#Thoughts

Two days ago I’ve shut down the longest running electronics device I ever owned.

The device was my an Alcatel Speedtouch Home ADSL modem which I got circa 2001 when I was lucky enough to get an ADSL line at home.

It was only turned off when there was a power failure or when I moved an apartment.

I know the title is a bit alarming, but that was my first thought after reading @bryce‘s latest post “The Rising Generation“.

Briefly, he mentioned a 25 y/o asking a question on Quora about how was life before everyone had a cell phone and no one talked a lot or texted in public areas. Bryce also say that the new entrepreneurs, like the ones in yesterday’s Y Combinator Demo Day have different expectation, understanding and perceived value of technology than any other that has come before them.

Launching a startup is like sending a message in a bottle. If the message is not clear, no one will come to visit your lonely island or send you a postcard back.

When you launch your startup, your online presence (i.e. website, twitter account, facebook page, etc) and the buzz you manage to create online via the online official and unofficial press are the message you are passing to your users. If the message is not clear you can lose a lot of attention.

Whenever a new programming language appears some claim its the best thing since sliced bread (tm – not mine ;-) ), other claim its the worst thing that can happen and you can implement everything that the language provides in programming language X (assign X to your favorite low level programming language and append a suitable library).

After seeing Google’s new Go programming language I must say I’m excited. Not because its from Google and it got a huge buzz around the net. I am excited about the fact that people decided to think differently before they went on and created Go.

A couple of days ago I’ve talked with Eran Hammer-Lahav about an idea I had regarding his post about using Emails as OpenID identifiers.

During the talk another sub-idea came into light in regards to OpenID 2.0 Directed Identity and Emails. While I’m not sure if this has been discussed before (I didn’t have much time to go through old posts on the OpenID mailinglist yet) I thought about bringing it up here.

Jeff posted a couple of days ago that the tickets for the Jerusalem ROCKS! event are on sale at Hadran.co.il.

Go here to read more about Jerusalem ROCKS! I also wrote a little bit about Jerusalem ROCKS! here.

Jeff is looking for bloggers from both Israel and around the world who would like to cover and/or promote the show. If you are interested Email to jeffp@pulver.com and introduce yourself.

I’ve corresponded a little bit with Jeff about why he was doing this Event and he told me that he wanted to do something that no one did for almost 20 years. Also he wanted that Israeli people will just have fun.

I wish I could attend iPhoneDevCamp but unfortunately I won’t be in the area (or in the right country for that matter ;-) ).

I just read Chris’ post about iPhoneDevCamp and I think these are the right reasons to make the iPhoneDevCamp.

There are a few facts that support Chris’ view:

• In the first week Apple sold 700,000 units
• The iPhone is closed for outside application, but not for web applications
• Having a couple of million units out (after it is also sold in Europe and Asia) means there are a couple of million users using Safari on their iPhone and want to get the right experience in all/most sites.

The day I heard that the iPhone will be closed to 3rd party apps but will use web applications as its main extension approach I thought one thing. Apple should make Safari (or at least just Safari on the iPhone) Microformats aware.

I’ve recently started to use Google Apps for Your domain to host my private emails on the sandler.co.il domain.

Google Apps for your domain is quite cool and was very easy to configure. I mainly moved to it due to the unbelievable amounts of SPAM and I didn’t have the power or time to configure SpamAssassin in a reasonable way that would actually work.

When I moved, one of the things I did was to change the “default” URL in which me and other members of my family use to access the web mail of the domain. Google Apps for your Domain allows you to do just that by configuring it in its configuration screen and settings a CNAME record that points to ghs.google.com.

2 days ago I wrote a post about the lack of Google Israel’s involvement in the development community.

It seems that in most of the places (I’m sure in the US, I’m not sure if the rest of the development centers in South American and Europe have the same involvement) where Google has development centers they are a little more involved with the development community in the form of lecture, places to meet and chat, sponsoring events, etc.

I know that Google‘s original Googleplex at Mountain View is very active for non googlers. There are frequent open lectures there and they host a bunch of other things like Summer of Code (well, not always host, but sponsor and make sure people know about it) and Google Developer Day (which is happening at 10 different locations worldwide, but NOT in Israel).

I know there are suppose to be two development centers in Israel, one in Haifa (which I know is located in MATAM cause you can see it from road #2 leading from Tel Aviv to Haifa near Intel and Microsoft Haifa) but I have no idea where the other development center in Israel is located, other than the fact that its suppose to be in the Tel Aviv area.