Sarah Lacy is a busy lady. She co-hosts the Web video show Yahoo! Tech Ticker, writes and edits for TechCrunch and is a columnist for BusinessWeek. As if that wasn’t enough, she has written a book: Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good which is about the rise of Web 2.0 and is now working on her second book which will be about global entrepreneurship. How she finds the time for all this is beyond [...]

While I was at the DLD conference back in January I was lucky enough to get the chance meet Ito Morabito the famed industrial designer who designs under the name Ora Ito. He is something of an Internet pioneer; while at a magazine called Crash he created virtual products for virtual brands. The idea, he said, ”was to make fake publicity for fake products that looked real”. He put these products on the Internet, and soon [...]

Continuing the tradition from last year, yesterday together with YL ventures I held an Innovation luncheon at the Manta Ray restaurant in Tel-Aviv for my good friends visiting here this week: Sarah Lacy, Deb Schultz and Cathy Brooks. We schmoozed and talked about the state of the Web in today’s economy and how the social Web was continuing even now to stand out as a force for change. Sarah Lacy gave an excellent short speech [...]

The Facebook photos application has been by far Facebook’s biggest success, the easy to use interface for uploading pics from your computer and then brilliant point-and-click tagging of friends has proved intensely viral; there are now more than fifteen billion photos on Facebook, making it the largest collection of pictures in human history. More than 850 million new photos are uploaded a month with no signs of slowing down, and Facebook’s servers display twenty billion [...]

One of the companies that I got the chance to talk to at SeedCamp Tel Aviv was wePapers, a new academic social sharing network where college and university students can work together in study groups and publish academic documents online.  I spoke to Co-Founder Hanan Weiskopf, who described to me what makes wePapers unique, what their revenue model is and what they plan for the future. wePapers, which launched their public beta two months ago after [...]

It seems that every major voice in the tech Blogosphere has at one time or another called for a Web-enabled tablet PC that would give us the capability for full mobile touch-computing, saving us the need to carry around that pesky keyboard. In the post iPhone world it’s easy to imagine how a tablet could be very popular, we iPhone users love to touch the Internet, a bigger platform seems a natural evolution and the [...]

How early do kids start playing online? It’s been well documented in studies going back almost twenty years that children as young as five play PC and console games, but more recently trends have started showing that kids are migrating their gaming habits online. According to Pew Research around 75% of kids and tweens aged 5-12 in the United States play casual games online and the numbers are only slightly less in Western Europe. In [...]

Ever since heady days of broadcast.com back in the era of Web 1.0 there has always been promise in the field of Web video, and as the encoding technologies have grown more sophisticated and broadband penetration breaks new records every day, online video has exploded, but aside from a very few examples like Hulu no one seems to have the monetization of Web video figured out. A couple of weeks ago while I was at [...]

A couple of weeks ago I was in Paris.  While there, I had the opportunity to talk to Ben Cahen, the founder of Green Republic.  Green Republic is a French e-commerce website dedicated to green products and to promoting a green and sustainable way of life.  They sell 700 products to 3,000 customers including products for around the house, cosmetics and products for babies.  Their most popular products include a green recycle bin and baby bottles. Green Republic [...]

The gamer’s dilemma has always been between the quality of dedicated gaming vs. the convenience of casual flash based games. You can play Gears of War if you have the game (80$) the console (300$) and a TV (500$ for a good one) or you can play limitless flash games on limitless sites -for free- if you  happen to have a computer. But whichever way you go there will be a tradeoff: quality vs. ease of [...]