Join the Club

The power of children is amazing. They have a built-in convincing power. If they want something they will get it.
The fact that children do not have credit card does not prevent them from spending money. This is why they have parents…
Club Penguin is an online game for children, virtual penguins in a virtual world. You can earn some coins by playing some games and spend it by buying stuff for yourself. You can chat with other penguins and do harmless regular social network things. The registration is free and gives you a taste of what could be the done.
But, and there is a big but, you need to be a member for being able to get the fun stuff. The membership costs ‘only’ $5.95 per month.
Now, do you think that a child that his/her friends are members will not convince his/her parents to pay for it? If your answer was ‘no’ you better think again.
I don’t know the exact numbers but I believe that Disney (who bought it 2 years ago for $350M) is having many paying users. It seems Club Penguin found the formula.
I’m relatively new to the club. My daughter convinced me a week ago to pay for membership. So they managed to caught her but will she insist on paying for the second month or will she get bored of it? I know the answer for that – after one month you can be promoted to a spy (never mind what it means) so the second month is guaranteed. What about the month after?

The Good/Evil Empire (take your pick)

When Google released Google Chrome I decided to use it. Dont know why but I liked it. Not only that I use it I also use the dev release. Is it better than IE, Firefox or any other browser out there? Don’t know, but it works well for me. I don’t intend to give a review of Chrome but to point out an interesting observation - Chrome has a feature that shows the 9 most used sites when you open a new tab. I don’t know how its algorithm works but while looking the other day on my top 9 sites, I found the following sites:
1. Google search (of course)
2. Google Reader
3. Google Calendar
4. Google Blogger
5. Facebook (how did it mange to slip in…)
6. Google Groups
7. Google Analytics
8. Google Docs
9. Google Trends

What does it mean?
I’m either a Google addict or Google push their sites to the list. I can believe both… I use at least 5 more Google services/sites which are not on the list.
Gmail was not on the list maybe because I never close it and I have it in my tray as well.

No doubt about it, Google dominates. Is it a good or evil empire? Up to you to decide.

P.S. In the spirit of these days, must be said that empire or not, GOOG got bitten badly this year

Happy New Year – Shana Tova

The year ends and another one begins…

In the last years it was a kind of tradition that I give the holidays’ speech to my team, summarizing our achievements and setting the bar for the next year to come. From year to year the team got bigger, same as the achievements and dreams for the next year. It was a good opportunity to stop the ongoing madness and to appreciate what we have. And each year I felt lucky for being able to do so.
This year I decided to keep the tradition with one change – this time you are the audience of my ‘speech’.

Keeping it short (no one likes to read long posts…), in the last year I made a huge change in my career which dramatically impacts my life – I’ve decided to follow my dreams and be an entrepreneur. It was not a one day decision but a process, in which together with the support of my wife I took the jump into a new world. For me it’s definitely only the beginning of a journey. My life really changed and one of the best things that happened is that without noticing I managed to spend much more time with the kids and enjoy most of it (after all, 3 kids can be annoying :-)).

What do I wish for next year?
In one sentence - Keep fulfilling my dreams, while focusing on the big stones and avoid distraction by the small ones.

So, have a great new year, spend your time wisely, be with your beloved, explore, dare, rest, enjoy and follow your heart.

And do not forget -“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present”

Eureka!

About 6 months ago when I’ve decided to change the nature of my career and be part of building something new, I did not imagine that my exploration would end by taking my wish to the extreme.

After great couple of months of exploration I’ve found a great partner for the journey – together with Benzi Ronen we co-founded something special.  Benzi and I know each other for many years while working at SAP and I fully trust him and his abilities to know that this partnership would be a huge success.

Indeed it’s only the beginning and we still have a very long way to go, however I'm optimisitc. As it says – ‘think positive and positive things would happen!’

If you are curious about what we are going to do, it’s something to do with the internet J stay tuned.

Cool way to view your photos

It’s a very enjoyable summer. I’ve never had so much quality time with my kids :-) In addition, I’m checking a very interesting initiative, so my time is well spent.

During my research I saw a nice service/program – photosynth - I saw a cool demo of it some time ago and now it’s available for usage by everyone.

To understand what it does, it’s better to check it in action. Check this solar system model. My daughter, Maya, created it at a science camp, pictured it from all angles and created the photosynth model. Yep, I’m a proud father!

BTW, this time this technology does not belong to Google but to Microsoft…

Flexible Scalability - Part I

[After a few not so technological posts, getting back to tech…]
When planning a (web) application, everyone fantasize on the tons of users that would use this ‘amazing app’. It’s great to dream but what happens if the dream comes true :-) Assuming the architecture is scalable and was designed for large amount of users, you would still need the computing power for that (CPU, memory, DB, network…). And what happens until you reach millions of users and ‘just’ have dozens of thousands of users – how can you stretch your infrastructure to support it?
For that you need flexible scalability… I gave a try to two leading solutions:
Google App Engine – “Enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications”
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) “A web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.”

My intermediate impression after working with both solutions for a short time is:

Google App Engine is relatively simple to use. You just need to have Google account and after a short registration you have your engine setup and free for usage until you reach ~5 million monthly page views (did not manage to test that…). It contains an ‘offline’ SDK that allows you to develop and test the application locally and then to upload it to their environment which makes it easy. The main drawback (for me) is that it is designed for running web applications using a specific engine based on the Python programming language which requires learning a bit but by using the tutorial it is still easy to use.

Amazon EC2 is actually part of a bunch of web services that allow using Amazon scalable platform for building apps by consuming processing power, storage, etc’. It’s not free and you pay for the usage (CPU time, storage, network traffic and some other parameters).Basically it allows to choose a machine image with relevant applications and to run number of instances based on the need. However although it allows using variety of machine images, containing different types of applications, it is not completely straightforward (flexibility has its cost). As it’s not free - I had to pay for my tests - up till now only 50 cents, but on the other hand, I managed only to run an existing image and even did not manage to get a proper web page shown.

Hope next time I will have more impressive results…

Confront Your Fears

It's been 4 weeks since I started my vacation and almost 4 months since I've decided to leave SAP and I still do not have anything concrete yet for my 'second career' - For all the non-believers, I'm ready to collect the bets :-) Don't get me wrong, I have no complaints and I enjoy this unique period of time.

It’s a very interesting situation and my days now seem much, much different than a few months back (more details in another post). The days are different not only in the location (beach vs. office) the people I spend time with (my kids instead of managers), my clothes (shorts instead of buttoned shirts) but mostly in the level of uncertainty.
At SAP I dealt with uncertainty on a daily basis but it's incomparable to what I have now - my career related activities are less predictable.

I'm checking now some promising but with high risk options and although at this situation there are ups and downs, it gives me a lot of fresh energy. On the other hands it requires me to confront some basic fears. As I believe that fears are great source for energy, I'm ready to confront them…
Talking about fears, I have a small fear of heights (nothing serious), which I tried to confront by climbing a 10 meters wall. Another thing I learned is that technology cannot help you when you need to leave you hand and try reaching a higher anchor. It’s you and only you…

And, as Michael Scofield said “Just have a little faith” :-)