Web X.0

TGIM

I am noticing that the whole definition of TGIF changes significantly after you have kids running around the house...

Israel & Hezbollah - the sad truth, part 2

Yesterday I posted an amusing comic strip about the reality of fighting a terrorist group like the Hizbollah. This morning's chilling story published by Ynet shows how sadly true this is:

Six days before he was killed in an Israel Air Force bombing of a United Nations post in southern Lebanon, Canadian observer Major Paeta Hess-von Kruendener sent an email to his former commander in the Canadian army, in which he said that Hizbullah fighters were "running around" near the UN post struck by the Israel Defense Forces and that they were using the post as a sort of "shield" against Israel's strikes.

The former commander, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, who served as a UN commander in Bosnia, spoke about the email in a Canadian radio show. He said that Hess-von Kruendener wrote that the IDF strikes near the post had "not been deliberate targeting, but rather due to tactical necessity."

"That would mean Hizbullah was purposely setting up near the UN post," he added. "It's a tactic."

Israel & Hezbollah - the sad truth

When seeing the reports on TV about the war going on in Israel and Lebanon, it's easy to forget who the bad guys are in this story. I thought this comic strip does a good job summarizing the shit that's going on...:

MySpeace

My quote-of-the-month award goes to the DeGardner blog (slightly edited):

"As a matter of fact, I think I know more social networks than people."

This space is becoming fairly absurd. There are obviously a ton of social networks for teenagers, networks for college students, for professionals, for actors, for mommies and for their girls, networks for Hispanics, for Muslims, for hockey fans, for families, or any friends, for city dwellers, for Googlers, and even for dogs and cats!

With all these social networks it's sort of a mystery that no one has taken a stab at a social network focused on peace - A network with a sole purpose of creating cross-border connections in order to humanify both sides. It's much more difficult to throw bombs at each other when everyone is personally acquainted with 3-4 people on the other side of the border...

Israel's exports, part 4 (special war edition)

I thought that the mess in Israel/Lebanon would give me a short break from this series. But the Israeli Startup Factory keeps firing on all cylinders in war as in peace:

• Mercury Interactive just announced being exported to HP for a whopping $4.5B
• Ex-Libris exported to Francisco Partners for $62M

Previous export journals here, here and here.

Video aggregation

Take video, the hottest thing on the web right now, and layer it with aggregation, which is a far better business than any single video source can ever be, and you get Dabble - a new meta-search engine for video content, aggregating results from YouTube, MetaCafe, etc.

All the advantages of a video site, with more variety and waaay less serving costs. Sweet!

I should have seen this one coming!...

More coverage on Mashable and TechCrunch.

Best spent marketing $$'s...

I've never seen an ad for:

• Whole Foods Market
• Starbucks
• Google
• In-N-Out (and while we're at it - Shake Shack too...)
• Chipotle
• TiVo

Outsourcing my memory

Every day it seems like I'm moving more functionality from my memory (I mean the one on my shoulders, not on the mother board...) over to the cloud. A few examples - I once used to remember the phone numbers of friends and family. That's all gone into Plaxo (and my cell phone's contact book), and now I am lucky to even remember my own phone numbers. Or - I used to keep mental notes on to-do's to-call's, etc. That's all gone into my TaDa lists. Or - When I borrowed money or stuff I would make sure to burn that in my memory so that I would return it one day. Today I track it all in BillMonk.

While I consciously know that this probably has a long term damaging effect on my gray cells, the feeling of offloading stuff from brain over to the cloud is simply wonderful.

Idea: Cooking timer site

Here's an idea for a cool little website, free of charge for anyone who decides to develop it:

Target audience is home cookers. Anyone who's cooked a meal knows how difficult it is to time all the cooking-related activities - when to cut stuff, when to start defrosting, when to put something in the oven, etc, etc.

So the idea is as follows: You upload all the recipes for a meal you want to prepare to the website. You then define the time you have available for preparations and any breaks you need in the middle ('pick up the kid from school - 30 mins').

The site then calculates and optimizes a step-by-step timeline of what you need to do in order to accomplish all the dishes, and have them ready at the perfect timing for serving to the table.

For example:

1:45 - defrost chicken
1:51 - pre-heat oven
1:52 - chop 4 onions
1:57 - melt chocolate
Etc, etc.

A v.2 of this site might also optimize a shopping list for you, combining all the ingredients for all the items on your menu.

Not sure you can make money off it (OK - slap a few Google ads on it...), but I sure would use it!

Alien in New York

Not sure which of the following is wackier:

1. A wild thunderstorm with torrential rain, fog and the rest of the spiel on a beautiful summer day, or...
2. ...that *everyone* on the street (excluding me, that is) pull out their umbrellas within seconds.

I mean - taking your umbrella on a hot mid-July summer day... hmmmm.... makes total sense, I guess.