Jay Meydad's Blog

It was very sad to wake up this morning and hear about the premature demise of Poly (Israel Polyakov), one of Israel’s legendary and greatest comedians, and a member in the most known comedy trio in Israel – Hagashash Hachiver.

A lot was said and written about his personality and talent. I simply want to say TODA (Thank you) and ask:

SearchMash, the playground for Google engineers keen to invent new technologies and interfaces, has just released a Flash-based version that uses Snap.com’s website previews.

The more I use it, it feels like Snap.com. Ain’t previews great when you browse and search the web!

Read more here: http://blog.snap.com/2007/10/25/breaking-major-news/

Or try the new SearchMash

Since June ’07, a MyBlogLog user can add services to his profile. These are the user’s online identities on over 30 popular social services (Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, del.icio.us and others). This is very useful and creates a richer profile.

But viewing someone’s profile and figuring out which username belongs to which service is a frustrating process that involves trial and error. Labels (text or favicons) would greatly help here.

Make labels for data fields distinctive, so that they will not be readily confused with data entries, labeled control options, guidance messages, or other displayed material.” (Jakob Nielsen, Sixty Guidelines)

While most the Israeli Internet scene got together to shomooze at iDrink 7 in Tel Aviv, a selected group of them showed up last night on the red carpet of the Beverly Hilton for the reception event. I had the pleasure to be there and meet in person very smart and creative folks who came to LA to impress the local media giants with their ideas, products and passionate personalities.

The reception was the end of a long day which started early in the morning in a breakfast/panel with a few Israelis who work in US media companies: Nimrod Lev, Shaul Olmert, Roy Bahat, Tal Pink, Sam Gonen, Itzik Ben Bassat, Ofer Shaked and myself. Later on, the delegation hopped on busses and went to visit MTV, Sony and other media companies. The format of all the meetings was very similar to speed dating – each company had two minutes to pitch their product to a group of executives, and then companies and executives could spend more time together in one on one meetings.

Personally I find three companies to be very interesting and with great potential: Prime Sense (technology/device that can see, track and react to user movements outside the computer), Musestorm (widget creation, syndication & distribution) and InnerActive (advertising in mobile gaming – check out Adidas ads inside the Fifa game).

I look forward to meeting the participants of the 2008 delegation which I am sure will be even more successful.

• Gmail announced the addition of IMAP support. Finally my inbox can be kept in sync when I read emails using my iPhone. This is how to set it up.
• Meebo, my favorite web based IM service, released a very cool and useful Firefox plug-in. Try it out.

Later this week a delegation of selected Israeli digital media start ups will hit Los Angeles.

The event is organized by Yossi Vardi and Arnon Milchan with the purpose of introducing Israeli entrepreneurs to some of the world’s largest media companies.

In addition to those meetings, there will be a panel of Israelis who work for US media companies. I will be one of the panelists together with Nimrod Lev (Fox Interactive/KSolo), Shaul Olmert (MTV Networks), Roy Bahat (IGN Newscorp), Itzik Ben-Bassat (formerly Blizzard) and others.

I look forward to meeting old friends & colleagues as well as getting to know some of Isreal’s most creative minds. In case you will be in the event, please come by and say hello.

A quick update to those of you who follow my work at Snap. Yesterday we released two significant improvements to our product:

• MapShot – triggered of links to maps.google.com and displays a GoogleMap for a an address, a point of interest of a location specified using lat/long. The Shot also offers a neat way to perform quick local searches. More information can be found on the Snap blog . Here are a few examples:
  • Address (130 W. Union St., Pasadena, CA)
  • Lat/Long
  • Point of Interest: Disneyland

• WikiShot – A wise man once said “a picture is worth a thousand words”. We have improved our Wikipedia crawler to search for images inside articles and display them inside the WikiShot when such are available. Detailed information can be found here. Here are a few examples:
  • Empire State Building
  • Snare Drum
  • Radiohead

Today, over 15,000 bloggers around the web participate in the Blog Action Day, and unite to put a single important issue on everyone?s mind – the environment.

I would like to use this day as an opportunity and remind everyone about CO2 Saver. It is a lightweight application that automatically adjusts computer?s power settings when the computer is idle in order to reduce electricity usage (and bills) and by that decrease CO2 omission.

CO2 Saver was released nearly 6 months ago (on April 25th 2007) and since then helped save over 429,000 lbs of emission which equals to nearly 5000 tree seedlings grown for 10 years. Very impressive!

Those of you who have not installed CO2 Saver on their desktop and/or laptop yet should do it by clicking here.

Technorati Tags: Blog Action Day, CO2 Saver, Eco-friendly, Blogesphere events

An interesting launch strategy – ask users to leave the page open in browser for hours/days in order to create a large pool of initial users with great hunger to try your new service.

As it currently looks, I think we are a day or two away from the launch of the new Hype Machine. Still, this is a great viral marketing tactic.

I am happy to announce that the experience for my readers who use iPhone or iPod Touch to read this blog has been upgraded.

I installed the iWPhone WordPress Plug-in on my blog. This plug-in automatically reformats the blog content for optimized viewing on an iPhone and iPod Touch.

Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, iWPhone, iPhone, iPod Touch, Usability, Mobile