’s called social DNA, it will be launched within the next 24 hours.

So what is Social DNA? It's a new social platform within eSnips that let’s people discover others that are like them. 

And what’s the big deal? Well today you can discover likeminded others based on a handful of common tags, or friends.  Social DNA takes this concept to another dimension, buy showing you matching individuals  based on hundreds or thousands of common parameters we call 'digital genes'. 

It's done through quizzes (open questions and multiple choice) in various aspects of life, or very specific hobbies. You start seeing matching people right from the first answer.

Official launch is tomorrow, November the 14th. Direct access will be provided from the eSnips home page. 

We have a launch event tonight  and are delighted to have two very special eSnippers in the spotlight. 

Interview on Blog Talk Radio

I was interviewed by Mike McGrath. It was a 30 minute chat on diverse topics; from Web 2.0 growth drivers, to eSnips to our newly launched Social DNA. Mike's a great interviewer. He spends a lot of time looking at and playing with new services in the social networking and media space, He knows the space and has a great sense of humor.

Family pet news

And a little personal note here :) Zita, our Cavalier King Charles dog, my jogging companion, had her first litter this week. But while this breed usually produces 3 - 4 puppies, she delivered 8!!!

She's now very busy with the pups and provides me with an excellent excuse to take some time off my not too harsh running regime...

How does a grown Cavalier look?  here's a picture I used from a new service called Picapp that lets you embed professional photos from an entire catalog, free of charge:

eSnips picked by Business 2.0 in CNN Money

The user-generated revolution is in full swing worldwide. Erick Schonfeld and Yi-Wyn Yen from Business 2.0 Magazine list eSnips as one of the best non-U.S. sites to watch.

First eSnips DJ Contest Starts tomorrow!

The DJs from the eSnips DJ Community, together with Lonnie, our Community Manager are organizing a DJ contest. Today is the last day for submissions and close to 100 DJs will be competing. We love this community. Everybody here is totally excited about this contest. Voting will start June 10th midnight Pacific Daylight Time.  you'll be able to LISTEN AND VOTE HERE.

Lonnie and Shahar ('Le Maitre' Desinger) in the photo below, produced a cool contest shirt that'll be sent to all DJs participating in the contest.

Here are Lonnie and Shahar, and here's the shirt:

Good opportunity to thank Mike Suede and Christian Antonsen  (jamlover) for initiating and helping the competition move forward along with , Mighty Jah , DJ Ronge and many many others very cool eSnippers .

Long Term Retention - The Impact of Social Features

If you like metrics and graphs, you'd love this one. It's one of the metrics we use to measure how well we are doing here at eSnips  in maintaining the interest of people who sign up to the site.

What is measured here is the month by month improvement in what is referred to in the industry 'Long Term Retention'.  Long term retention tracks how many of the people that signed up to a particular service during a particular month continue to visit it regularly and actively use it several months later. The 'Industry' number tends to be all over the place depending on how it's measured.

Here is the data for eSnips. What's interesting to see here is the very significant improvement in retention that takes place with time.  Every one of these lines represents a group of users that registered during a particular month. The first line on the left is the group of people that signed up with eSnips during October. Every point on this line represents the percent of those who remained active a month later, two months later, three months later….up to six months later. The next line to the right of it represents users that signed up during November and so on.  What is very evident from this graph is that every month the site becomes more attractive, and every month the % of retention increases drastically. Improving retention is a difficult thing to do, even by single percentage points. We are delighted to have managed to improve by several tens of percentages. This increase in retention is It's clearly linked to new functionality that is added to eSnips every month, making it more appealing for people to return.

Kudos to our team, and thanks eSnippers for your support, contribution, use and appreciation of the feature set!