Techno-fille

Josh Silverman, VP Europe: eBay New Ventures, joins the eSnips advisory board

This is very exciting for us. Josh is of those very unique and impressive people that you feel privileged to meet and work with. We will profit tremendously from his extensive entrepreneurial and management experience. As the VP Europe, eBay New Ventures, Josh was responsible for a long list of strategic acquisitions, including the $290M acquisition of Marktplaats.nl which he also managed, the acquisitions of Gumtree.com (UK), Loquo.com (Spain), and OpusForum.de (Germany); as well as the launch of the Kijiji brand in Italy, France and Germany.  Josh also serves on the board of Craigslist, representing eBay's 25% ownership in that company.

Prior to Ebay, Josh co-founded Evite Inc and was its CEO until it was aquired by IAC in mid 2001. Josh graduated from Stanford (GSB ’97) and worked for 10 years in the U.S. Right now he lives in Amsterdam with his wife and 18-month-old daughter.

Update on my "10 km by mid March" resolution

As to my  "10  km (6.5 miles) by mid March"  resolution from my Feb 15 post (In the Running: beating Loic Le Meur?):  Well,  there's some progress. Yesterday I managed to increase the distance… without reducing the speed :)  from 4 km to 6.5 km.  No coach yet. But  am considering joining a group or something.....I'm flying out to CA for 10 days. hope I'll manage do some progress there with the jetlag and all.

Welcome Efrat!

Latest and very important addition to the eSnips team: Efrat Moshkovitz. Amongst tons of other things, Efrat will be responsible for our online strategy and community building efforts.

Efrat will write her own blog called esnippers' den, where she'll get into lots of detail about what’s going on at eSnips: upcoming features, directions, insights, thoughts and ideas. eSnippers, go over there and join the discussion! 

We enticed her to eSnips after 5 years in marketing and analysis management at ICQ (acquired by  AOL in 1998), preceded by a few years at Gallup and at a PR firm specializing in hi-tech and finance. She has a degree in Communications and Management from Tel-Aviv University. They don’t come any better!
She lives in Israel, spent several years in the Valley as a child. She has this absolutely amazing 2-year-old redheaded little girl of her own that I couldn’t help not sharing here.

eSnips is undergoing a major service upgrade this week

Dear eSnippers:   eSnips is growing fast and our service needs a bigger, faster home. We'll be moving it this week. It's a pretty complex transition but we hope to keep the disruptions to a minimum. 

Here's what you should expect:

1. A small percentage of you may notice that some recently uploaded files do not appear. It's only temporary, they will soon be back.

2. The service will not be accessible for one to three hours on Wednesday the 22nd or Thursday the 23rd. It may get pushed to Sunday the 26th or Monday the 27th. A notice with the downtime schedule will be provided here in advance in your eSnips home.

We will make every effort to schedule the upgrade during US night time hours.

Thank you for your understanding!

Gemini Ventures Invests in eSnips

It’s now official, so I can finally blog about it: Gemini Ventures made a seed investment  in eSnips.  This investment will be very helpful to us in the short and longer term as we continue to build eSnips.  Gemini is an excellent VC, with an amazing track record of successful exists in Technology start ups. It’s actually the leading Technology VC in Israel with $550M under management.  Their team was very impressive and amazingly quick in executing this deal.   It was completed in two weeks -  a record - breaking speed, according to all the professional teams involved. Danny Cohen is  the partner from Gemini who lead the investment. He’s moving to the Bay area this summer.   

So what are we planning  to do with the money?  Well, it’s a seed investment, so we want to manage it  carefully.  We're not planning to enlarge the team in the next 6 months, other than the addition of one ‘non - tech person’ (…it’s about time!). We'll remain small, and use the funds primarily to finance our operation, add cool features to eSnips and invest in hosting equipment that will allow us to serve you, the eSnippers, and those who access your content, with the fastest and most reliable service possible.

Well, we might manage one small bottle of champagne to celebrate...:) 

The bright side of non-defensibility

Regarding Pete Cashmore's review of Edgeio and the comments on Edgeio's "defensibility". 

Shouldn't this term be RIPed? Aren’t there enough example that prove that it' s a NON-ISSUE. Isn't it clear yet that almost nothing in software is 'defensible'?  The big guys can always put together the required number of brains to develop anything. It 'll take a year or 18 months but they'll do it. Does that mean it will be successful ? Sometimes they'll succeed and sometimes not, and that's part of the risk you take when you do anything in life.  del.icio.us is a perfect example that Yahoo tried to reproduce with no success. When people create products that are their passion, it conveys somehow and it can be very hard to reproduce. 

We recently raised money from VCs, I'll write about it later, but before Web 2.0 services became so hot, the issue of 'defensibility' was a show stopper. Luckily for us – to build 'Non-defensible' products doesn't take too many people nor money. Otherwise we wouldn't have been doing what we do today.

For those happy few who've never tried to raise VC money: Defensibility refers to how difficult it will be for others to copy or compete against you.   

In the Running: beating Loic Le Meur?

About a year ago, I started running. The inspiration came from Nahum Sharfman,  the company’s chairman and first investor, who started practicing for the Triathlon.  So I thought why not, it's good for relieving stress/removing all that order-in pizza. So for the first 6 months I was sure it would be a temporary thing, but  like many others I got caught by the bug. I am lucky to live in an area where my house is totally surrounded by beautiful orchards and nature …

So, I ran about 3 times per week, mornings  at around 6AM, and was very happy with the 4 km I was running, at a not so fast rate of about 6.5 minutes per km. My dog Zita, who is supposed to be a toy  dog / lapdog breed (a Cavalier King Chales Spaniel, in the photo) joins me and runs twice or three times as much (back and forth).

So all was well until yesterday ,  when I stumbled on Loic’s blog, and because I met him briefly last year and didn’t know  he was a runner, I started reading. Loic writes that  he  started running about 6 months ago, and now runs about 17 plus km on a regular basis.  Now my 4 km feel very miserable.  Time for change:  My goal by mid March:  10km.  But then I think:  Loic has a coach.  Maybe taking male hormones would be cheaper :)?

 

 

Technocrati 'Authority'': Google 'Popularity'

Played with Technocrati's new  'Authority' feature and thought it a good addition but  a bad  choice of name.   

The problem is that we already kowtow too much to popularity, and make too many decisions based on what others think is good, but at least you still think  you're the one making the decision.    
But when you give the name "authority" to something that's essentially PageRank (how many incoming links the blog has), you're claiming that quantity translates into quality, and that we ought to give more weight to someone's opinion just because lots of other people think like him or her. 

Really? OK, OK, Wisdom of Crowds and all that, but we're getting perilously close to Might Is Right here (or perhaps it's Two Wrongs DO Make a Right, and two thousand wrongs make it righter?)  Perhaps they meant it to be funny,  but not everyone would take it that way

After Demo 2006 thoughts ...

I haven't been to Demo this year, but I’ve looked at some presentation videos. It occurred to me that that for a normal person, who doesn't  live all day long in Web 2.0,  the new services  of the last year or so all sound more alike than they really are.   Perhaps it's because many of them have: 

1)  " Exotic"  names  like Kaboodle or Zingee  - cool names, but they make it hard to remember which of them does what.

2)   Three  or four word "action message"  on the home page   - "Keep, Share, Discover" (del.icio.us); "Collect, Share, Discover" (Kaboodle) ; "Collect, Share, Connect" (Plum).

3)  Blurb that  sometimes seems to address the industry rather  than the user  - "Building the Social Web" ; "Powerful Web 2.0 Tools" ; "AJAX".

I searched for posts that had noticed these trends but couldn’t find any.

And re. Demo: there were some great companies. My favorite consumer product was Blurb. They're unique, they have a lot of technological depth, and their product fills a real need. For some things, the value of having a hard copy has no  substitute yet … at least for me .

What is eSnips, and are we part of the online storage gang?

eSnips provides users with a centralized place to store, share and publish collections of files related to their areas of interests, causes or passions. Because collections of files usually take more space than html text, we provide a significant amount of free storage space (currently 1GB).

We've recently been mentioned in notable blogs such as Techcrunch and Mashable as part of the online storage gang. Online storage is generally picking momentum and it's great. There is a lot of potential in this space and many angles. But are we an online storage company? Well, we offer 1GB of free storage space, and that has value by itself, but storage is only a small part of our offering and vision. 

We want to help people handle their dynamic / 'live' content; the part that is central to what they do at a given point in time, the things they care about and want to share. We don't want to be an online drive for users to store or backup their computers or files. The value we want to create for the user and the online community is in the content itself and the social aspects. Our upcoming version focuses on these key elements.  

We are all really excited about this upcoming launch (scheduled for the first week of March). We are not sure if we'll provide limited access to the beta during the first few weeks or have it totally open. I'll try to post about it in advance.