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.

I listened to Jef Pulver talking today at the (first ever) BirdBrain conference talking about those “Ha Ha” moments. Jeff talked about how for him those moments come many times in the shower, while for other people they sometime come while running or doing other activities. They are almost ever come while we are in the office.

Thinking about it I realized how true this is also for me. No, I actually take fast showers, but my best ideas came to me while I was far away from the office. Actually, I can say that the most productive time I mostly have is when I’m working in a very different environment from the office. For me it’s mostly coffee shops, sitting at home in my bathrobe or laying on the couch at a friend house.

The office actually pushes me to be less productive. I tend to feel more tired, tend to browse the web aimlessly more and basically feeling not so much productive.
So the big question is: How do we build an office that will actually push us into a creative mode? Or maybe we simply need to give us and our employees the freedom to spend much of the time in what is their preferred creative places.

Now that the Super Bowl dust has settled down I thought it will be just appropriate to write a post about the connection between sport and entrepreneurship/startups.

A couple of years ago at the first TC50 conference I heard Chris Sacca say on stage that he favors for his investments founders who played sport in a competitive level. I was really happy to hear that as I always felt that my sport background contributed a lot to my experience as a startup founder.
This is of course not a new understanding. Not for nothing Patrick Riley, the former coach of the Lakers and Kniks, book was one of the top selling business books for years.
There are many ways to compare a basketball team (or any other sport) to a business unit. A group of people that need to learn how to work and live together in order to accomplish a higher goal. Both teams need to manage times of ups and downs, understand how to evaluate competition and hot to handle constant stress.

But for me the most important things I got from sport are the need to win and the inside feeling that everything is possible.
For me, basketball was always my real passion. Iv’e been playing it all my life, most of the time at least a couple of times a week. I’m also a huge sports fan in general and follow my teams in Basketball, Soccer, Football, Tennis and others. People who are not really into sport think that sport is about a few people that for some reason try to run and do something with a ball. They don’t get that most of the time sport is not about the game at all. It’s about what comes with it. It’s about the will to win. It’s about people who manage to get out of themselves much more than expected.
In all the years I spent playing basketball I learned one thing the most – how I hate losing. This drive to win is something that today became a basic part of me. In the last years managing a startup, this feeling kept me fighting and up on my feet in the darkest days (and for every startup there are always some very dark days).
On top of that I think that my experience with sport is one of the things that contributed the most to the fact that I’m never afraid to come up with ideas of going after companies like Google, Microsoft or other Giants. Sport teach us that everything is possible. That even the smallest teams can come together to create powerful moments in order to beat the big guys against all chances. Even better, sport teach us to fall in love in these scenarios. It inspire us to understand that everything is possible if we will just believe in that and will be willing to work hard, all together.
This is why the saints were able to win this Super Bowl and this is why startups keeps killing the big guys.