I spent the last few days in a really cool event named SHIFT which was produced by Social People. Many of the conversations there reminded me of one of the big lessons we learned running NuConomy.

Coming from the creative and digital sides, many startups that try to work with the agencies, can’t understand why they can’t convince them to use their products. For us it’s hard to understand why these agencies spend millions of their customers money on TV and other platforms instead of do highly targeted and measurable advertising on the web. What startups need to understand that it’s not about measurability – It’s about predictability.

These agencies have worked and ran campaigns on radio, newspapers and TV for tens of years. They have seen everything and than again. They know exactly what will happen when they put a million dollars on a prime time TV campaign. They don’t need it to be fully measurable as the web. They have done the same thing so many times before, that statistically they can predict the exact results. At the same time, we the startups, offer them superior solutions. But these are also solutions that no one have tried before. Solutions that were tested just a few times. For us a couple of years seems like a long time, but these companies were doing business for tens of years.
What startups needs to understand is that in the end of the day it’s about people lives and careers.  Predictability is also security. It’s knowing that your job will probably won’t be in risk.
What we need to offer agencies is not more data points to measure, but a way to have the comfort and security of predictable results.

I spent the last couple of nights filtering some of the new entries to the Startup Chile program.
Many of these entries are of teams coming from countries such as Brazil, Germany, Slovakia and others around the world. What I found fascinating is how different these startups are from the ones I mostly meet in the US.

The first obvious difference is in the target market. While most American startups are trying to first go after the US market and than rule the world, many of these companies are targeting their own local markets. It might be obvious, as these are the markets that they are more familiar with, but personally I’m not used to see that. Originally coming from Israel, I’m used to see entrepreneurs who always thinks first on the US market. The main reason – It’s the biggest one. It’s the one with all the glory.

This decision, going after the local markets seems to also have big effect on the products themselves. While a lot of the US companies are trying to innovate on features and technology, developing brand new experiences, many of the international companies are trying to create local versions of products that are already successful in the US. I see much less technology innovation than companies which try to answer specific business needs that the local market still struggle with.
Most of them will probably won’t become the next 500 million dollar company simply because their target markets are not big enough, but many of them might be able to pull a 10 – 20 million dollars company which might be acquired but the big guys when they decide to attack these markets. These companies represent some great opportunities for the new kind of seed investors who want to invest small amounts of money in many small, agile teams who can solve a pain point and execute quickly.

That said, I would like to see more entrepreneurs around the world trying to go after the American market. We all want and need to see the next Skype coming up. The talent is there. Now all they need is to dream bigger.

I’m a long time Foursquare user. I love the service and I tend to check in multiple times a day. So far I’ve been using it in order to update my location and see where my friends are. For discover of new place I always use Yelp, another one of my favorite services. But in recent days this has changed. After neglecting to do so for some time, I decided to give the “explore” option of Foursquare another try. When doing so I suddenly noticed one killer feature that foursquare beats Yelp in – The power of real life data.

When you look at a place in foursquare, you also shown a message similar to: “People who went to xxx tend to also go to yyy, zzz…”. This data is better than any review or rating you can ever read. It tells me that people who tend to go to some of my favorite places also go to this place. This is the highest possible recommendation you can get. Even better, it also shows me which of my friends tend to go there.

True, a year ago Yelp went into the checkins game as well, but my guess is that foursquare boost a much bigger set of real life data that they can now harvest to create compelling features like that.

Ever wanted to code while on tour with rock bands?
Think that coding on a Caribbean beach or in the middle of a jungle is cool?
Or maybe you just want to work in a dynamic, highly talented environment?
want to work hard and play even harder?

If you are a killer Ruby, PHP, Python or mobile (iOS or Android) developer – we want you!
An upcoming startup with strong roots into the music, media and entertainment industries is now hiring the core team. Come and help us change the world!

Contact me here or at shahar at deathstarlabs dot com.

Also – iPad, drinks and a big kiss for anyone who refer us great candidates.

I wanted to introduce to you a new experiment product I call Kikaros. Kikaros is a community curated search engine. What does it mean? Well… let’s start from the beginning:

I woke up yesterday morning reading Michael Arrington complaints about the quality of results produced by Google.
This is a topic that dear to my heart. It’s been a couple of years that I feel the same. I find myself more and more frustrated by the quality of the search results I get, clicking to much on the 2nd and 3rd page links.
I think we can all agree that the problem is not with the indexing technology. Google is doing a great job there and to be honest Bing and probably even Yahoo are doing a good enough job.

The problem lies with the filtering of the results and the fight against SEO spam.

In a world where your position on the search results can determine the outcome of your business, there are simply to many companies who spends millions of dollars on SEO tricks that will put them on the first results page. It’s even worse when you go outside of the US. In Chile for example, almost every search for a restaurant name brings the local Groupon as the number one result. And of course 99% of the time, there is no connection between Groupon and the restaurant.

So what we actually need is not a better search technology but a way to simply filter the spam and low quality sites out of the results set.
With this thought in mind I sat down to develop a new experiment. A few hours later Kikaros came to life.

You can think of Kikaros as kind of hacker news for search.
Hacker news is a curated feed of great hackers related content from across the web . The community maintains the feed and suggest new content.
Kikaros follows the same principle. It allow the community to submit the best sites that should be used to look for search results for different categories. For example, if you do a search under the code category, you will get results just from the best coding sites voted by the community.

Kikaros is not a full replacement for a search engine. The goal is to see if it can replace 80% of our search needs.
Kikaros is also not a new search indexing technology. It actually uses Google as the underlying search engine. 

Can such an experiment actually work?
I have no idea. This is why this is an experiment. And this is why I would love your help. Please take a moment to go to http://kikaros.com and submit some of your favorite sites.

Please note that this is a very early work and the outcome of just a few hours of hacking. There are many things that can be improved and if you want to help also there, please contact me directly.