Author: Raanan Bar-Cohen

Raanan Bar-Cohenhttps://raanan.com/
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First Real Bike Ride in Years

Used the RunKeeper app (it supports biking) on my iPhone to keep track of the trip — I like how it automatically tells you your speed and distance at key intervals, it’s pretty cool.

Andalu

A great little spot in the mission in San Francisco [4sq]:

Very excited to have such great companies join our partner program.

Paul Maiorana's avatarEnterprise WordPress hosting, support, and consulting - WordPress VIP

Earlier this year, we introduced a new partnership program where we’re working with technology platforms to integrate their services into our WordPress.com VIP platform, connect them with our VIPs, and collaborate to support the integration and provide a seamless experience for our users.

Some of the world’s biggest brands and publishers rely on WordPress.com VIP, and every day we connect our VIPs with top service providers for their WordPress development and design needs.

That’s why today we’re announcing the expansion of the Featured Partner Program to include interactive agency partners as well: 10up, Alley Interactive, Code for the People, Doejo, Human Made, inSourceCode, Oomph, Range, and Voce Communications are all joining as partners.

In addition to our agency partners, Facebook, Flipboard, PostRelease, Tinypass, and Zemanta are now a part of the program as well.

“As a team that relies heavily…

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Google Fiber and Social Engineering

It uses social engineering: It’s accepted that one of the most costly elements of building out a fiber network is the physical labor associated with strong cable, digging trenches and hiring people to terminate the fiber into the home. Google has already strung cable on power lines throughout Kansas City and lowered those costs by working with the local utility and AT&T to get access to the utility poles without having to pay high fees.

But to reduce the cost of the actual last mile to users’ homes it’s telling people in Kansas City that if they want to be the first to get fiber, they’ll have to convince their neighbors to sign up. The goal is to get a critical mass of between 5 percent and 25 percent of the homes in a given neighborhood (Google calls it a fiberhood) committed to signing up for Google Fiber before ever sending out technicians. Residents have until Sept. 9 to get their fiberhood on the leaderboard before Google starts rolling out its fiber.

Google’s Milo Medin and a Google fiber product manager.

Milo Medin, the VP of access services at Google, explained that with this model the folks in the first fiberhood will have their access within a week. This is also why the free service is so important to Google. If people buy into that process, it can get homes attached in those initial bulk deployments and reduce the number of times Google has to send out trucks and technicians. Medin says the $300 initial connection fee will cover the costs associated with the deployments — it’s not doing that at a loss either.

via http://gigaom.com/2012/07/26/the-economics-of-google-fiber-and-what-it-means-for-u-s-broadband/

Fortune Tech Brainstorming Conference in Aspen 2012

Last week I attended the Fortune Tech Conference (WP powered site) in Aspen.

A few interesting bits that I wrote down:

  • Marc Andreessen’s opening interview was great, and he once again proved that he’s one of the smartest and most transparent leaders in our industry. (a16z.com and all their blogs, like Marc’s, are on WP.com VIP).
  • “War for Tech Talent” session.  Facebook is a strengths based organization, which means people are encouraged to work on what they love.  Their data says that people are most happy and feel most accomplished when working on something they are good at and have a passion for.  A good day for an employee @ Facebook is usually one that plays to that person’s strengths.  For managers “focus on how each individual has impact”
  • From the CEO of Intuit, Brad Smith, on how they view and deal with competition.  One thing they do is that each quarter they have a “pick a fight with a new guy” session where Brad asks a product manager to focus on 3 competitors and decide how to track them, learn from them, and sometimes buy them (Mint).
  • Tony Fadell (Apple iPod guy, now Nest), “fall in love with the problem” and “focus on what problem you are solving”
  • Tony Fadell also talked about how we should let new new hires have the space to change the organization & ideally makes everyone better.  And to not fall into the trap of forcing your own culture / DNA on them, otherwise you lose the ability to adapt and become too insular and fail to learn from the outside world.
  • Mark Pincus: Mobile monitizing better than desktop.  Why ?  Way less friction for payments (huge) and higher net income demographic on smartphones today VS the global / even distribution on desktop web
  • Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel had a heated head-to-head debate on the role of tech that is definitely worth watching

At all events I feel like many conversations turn to new startups, interesting apps that you have installed, etc. This event was no different. Mike Green from Comcast had two gems that I’m checking out: Paper Karma which looks amazing “PaperKarma allows you to take photos of the junk mail you wish to stop. Snap a photo, and you’re done” and CarWoo which is a LendingTree style car service where car dealers compete for your business. (big AOL Autos deal just announced)

So a great event – I learned a bunch, and highly recommend attending. A big shout-out thank-you to John Cantarella and Adam Lashinsky (conference co-chair) for their hospitality.

Also a pro-tip for those flying from SFO to Aspen. I highly recommend you fly SFO->LAX->Aspen and avoid Denver airport, unless you enjoy a 4 hour drive to Aspen 🙂

Here are some quick photos from the trip:

How long does it take to become a true New Yorker ?

New Yorkers, especially those who have been there for at least 10 years, the length of time Ed Koch says it takes to be a real New Yorker …

From the awesome post on Gawker: I Used to Love Her, But I Had to Flee Her: On Leaving New York

Best thing I’ve read about what it’s like to live in NY and try to make it, why it’s so hard to leave or fathom living anywhere else, and then what it feels like to have left (I lived in NY for nearly 13 years before moving to the Bay Area).

Setting up my new MacBook Air in the age of the “cloud”

Everything today is in the Cloud – our photos, documents, sites, etc.

What I hadn’t realized was how much my own laptop’s initial setup was tied to the cloud.

I just got a new MacBook Air 13″ — which I must say is a big improvement over the 2010 model, and here were my steps to getting things setup:

  1. Install Dropbox (love LAN sync)
  2. Install 1password (which for me requires Dropbox)
  3. Install Evernote (via Apple App Store — runs locally, but cloud’ish)
  4. Install Skype (non-cloud)
  5. Install Adium (non-cloud)
  6. Install Spotify (all my music is in the cloud)
  7. Install mailplane (all my email is in the cloud / google apps)
  8. Download Chrome and watch in real-time as extensions appear (they sync) – pretty cool.
  9. Install sophos anti-virus (shows how popular Macs have become)
  10. Install office for mac (Downloaded trial version & put in my purchase code. I also use google docs a bunch, but for contracts Word is still the best w/ tracking)
  11. Turn off OS X auto correct !

So these 11 steps took all of about 25 minutes and then another hour or so for Dropbox to fully sync. And obviously nothing was installed from a DVD or USB.

I’m guessing that in 2 years when I setup the next new laptop, everything will either be in the cloud or get installed via an App store.

There are downsides in terms of control and what this means to some independent software publishers — but overall from a user experience, it’s pretty amazing to me how quickly things have shifted, and how just a few years ago you would spend a bunch of hours installing software, and do so largely from DVDs.

Eight Fantastic Startups from the Zell Entrepreneurship Program

I had the privilege of hosting the 2012 Zell Entrepreneurship group the other week here in San Francisco as they wrapped up their big U.S. trip. They are a startup program at the IDC Herzliya – a top private university in Israel – which has produced some big companies such as Wibya.

The idea was to have some informal chats and also an ignite style 5 minute demo for each company:

I’ve been to a few demo days from various accelerators and VCs over the years, and this group was as good as any I’ve ever seen.

What was so amazing about this collection of companies was that each demo was polished, each company was solving a real issue (no vitamins here — all painkillers) – really impressive stuff. And a ton of credit has to go to Liat Aaronson – the Executive Director of the Zell Entrepreneurship Program – who also is the director of the StartUp Seeds, a young technology entrepreneurship incubator in Israel.

For those who are interested, here is who presented:

– HocSpot: Instant location based file sharing and communication. (So smart and useful — no more USB stick hand-offs, or dropbox links on Skype).

– Roomer: A peer to peer marketplace for buying and selling hotel room reservations. Taking advantage of a huge opportunity with room cancellations.

– 3Kudos: Crowd sourced web platform for revealing financial service fees and helping people negotiate better deals.

Ten Foot: Offering online merchants a way to increase revenues by automatically turning their online stores into engaging tablet experiences at low cost and in a few minutes.

Bigger Game: Is a smartphone app that brings the social experience of watching live sports events into your hands.

Crowdpic: Crowd sourcing photography for creating group albums and enhancing experiences together.

Jesta: A marketplace that allows people to outsource their daily errands.

Spoteam: A platform that delivers its users personalized and relevant video content, like Amazon for books and Netflix for movies.

And lastly — here is a a great infographic on what the Zell program has meant, impact wise:

Every device needs a guest mode

How many times have you handed over your iPhone or iPad and wished it had a guest mode that allowed that person to use Safari and other apps but w/o your credentials, and without all your alerts, settings, etc ?

Seems like a super useful & social thing, and with alerts, check-ins and other 1-click actions on a device — it’s harder and harder to use someone elses’s device without it buzzing and interrupting every 30 seconds.

The only device I’ve seen so far that had a guest mode was an early Chromebook prototype that I received a couple of years ago:

And looks like they kept that feature:

Chromebooks also offer the ability to browse without signing in. We call this function Guest Mode. When Guest Mode is used, Chrome runs with the usual privacy measures of incognito mode, but none of the browsing data, including downloads, will stick around. When you exit Guest Mode or reboot your Chromebook, the browsing data is deleted.

Strange that iOS doesn’t have this built-in.