April 2013
1 post
3 tags
Products should work for you, not the other way...
When building software, you often encounter a case where you expected user input in some form, but it arrives at another. Excellent products do not reach such situations because they know what to expect from their users. Generally speaking, the situation of receiving “bad” input can be divided to two cases:
You just don’t know how to figure the input out
You know exactly how to...
December 2012
3 posts
4 tags
Our service is down because Microsoft Azure is...
Running a cloud service surely has its challenges, but I believe it’s the future of consumer products and most technology in general. We (Soluto) rely our service on Microsoft Azure, which we chose as our scalable big data platform because we could build stuff really fast on top of it using our favorite tool: Visual Studio. We now run on hundreds of machines and deal with close to 100M data...
3 tags
I'm selling my PC museum!
I love tech. Throughout the years I’ve surrounded myself with old tech memorabilia that has some significance in the history of computing, or to me personally. But now, as I plan my move to NYC to open Soluto’s US office, I need to cut down on my stuff. The apartments are much smaller in Manhattan…
So with a heavy heart, I’m selling my PC museum.
I’m using this...
Is this horrible button placement or am I missing...
Skype was misbehaving on my PC, so I uninstalled it and went to Skype.com to download and install it again. It’s Skype, possibly the most popular downloadable software in the world, right? So I didn’t think it’ll take me more than 200 milliseconds to find the desired “Download” button.
But it did. Here’s the Skype homepage I saw.
Granted, I don’t have...
November 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Good luck Julie Larson-Green
I’ve been following Microsoft for a while now, fascinated by the disconnect between the huge amounts of money they make, the huge amount of people they effect, and on the other hand the reduction in what marketers would call “brand value”. In other words, while for every Mac in the world there are 10 PCs, in some places around the world it seems PCs just don’t exist.
A...
2 tags
The hazards of working for an Israeli startup
I was driving to work when the sirens started. This is how Israel’s Road No 1, aka “Jerusalem - Tel Aviv Road” looked when everyone stepped out of their cars to take shelter:
This is me, taking shelter behind my car (give me a break, the sun was in my eyes):
And then I saw two amazing Iron Dome rockets fly up from right next to me, intercepting two rockets on their way...
September 2012
1 post
5 tags
Is boot time still an issue?
One of the things we do well at Soluto is enable people to understand what runs in their boot, what’s required and what’s not, and allow them to speed boot time. I’m often asked why this matters, because it seems today no one reboots their PC, they put them to sleep. I know I don’t - I reboot my laptop maybe once every two weeks, and my home PC even less.
As it’s a...
August 2012
1 post
2 tags
Great work Visa, now I HATE you
Last week I jumped to London to watch the Olympics. Being a huge sports fan the experience was amazing, but there was one thing that drove me crazy.
The London Olympics has several sponsors, most prominently Coca Cola, McDonalds, Visa, Samsung and Acer (when I say “prominently” I mean their effects are felt everywhere through the games).
Before I flew, I discovered that...
July 2012
11 posts
“The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team...”
– Eric Ries (via a-pr)
3 tags
The startup curve
collaborativefund:
From initiation, to the trough of sorrow, to the promised land — Paul Graham’s view of the startup process, from a Y Combinator meeting in 2008.
image by A VC, via swissmiss
3 tags
“If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with...”
– From “Yahoo Is No Longer Dead To Me” by Fred Wilson. I’m a big fan of Marissa Mayer ever since we crossed paths at TechCrunch Disrupt and Garage Geeks (read more here). I hope she can nail it, and by it I mean making Yahoo! cool and successful. There’s a place for Yahoo! in...
4 tags
“The trick is to not think about composing the question first. […] Instead,...”
– A great post by Cindy Alvarez of Yammer about interviewing customers. I often find that questions aimed at improving customer insight are actually engineered in a self-destructive way. In many cases such questions are based on internal company lingo no customer can deeply understand, or includes...
“It is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to...”
– http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/joichi-ito-innovating-by-the-seat-of-our-pants.html
7 tags
The Importance of Right-Left-Up-Down Standards in...
Yesterday I created a meeting on my Android smartphone (Galaxy Nexus running ICS), filled in all the details, invited a couple of people, and then accidentally cancelled it. I had one of those “WTF just happend??” moments.
So I came back to the screen, and I noticed that the “Done” button was on the right and the “Cancel” button was on the left. I scratched my...
4 tags
Meeting Eric Schmidt, Insights about Scaling a...
One of the great things about Soluto is that we’re backed by an excellent team of investors, ranging from big-name VCs to private current and former senior executives in various companies. One of our investors is Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, through his personal fund (called Innovation Endeavors) that he founded with Dror Berman.
Eric recently came to visit Israel, and between meeting our...
2 tags
“Devs Love Bacon: Everything you need to know about Machine Learning in 30...”
– Great title, great delivery. Learn.
Devs Love Bacon: Everything you need to know about Machine Learning in 30 minutes or less
5 tags
“First, Asus has done a lot of work to make the machine look and work just like...”
– As a long time PC guy who’s been comparing PCs and Macs lately, I absolutely agree with this analysis.
http://pandodaily.com/2012/06/24/why-does-every-pc-notebooks-trackpad-suck-or-why-microsoft-is-building-its-own-hardware/
5 tags
“Of course there are many differences between startup fundraising and Nigerian...”
– A brilliant article about lessons to be learned from Nigerian email scammers:
Essentially, scammers face an optimization problem. Touching a huge number of potential victims is easy. The real cost is the time spent converting a prospective victim into an actual victim. The scammer has to spend...
June 2012
7 posts
5 tags
Why founders should not hire a Product Manager
In the past years I’ve been meeting many founders before they raise money, to help them around product, marketing and generally what’s important and when. One phenomena I keep seeing is one of the founders will ask “where can we find a good product manager?”
My answer is almost always “You don’t need a product manager. The product is the most important thing...
5 tags
Doing what needs to be done →
I love Reddit. That’s where I consume most of my humor nowadays. In this article, Reddit co-founder admits that in the early days of Reddit, it’s activity was generated by many fake accounts run by the co-funders themselves. This served two purposes: 1) setting the tone for the type of content they wanted on their site and; 2) creating the feeling of an active vibrant site.
Some may think it’s...
6 tags
“Users can’t read anything, and if they could, they wouldn’t want to”
– I recently wrote something about an experience I had with my iPad when I just opened it up. I got plenty of angry responses telling me that since I didn’t read the manual I’m not allowed to complain (in other words, RTFM).
Such comments really piss me off. Not because I should not read...
4 tags
User guides, updating stuff, and a LinkedIn...
So I decided I want to post my tweets on my LinkedIn timeline. I noticed most of my friends do it, so why not me.
I Googled for “posting tweets on linkedin” and sure enough the first link was what I was looking for:
I clicked the link, and arrived at a simple explanation in the LinkedIn learning center:
In this article there’s the great sentence “you have the option...
7 tags
Facebook spamming and A/B testing
A couple of days ago Chris Dixon tweeted the following:
I know some of the Gogobot fellows, and they are definitely not evil. But I know Facebook spamming, and it is pure evil. And I know Chris Dixon, and if he thinks you’re evil then you’ve got a serious perception problem.
When I saw this tweet, as I automatically came to the defense of Gotobot, this was my train of thought:
...
4 tags
iPad - please don't ding while you and I are...
I bought an iPad. I must admit I don’t really understand how people can use it their main device, but that was exactly the purpose of me buying an iPad. I believe that product people should constantly try and use every product that is immensly successful, in order to develop insights into what makes consumers get excited about stuff.
I just brought it home, set up my email and installed a...
Preface
I’ve been a product manager for most of my professional life. It wasn’t always my title, and it usually occupied much less than 100% of my time, but it was always there. As I’m trying to keep an open mind, I find myself learning a lot every day about modern product management, or more accurately modern web service management, and I decided to start sharing those insights.
I see...
