Last week I attended a rare event - the GarageGeeks get together/conference/party hosted under the title “A peak into the future of TV”. Talk about a hard core event - as you can see from the short vids and photos, it’s a real junky (but funky) garage, in a real industrial zone, with very little space, plastic chairs, no real food, coffee or toilets but it GOD DAMN WORKED! Something about the surreal surroundings made it feel like we are are actually talking about a real revolution (which it is). The fact Jeff Pulver pulled a surprised appearance added to the hyped but underground ambience and left me with some very good impressions, albeit, like I said, offbeat surroundings.

All the photos and the video you are about to see were taken with my digital companion, the Nokia N73. There is a case in point about the revolution of broadcasting already - I created over a 100Mb worth of video with my mobile phone, posted it on the net, blogged about it and now you can watch it.

Below is a link to Pulver’s presentation (10+8 minutes - I had to split into two because of YouTube’s limits). In it, he articulated his vision in a very succinct and sensible manner. I think that anyone interested in this space should spend the time to watch what this down-to-earth thought leader has to say. My ‘fished’ headline out of the video would be “Pulver says - RSS to lead future of TV distribution” the rest I leave up to you [Another case in point is that I’m no Tarantino of the mobile video world but I hope you appreciate the art].

Pulver on Future of TV - Part 1

Pulver on Future of TV - Part 2

My own take in the whole “Future of TV” symposium is more about “Future of Marketing”. Current global spending on advertising tops half a trillion (yes trillion) dollars - funneled towards TV, newspapers, billboards and magazines. Within five years, once the internet will establish itself as THE bearer of entertainment - with its innate capabilities of micro filtering, geotargeting and dynamic personalization - the dumb tube (I mean TV) and the recycled paper held together using glue (I mean magazine) will not be able to compete.

I see a huge and I mean HUGE tsunami of ad dollars racing towards this space. And guess what (and this is a big WHAT) there is no existing eco-system, service or technology that can handle that!

I predict that in within five years we will witness a whirlwind of startups trying to come up with services, technologies, protocols and whole eco-systems to help solve this problem. I am not predicting the death of the magazines… I’ll keep reading them as well as my morning newspaper but where and how I watch TV is a whole different story. And since most of that half a trillion is spent there… don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Having focused on Pulver (and my blah blah) kind of took the thunder away from the rest of the presenters at the GarageGeek event who all did a great job. Amit Or, a colleague of mine and Co-Founder of InLive blew us all away by embedding live graphs that were the result of us calling InLive’s IVR system - into his power-point…in real time! a whole magic show by itself.

Lastly, kudos to Yuval Tal and Dror Gil (and anyone else I missed) for organizing such a COOL event.

      

The video you are about to watch is very special:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOXoplVTcfY

I didn’t plan on take this footage or write about it, but it turned out more than post worthy. What you are witnessing is the first time my son has ever used an iPod. As you can see, for him its bliss. A simple, innocent, unpretentious, pure moment where beat meets mind and mind moves body. That, in itself, is probably of no interest to anyone but myself, so why do I care to put it here and write about it? Well, encapsulated in this moment are a few notes that represent how far we have advanced and how backwards we still are:

1. Past sharing = take a vinyl to a friend and play it. No piracy issues. Today = filetype? zune? iPod? player? protected? criminal?

2. Past song=song. Today Song=song/rintone/truetone/mp3/wav/drm/vidclip/cover/bitrate

3. Past music capacity = house shelf space. Today = disk space = $ dad will pay for next iPod.

4. Past 1000 songs = truck. Today 10,000 songs = pocket.

5. Past music = moving parts. Today music = on the move.

6. Past sharing = serenade. Today sharing = P2P

7. Past selling point = city center. Today selling point = planet earth.

8. Past phone = speak. Today (mobile) phone = another music player.

9. Past download = garbage in the house. Today download = music from net.

10. Past (corporate) promotion = Top of the Pops. Today (self) promotion = myspace.

11. Past recommend = talk to friend. Today recommend = something.web20.com

There is no doubt we have come a long way. A very long way. The biggest open issues remain compatibility and legality. The fact that 30 years ago it was easier to go places and “just play a song” whereas today it turns into a techno_legal symposium is mind boggling.

Over time this absurd will be resolved. By the time my son will be my age he will be able to continue to do what everyone should when listing to music - simply, innocently, unpretentiously, purely… dance!

      

My friend Shahar has decided to sign off every post from now on with the following:

“Moreover, I advise that the genocide in Darfur must be stopped”

This is a paraphrase on Cato the Elder, who used to sign off every speech with a pledge to destroy Carthage (”Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse”).

Israel and the whole Jewish people have commemorated the victims of Holocaust last week. We are very good in remembering what happened to us, we suck at preventing it from happening to others. We seem to have an infinite repository of excuses. Once it gets out of our immediate scope we simply do not care. I am not sure which one is worse.  

I am very ashamed of the fact we have not taken a proactive stand in the Darfur situation. I am more ashamed of myself for having done nothing to date.

I am going to take Shahar up on his initiative and sign off every post with a pledge. The thought of generating a lot of noise from the blogosphere is not far fetched.

Moreover, I advise that the genocide in Darfur must be stopped

      

This post was contributed to Degardener by Shahar Even Dar. I strongly encourage you to visit Shahar’s writing here and here (in Hebrew).  Shahar is a long time friend and thinker.

This is the first in a series of posts in which I try to look at the long tail theory from a critical angle and check it limits. It seems nearly impossible to overestimate the impact of Chris Anderson’s long tail theory, and it is surely inadvisable to underestimate it. And yet, one can find examples for both types of wrong reactions. I am not worried, in any sense, about old media corporations trying to dismiss the new reality and I will not shed a tear while watching them drain millions before waking up. It is the over estimators, Chris Anderson naturally being the most prominent one, that worry me.

It seems nearly impossible to overestimate the impact of ’s long tail theory, and it is surely inadvisable to underestimate it. And yet, one can find examples for both types of wrong reactions. I am not worried, in any sense, about old media corporations trying to dismiss the new reality and I will not shed a tear while watching them drain millions before waking up. It is the over estimators, Chris Anderson naturally being the most prominent one, that worry me.The long tail theory was quickly adopted by many people who found it to be the perfect tool for analyzing the new emerging online economy. Those people now tend to look at the long tail as the only possible model for online commerce, and strongly object to any contradicting evidence. In a recent post in Anderson’s blog, for example, he was startled by the claim in a NYT article, that the DVD market is hit-oriented. For Anderson, the mere thought that a niche market does not follow his famous model is a blasphemy. Furthermore, if you are looking at online success, you must think in long tail terms. You either try to become a long tail supplier like amazon or try to carve yourself a respectable niche somewhere along the tail of an existing market by using SEM and SEO. While these two approaches are viable, one should remember that other options still exist.

The most striking example for a success that does not comply with Anderson’s theory is the online T-shirt vendor, Threadless. Threadless, for those who don’t know it yet, is a niche store aimed at T-shirt aficionados. Aspiring designers are invited to submit designs for the open contest (as well as for periodic topical contests), submitted designs are uploaded to the site, to be scored by Threadless registered users. Winning designs are printed in rather low quantities and announced twice per month. Many of the designs get sold out rapidly, leaving users with the option to call for a reprint. In other words, Threadless artificially and on purpose chooses a path which Anderson would regard as crazy; it cuts its own tail. And yet, this is the exact reason for the success story that drives Threadless. This is why there is such a buzz in the blogosphere about Threadless, why people rush to buy the new designs as soon as they get the biweekly newsletter, and why people get emotionally involved with a T-shirt store. Many times artificial scarcity works!

The Threadless success could only happen on the internet, of course, it is based almost only on viral marketing through blog reactions, its customers are T-shirt fans scattered all over the globe, and the online voting process has a major part in creating the customers’ emotional involvement. But all those factors do not make Threadless a long tail company, as I said earlier, quite the opposite is true.

Some people might argue that Threadless simply found a respectable niche within the overall long tail market of T-shirts, in which Gap, for example, is located at the hits end, and Threadless, as well as others is located somewhere along the tail. I beg to differ. Anderson’s model is based on the idea that the availability of information lets each buyer find exactly what he or she was looking for instead of settling for some default hit. Threadless uses the availability of information to create an almost opposite effect, to generate a will for something you did not know you wanted. Instead of relying on infinite shelf space and back catalog, Threadless forces its customers to be aware of the very limited shelf space, and the merely nonexistent back catalog, and manages to do it successfully.

The lesson to be taken from this example is that as powerful as the long tail is, there are still many other paths to success and to exploit the advantages of the online economy, as long as you keep an open mind.

Full disclosure: This post was written while wearing a Threadless “Technology Ruins Nature” shirt.

      

In my humble opinion headlines such as ‘The death of web radio?” or “The last days of internet radio?” are nothing but the opposite of what will turn out to be the actual result. If I had to give a 10 year outlook, my guess is that the government agency behind this current farce (CRB) has more to fear about its long term existence than web radio does. And that is (probably) the very reason it has chosen the weakest rival possible to try to prove there is a reason tax payer money funds their activity.

This was their last mistake. The nail that will seal their coffin. Ten years from now when the whole DRM / Copy Rights / Royalties issues will be solved using a completely private, voluntary and extremely efficient systems - historians will view this current battle as being the one that lead to the turn around in public awareness. Talk about choosing your battles right….not!

If they raised the royalties by so much as a penny, they would have made much more. If they could actually develop a business model that makes sense that would have even contributed something. But greed and power have caused greater empires and ceasars to fall and this will be no exception.

The public has awakened, the battle may seem lost, but its far from it. No government agency or corporate bureaucrat can stop a swell of change like the internet is creating. Not in radio, not in TV broadcast or elsewhere.

What is the end game for this? Kill the Internet radio? In an early stage industry there is so much more money on the supply side. Do us a favor, get your act together and create the opportunity. Wanna talk about making money? Get music actually heard, then tax the royalties from referrals to Amazon and iTunes. That makes so much commercial sense. This is synergy. This is convergence.

If you stick to this greedy pricing structure then you would ultimately:

1. Collect less taxes

2. Drive media outside the territory / industry

3. Get everyone to focus beating the system rather then on working with it

4. Lower incentive to develop technology, services and probably future royalty eco-systems.

Government wrath has never done any good other then get more conscripts in a time of war. Even then if it fights the right/just wars people will volunteer.

In 1610 the establishment didn’t like the fact Galileo published an account of his telescopic observations of the moons of Jupiter, using this observation to argue in favor of the sun-centered Copernican theory of the universe against the dominant earth-centered Ptolemaic and Aristotelian theories.

In 1614, from the pulpit of Santa Maria Novella, Father Tommaso Caccini denounced Galileo’s opinions on the motion of the Earth, judging them dangerous and close to heresy. Ultimately landing Galileo under house arrest.

In todays terms exhadurated royalty increases are the equivalent of putting internet radio under house arrest. Its not day light execution but the target is supposed to fade away.

I got a news flash for the bureaucrats - Father Tommaso Caccini won the battle but lost the war - you will too!

To learn more and and voice your opinion go to www.savenetradio.org

if you are still not convinced, read Tim’s plea (Pandora’s founder)

      

Scott Karp wrote a great post last week about video needing discovery more than distribution. In case you’re lazy, here’s the bottom line:

“Whoever figures out a scalable, networked, distributed, Web 2.0-compliant solution to the online video discovery problem may find themselves in the rare position to compete with Google.”

No more, no less. And I totally agree.

SuTree seems to agree with well. Their video based, end user e-learning service is based on discovery. While many video sharing verticals (Aniboom, 5Min.com) create their own stock and while YouTube and MetaCafe manage huge horizontal repositories, SuTree takes a different approach - it searches, filters and aggregates instructional content from across the big web. This way, they believe, true vertical value can be provided to the user without compromising the content itself.

I tried it and it works.  The results are rich, diversified and fetch content from good sources that I would never have known about otherwise. I ended up discovering not only content but great websites (check out VideoJug). it is clear the SuTree team are onto a good formula and that they build a good blend of technology, editorial work and collaborative filtering. I was very impressed with the depth of content I found. Quite a few categories and subcategories filled with plenty of high quality content. I also liked the “random lesson” which is offered on almost every page an that is very sticky in this case.

It’s not the service is free of flaws. The categories are too “serious” for my taste for example. I would appreciate some lightening up with more fun categories, such that would get me to both explore and contribute more often. I also found the site way too crowded with advertising. Finally, I found the free search very limited at this point. The service needs a lot more time and depth before the “long tail” can be effectively addressed with free search.

in the long run, one is tempted to ask the “why not YouTube?” inevitable question. I am a big believer in verticals and this is no exception. Yes, YouTube can ‘do it tomorrow’ but users will not look to e-learn on YouTube. The bigger challenge would come from the independent e-learning repositories which can expand to search. SuTree may develop a unique position of an ultimate search partner when that happens.

      

Before you read this post be so kind as and take our quick test survey on your mobile. Simply surf to:

de.mobiode.mobi

Before pointing out that “this can easily be done on the web, why the hell is he sending me to my mobile?”, bare with me, this has educational value. My only disclaimer is that proper use of the system would also mean receiving the link directly on your phone, but I guess the cost of sending messages was a factor.

What you experienced took me 5 minutes to set up.

Mobiode lets you create a survey and publish it in seconds. This is not new. The neat thing about Mobiode’s service is the following:

The surveys are adapted to WAP and therefore allow you to distribute the survey/poll to any mobile. This way you can reach your customers outside of their usually PC settings.
And on top of this:

1. Its extremely easy to set up the survey
2. There is a basic account that lets you publish one survey at a time for free. Not a money back guarantee. Not a 30 day trial. Free.

If this weren’t simple the whole package would not be worth it. While Mobiode doesn’t look as smooth or schique as 37signals, the execution is just as simple. And it makes all the difference.

I opened an account in seconds. Created a survey. Sent it (to myself first) and then to friends and collected the stats. No hassle, no complications, no ‘read the fine print’ - just did it.

The ability to connect to your users on their mobile and gain feedback in such a simple manner is of high value.

I recommend taking a look.

      

Serendipity Technologies is a unique web 2.0 company. It has earned a poll position within the Enterprise 2.0 space for a few good reasons.

Serendipity goes for for the big prize. Its Flagship solution, WorkLight™, is already helping global 500 and other enterprise customers catch up with web 2.0. The solution is a secure server-based software product that provides workers and consumers with “Web 2.0-style” access to corporate data stored in enterprise information systems and applications. Timely information is delivered using technologies such as RSS, Ajax, desktop and web-based gadgets and widgets, personalized homepages, social bookmarks, application mashups and instant messaging. 

In other words, it ports “traditional” IT systems to the latest and greatest of web 2.0, making it more manageable, natural to use and yes, sexier. Early stage execution was impressive and Serendipity have secured significant early stage funding. This created a working environment that is anything but common in web 2.0 start-ups. Being an Enterprise solution provider makes it even more impressive. The Enterprise software market, while naturally more promising in the long run, is naturally much more complicated and cautious when it comes to embracing web 2.0 technologies.

I sat down with Shahar Kaminitz, Founder and CEO of WorkLight for a holiday eve Q and A session which is hereby brought to you.

Could you tell us a bit about WorkLight, how old is the company, where are you on the corporate and product life cycle?

Shahar: The company was established in the beginning of 2006 by Yuval Tarsi and myself, at which time we also raised our first round of financing, totaling over $5M. We are backed by leading venture capital funds – Genesis Partners and Index Ventures – and Shlomo Kramer, co-Founder of Checkpoint and Imperva’s CEO. We have officially released our product, called WorkLight, in January 2007 at the DEMO conference, and it is now generally available. WorkLight is currently implemented and being used at several Global 500 corporations. We operate from our offices in Boston, MA and Yakum, Israel.  

What is your vision as the founder?

Shahar: For the last 18 years, I have been involved in different aspects of enterprise software as an engineer, manager and Venture Capital investor. The general direction enterprise software took during these years is towards more functionality but also great complexity. Information systems have become extremely complex to implement and offer a very poor user experience. In striking contrast to that, on the consumer side of the internet, things have gone drastically towards simplicity, as far as the end-user is concerned. Google, for example, has taught us all a lesson about the power of simplicity, which hides a lot of complexity “under the hood”. My vision is that employees will be able to enjoy the fun and productivity associated with all the new “web 2.0″ tools and services in their work environment. We introduce new ways of access to enterprise data, which are taken from the consumer world. For example, sales, inventory, orders and financial information will be accessible to employees in a personalized and convenient way, just like getting blog updates through RSS, building a Personalized Google page or creating a Yahoo widget.

What is the biggest challenge a modern organization needs to face in terms of information management today? How does WorkLight help solve it?

Shahar: Employees increasingly rely on information to do their job. This information is available from multiple enterprise applications, each one coming with its own proprietary, and often cumbersome, user interface. Workers need to login to each relevant application, search for the appropriate data record, and only then use it in the context of the business task at hand. The typical result is that employees either are not using the applications altogether, or suffer from what IDC calls “death by navigation”: a deadly effect on worker morale and productivity. Finding and consuming information is exactly what the Internet does so well for us as consumers. With WorkLight, people at work use the same services familiar to them at home to access enterprise data. WorkLight harnesses web 2.0 technologies to solve the information access problem. Enterprise application data become just like web content; accessible in the same form as web content and by means of the same web technologies. Furthermore, application data and web content can be freely mixed. We constantly add more web 2.0 interfaces to enterprise data to our current collection, which includes RSS, gadgets and widgets, popular personalized homepages, Instant Messaging and Social Bookmarking.

There is heavy debate regarding the maturity of enterprise 2.0. WorkLight is a Marquis company in that respect and one of the first to have raised significant early stage funding.  Would you define WorkLight as an enterprise 2.0 company?  Was it hard to rally quality investors behind the vision?

Shahar: There is indeed a lot of debate what is scope and definition of Enterprise 2.0, and I’m not sure that I have a clear position on that subject. Our customers are mostly unaware of the Enterprise 2.0 theme, but are very much aware of the widening gap between the “at work” and “at home” computing experience. What is important for WorkLight is that we solve a known and substantial business problem, and as result have a solid business model. This made things quite easy for us on the fund-raising front, not our association with a hot trend.

The borders between personal and corporate information are getting shadier. For example, you see personal blogs by executives becoming a legitimate part of the corporate and marketing strategy. But it also redefines information flow and security requirements inside the organization. What is your view on the expected evolution in that area?

Shahar: I am a big believer in blurring these boarders and eventually eliminating them completely. There is no reason why the employee needs to go back into the “dark ages” when at work. The corporation needs to take care of the infrastructure to enable this consumer-like experience in a secure and scalable way, and let the users do the rest.

Who do you believe you would eventually be “selling to”? The CIO? IT? Marketing? HR?

Shahar: Even from our first few sales an interesting picture arises: we are selling to the business units, where the business problem is painful. Often, end-users themselves are the drivers for change and incorporation of web 2.0 technologies in their workplace, facilitating a “grass-roots” process. This can be the sales, marketing, HR or finance department. IT is then engaged in the process to verify that the product adheres to corporate policies, mainly security.

At the personal level, as a start-up-ist, what are the most fulfilling moments you have? most challenging?

Shahar: The most fulfilling moments are when you see that something so young and fragile as a start-up company is able to impact people. This can be your customers, for whom you are able to generate real value and change the way they work. It can be industry analysts or potential business partners that positively react to your new technology. And it is certainly your employees who get engaged in something adventurous and innovative. Challenging moments are mostly related to the lonely feeling of a small company with limited resources “fighting” against the whole world.

How do you deal with the “chicken and egg” situation of the early stage - getting the product ready for the customers in parallel to getting the customers who define the product?

Shahar: We did not really suffer from this problem. We were able to get enough customers engaged in a very early stage, before the product was ready, just based on their need for a solution and the innovative nature of our technology. There are organizations, notably in the financial services sector, that have a strategic goal to identify and incorporate new technologies, and these people are great partners for a company in its first year.

What would make 2007 a successful year for WorkLight and for you?

Shahar: 2006 was the year of company setup and initial product development. We were delighted to be able to implement the product at several huge organizations and garner a lot of interest in our offering. 2007 is dedicated to extending our reach into more customer organizations in more markets and enriching the product with more “web 2.0″ capabilities. If at the end of the year our solution will be used by tens-of-thousand of people and will significantly impact their work experience, I will regard it a success.

      

Always had the urge to spread the word on how to draw a perfect Superman? Or perhaps you’re looking to make your first steps as a DJ? If you love teaching or if you simply want to learn something new everyday without breaking a sweat then 5min.com is the place for you.

5Min.com is a new place for sharing short user generated video tutorials. The concept is stunningly simple and powerful; Video sharing networks have not captured that vital niche and expert networks are limited mostly to text. 5min.com jumps on that gap and covers it with style.

The destination itself is well categorized and designed. It is populated with pretty high quality content despite launching only a few days ago. The features demonstrate good depth as well. The tutorial creator lets “tutors” add textual storyboards and the Smart Player (really shique!) offers “students” the ability to view parts in slow motion, frame by frame and so forth. It’s very easy to envision quick spillover to YouTube and MetaCafe channels and to personal blogs and websites. It is also a great place for guerrilla marketers to pitch their goods. Clearly huge potential.  

The founding team is comprised of Ran Harnevo, Hanan Lashover and Tal Siman-Tov. Ran also serves as CEO.

Who said fun cannot be serious? Enough said, go check it out!

      

I was aware of the fact that ePayments were going through the most significant revolution since the invention of the credit card, but Payoneer managed to blow me away. It’s one thing to solve a real problem. Managing to simultaneously address an array of real problems, on and off the web, is a totally different story. Payoneer mastered a way to put sticking glue on both.

Payoneer’s offering is for businesses, but it is an end user product - a prepaid rechargeable debit card. The card (by MasterCard), is connected to a personal, secure, web based “checking account”. Card holders can use the card on and off the internet, collect and make payments, withdraw cash at ATMs, transfer funds in and out at their will and so forth.

Businesses, on the other hand, can use the cards to avoid the huge headache involved in managing payments. Instead of paper checks, eChecks and wire-transfers, which altogether are complicated to manage, expensive and insufficient, they can opt for a much simpler solution – issue a debit card to each payee and just credit it.

Payoneer offers the solution as a one stop shop, including issuance, management and support and all for a very cost effective price.  The company has announced this week that it has raised $4M led by Greylock Partners. It’s customer and early adopter base already includes names such as MetaCafe, oDesk, ROI Rocket and Plimus. I sat down with Moshe Mor of Greylock Partners and with Yuval Tal of Payoneer for a discussion that turned truly inspiring.

Can you pinpoint your target market?

Tal: “The sweet spot is clearly with web related companies who need to pay both companies and individuals. These companies  can now put together an effective business environment. Managing payments to a global array of individuals is close to impossible. eChecks and direct deposits are not a popular payout method even in the US and then there are all sorts of international banking and currency issues which just kill the whole thing. The result is a market that remains mostly paper based. The web 2.0 economy is dependent on the need to manage payment relationships with people all over the world. Think about paying bloggers for their journalism, for example, or about experts offering their services at expert networks. They all need a pay-out solution as a fundamental component of any business environment. Our customers have a very simple solution – they issue debit cards and then reload it on an ongoing basis without worrying about anything else”

What about the end user?

Tal: “For the individual the situation is even more painful. Take user generated content, for example. Think about what it takes to actually benefit from it as an individual. Cashing international checks is a very complicated matter for many people in many countries. Very few publishers would transfer money to personal bank accounts. This whole situation sets the bar at a point which is not cost effective or time worthy for most people and therefore withholds the huge economic potential”.

So how can another card solve a complicated issue?

Tal: “The card is the best mechanism because it’s simple and universally accepted. MasterCard cards can be used at any store, website or ATM, worldwide. Unlike pure online solutions like PayPal, you don’t need to worry about how to withdraw your earnings. The global economy has created a dire need for fluent payments from US publishers to international contributors, for example, a need that presents a huge and limiting challenge and that is easily addressed by us.”

Mor: “Let’s take a look at the big picture for a minute. The web economy started mostly as a one-directional payment flow; people paying for stuff they buy online. Over the last few years, the web economy has developed to encompass many more payment flows: people paying people (which gave rise to PayPal), people getting paid for directing traffic to web sites (affiliate networks) and more recently, for generating content. While the pay-in flow has been around for a years and therefore has been addressed by multiple solutions, the pay-out flow hasn’t. The globalization of the web added a layer of complexity that required innovative solutions like prepaid cards. So we have an underserved and a growing need”

How can you compete with better established solutions like PayPal?

Tal: “I get this question a lot but you need to understand that Payoneer does not compete with PayPal. It is the credit card companies’ strategic interest to establish position in the pay-out market and they do it with partners like us. PayPal is a great solution but it is also limited. It is much more dominant in the US domestic market and with US bank account holders. You can’t use your PayPal account to get an ATM in India, for example, but you can easily use your MasterCard card and get an ATM card there. Our solution is good for individuals that are practically “unbanked” and for people who prefer not to use their day to day back account to get paid”

This seems like an opportunity for new entrants. What is Payoneer’s secret sauce?

Mor: “Payoneer is coming into this opportunity with what we believe is the first easy-to-use and comprehensive solution. I believe that the main barrier to entry is credibility and domain expertise. Very few teams have the breadth of experience that this unique space requires. It took Payoneer almost two years to develop a platform that can provide a reliable and credible solution and they started with a team that already knew what they were doing! “

Tal: “We needed to rally a major bank behind us, then get through MasterCard and this is before addressing any “regular” start up issues. Both needed to feel very comfortable with our ability to manage this type of operation. Our deep experience with online banking was necessary just to get started. This isn’t a space you simply walk into”

What is your longer term vision?

Tal: “I believe the real benefit businesses begin to realize is the upgraded relationship they will have built with their users. An ongoing billing relationship with an individual is a very meaningful asset. It means your customer carriers your logo in her pocket, literally and metaphorically. It means your customer pay regular visits to your website. Transforming any engagement to a sustainable billing relationship carries much deeper potential for brand attachment and for additional business.

Evidence shows that people tend to spend on the web what they earn from the web. This sets the stage for much bigger economics and our customers already begin to realize that. Check out Plimus, for example. A market place for user generated software that has integrated our solution. A classic example of a web 2.0 service provider that gets it” 

Look, this market will clearly happen, the only question is whether it’s going to be us that get to lead it”

I remembered it was not too long ago that PayPal was a young, promising start up too. I have a strong feeling I will sit back and reflect on this post in a few years when Payoneer will long be a household name.

      

The Israeli Games 2007 event will take place on April 11th, at Kfar Hamakabya form 8 am to 6 PM. It will include 2 tracks and keynotes from Erel Margalit, JVP and Ofer Leidner from Oberon Media. Other speakers include Steve Weiss from Sony Online, Alexander Fernandez from Streamline Studios, Jessica Tams from the Casual Games Association, Shaul Olmert from Nickelodeon, Michael Eisenberg from Benchmark and other who will share different aspects about the market from the US, Europe and Israel. At the end of the event a unique round table about Metaverses will take place.

This event is a first in Israel in terms of size and focus. Its aim is to expose the games market, a $30 Billion in size, to local developers, talents and investors. Accordingly, the event’s management expects over 300 attendees. Over 100 job vacancies will be introduced.

The sponsors of this event this year are AMD ATI, JVP, Decima, Revolver, Nisha HR, Quick Soft, Lucid, 3DV and Vollee.