we recently closed our initial seed financing.

it is a friends & family round. in our case our families don’t really have money, so we just reached out to friends.. now we not only have our own money invested, but also our friends’ money, so we’re even more motivated to succeed (among other things we’ll try to avoid making these 18 mistakes).

we plan to spend the next few months in the trenches developing the product. we’ll probably bring additional talent to help us code. on the business side we’ll reach out to a few partners that we believe are strategic for a successful launch.

a few months ago i disconnected from cable. so i don’t get CNN at home. being somewhat of a political junky it is one of the only channels i really miss. so i was happy to see that CNN is broadcasting the debate live on their site.

i watched the whole thing online. quality was actually not bad, but not good enough for me to watch it in full screen. this is very encouraging, now all i need is to be able to watch the occasional sports game online, and my transition from cable TV to Internet TV will be complete.

i am tempted to write something about the debate itself, but someone told me i should keep politics out of the "corporate" blog..

this is an example of how we deal with opposing points of view. all methods and gear used are inspired by Abu Ghraib and all rights reserved to Rumsfeld and Cheney.

we just rented a small office space in tel-aviv. we are a true multi-national corporation now. with offices in two of the best cities on the planet

here are the steps you should follow if you’d like to attract blondes at a bar:

1. get an iPhone
2. fly to a blond-dominated country (i can testify for results in Denmark)
3. go to a local bar
4. pull out the iPhone and play with it

results are guaranteed.

unfortunately there is collateral damage for this strategy. in my case it involved many enthusiastic young males, and one old toothless lady that were very interested to check out my iPhone. the old lady while impressed with the device, said i should pull out the ear-buds, listen to the noise of the street and go hear live music in a nearby club. i actually agree with her..

i love Copenhagen

"You don’t need a brand to do something you could never do before." Jay Walker, founder of Priceline

as a start-up without a brand we’re always looking for reasons to believe we could build a brand.. so i was happy to come across this quote from Jay Walker. i happen to agree.

AOL reached a settlement under which it will change its policy on account cancellations.

i still have scars from when i canceled my AOL account a few years ago. they are not the only company who make it very easy to subscribe and extremely difficult to leave. i think this is part of the reason people hate subscribing to services. the other reason is that you just forget you’re subscribed to something and end-up paying for it without using it.

most annoying is when you can subscribe to a service online, but have to call in order to cancel it. this type of stuff should be illegal.

in boxee if we ever going to have a subscription model, we’re going to make cancellation as easy as subscription. no calls to customer service. no hiding it in a remote corner on the website.

in our building there is a key to the restrooms (i hate that). and in our office there are several keys with a big plastic thing attached to them, so people will not forget to return them (though i sometimes take one these keys to lunch with me..)

today when i went to the restrooms i saw another guy from the office opening the door with a key from his personal key-chain. he said he got disgusted by the idea of people touching the "public" key, so he just went and had duplicated a key for himself.

i "thanked" him for opening my eyes to the issue..

later i came across this story about a revolutionary automatic tissue dispenser.

they claim most people will be satisfied with 5 sheets.. must have been a great assignment to conduct the market research for this.

whatever. saving the trees is not the big thing here. this is probably the best day in the lives of many clean-freaks. i bet that for these people the launch of this device will dwarf the arrival of iPhone.

i know at least one guy that is likely to buy one for home use..

this is one the things that you hear about and say "now, how come i didn’t think about it?"

Sprint which is not considered an innovative company (at least not in my book) found a way to significantly improve its customer satisfaction rates. it is doing so by disconnecting the customers that complain the most.

makes perfect sense.

you have to give credit to these telecom guys. some of the brightest minds are in the business. i recently saw an ad from t-mobile in New York saying they have the fewest dropped calls in NYC. that is probably true. hard to drop a call when you can’t make one to begin with, because you have no coverage..