All you convergence enthusiasts out there – hold your horses! We’ve got it all wrong! We’ve been fooled to believe convergence is here… well its not… at least true convergence isn’t. You ask why - I’ll start with an analogy. Imagine there are two parallel universes – ‘the water world’ and ‘land world’. Fast forward four billion years of evolution and imagine two parallel cultures have independently developed. Now fast forward additional 2000 years and we’re getting to the reality TV era. Imagine you are now watching a reality contest between two groups – “land” and “water”. Each group is given a challenge (separately) - to invent a means of travel and (oh’ one more detail…they don’t know the other world exists). When it’s time to take a look at the outcome (I’ll skip the emotional drama, group dynamics and commercial breaks) it would be plausible to believe that the ‘water people’ would have invented boats (or something that resembles them) and land people, cars.  Now let’s move on to the next challenge. Acquaint the groups with the other world, water with land and vice versa and tell them their means of transport should work on land AND water. What would you get? That’s right! You would get boats with wheels and cars with buoys! Is that what we were looking for? 

(more…)

      

The Israeli scene has been extremely active as far as web 2.0 is concerned. Some of the activity has been echoes by Michael Arrington who visited Israel and hosted the Techcrunch lunch. Israel has been a telecommunications leader for a while, and if you topple that with growing user centric maturity you get a favorite horse for winning some key convergence races. Interestingly enough, more and more Israeli companies are drifting away from selling “technology enterprise products” and are embracing a user centric approach. Incredimail is one of my favorites in that respect. Incredimail’s founders were not afraid to take on the bully (Microsoft Outlook / Outlook express in their case). They were not afraid to take on a mature killer app (Email) and made it by making it fun and worthwhile for the end users. This, to me, is great inspiration.  

On a related note: My friend Danny Cohen, ex-long time colleague and currently a partner with Gemini, is running Israeli Venture Capital 2.0, a blog about the Israeli 2.0 scene. I have a confession to make: I like Danny and I wish to promote his blog. Seriously, he provides a lot of useful information and I know for a fact that his passion for the subject is genuine.

      

The “how to treat google” question is apparently mind-boggling a lot of innovators….Another important contribution from Spock:

One can only wonder whether Serge and Larry had a similar discussion when they decided to start a search engine in an already mature search market. Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, Excite - all existed and had search engines, and the two geeks from hell (well we can all admit they are from hell now) didn’t really care. And I can safely assume that there were probably 100 other Laurel and Hardy’s that tried to do the same at the same time. The fact that they had such huge success is probably part luck, part business planning (oh yeah I’m sure some people will claim they had it all figured out from the get go), but mainly a real differentiator that gave them something nobody else had or could easily copy - a really really good search engine. It’s not just that they overcame the technological obstacle - it’s that they recognized that there was room for improvement in an already well established web-based tool.

So yeah, they have seem to gone through the anakin-gone-darth-vader, republic-turned-galactic-empire process, but in the core the Google story should be an inspiration and lesson for entrepeneurs, not the other way around. No single group of people has a monopoly on creativity, innovation or brains.

(more…)