New media

New media what is it about
I have been dealing with new media since 1993. This is not a typo or my dyslexia acting out but a realization of how long I have been in this industry. To anyone who can remember a world before the web the early 90’s brought the first wave of multimedia due to the availability of CD-ROM on every home computer. Interactivity meant providing the user with a menu to choose from. While user generated content was a letter (real paper not email) to your customer support staff. At the time the technology provides the ability to hyperlink from one article to the other and create easily accessible links to related content and media. We spend countless hours to decide what was the most important function on the main menu through which the user could navigate through the site. There was no ability to personalize or get any type of real time feedback about your product. Going live in beta was unthinkable and costs Disney millions due to bugs in CD-ROM products that had to be recalled. But the single most important difference between the mid 90’s and today was the place the user or consumer took in the process. You guessed who the user was and what he/she would do. Asking them or getting any real feedback was impossible and the product designers and editors thought they know more then any user about the respective subject, user experience or functionality. When developing Olympic Gold (a 100 year history of the Olympic Games) we had about a dozen editors on staff with another 20 or so experts contributing in their area of experience. At Sportingo we have about half a dozen editors and potential of tens of millions of experts that can contribute from their knowledge and experience. The beauty is that the wisdom of tens of millions of avid sport fans around the world is greater then that of any editorial team you could put together. Instead of guessing what users what you can ask them, or better yet analyze how they use your site and change it accordingly.
This new approach has its share of pitfalls including abuse of the system, consistency of the content, determining quality, fact checking etc. Yet with all its shortcoming it has the potential of creating a much more compelling experience then ever before.
More on how we can cut down on the possible abuse of an open system in my next posting.

Going Beta

The web 2.0 world has brought with it the idea that in order to stay competitive you must release in beta. If you wait until your product/ service are fully developed you are going live to late is the view. The problem with this view is that you end up launching a product that is not fully featured then end up having to double your efforts as you manage the day to day of the new service while continuing to develop the full service/ product.

It is a crucial point to figure out when is the right time to launch and make sure you have enough value to offer. On the other hand going live gives you invaluable feedback about the service and you start to learn more about your service then ever before. For example, I tend to navigate through Sportingo by subject. I go to a specific section of interest and hardly ever use the Article feature on our site which gathers together all the different articles on the site.

We are now learning that more and more of our users actually prefer to click on the Article section and navigate their way to specific articles that way. This changes the whole layout of the article section as it was intended to be more of an archive then the main place for people to search for content and requires us to redesign this section.

An important lesson to anyone building a website never expect other users to behalf the way you do. We are all individuals and have our own preferences. A good site lets different people use it in different ways to find what they want and does not require everyone to do the same.

So did we launch at the right time? Were we do early? Although I am not pleased with parts of the site I believe we made the right decision to launch. It provides us with better feedback on the site use and has opened up a number of partnership opportunities. My conclusion launch as early as you can add value to an important part of your target market. BUT be prepared to the operational requirements of going live and treat your beta site as the website that the whole world will see.

Hello world

Hello world,

This is my first blog entry, for the past year I have been an obsessive reader of blogs and an occasional commentator but I have resisted the plunge into the midst of writing. I guess that as a CEO of a new media/ internet/ web 2.0 start up I am obliged to share my thoughts with the world. Let me start with a world of caution I am dyslectic if a word has more then 3 letters I will most likely misspell it. Fortunately the spell checkers catch most of my mistake but not all of them.

• So if a word makes no sense then I am making no sense
• I was writing at 5:30 in the morning after giving my baby boy his morning bottle
• The spell checker changed what I meant and I did not catch it
  

I am the CEO and co founder of Sportingo a new fan generated news and community sport site (more about the company later), father of Liam and Elay, husband to Lisa, serial entrepreneur and lately amateur organic farmer.

I started my first company in 1993, long before the Internet craze. At the time I was a history student at Tel Aviv University and some friends of mine where digitizing dental magazines onto CD-ROM. I was fascinated with what the CD enabled and started thinking of how this new media could be applicable. That brought o the founding of Sport Electronic Archiving (SEA for short) which focused on creating sport related new media products. We licensed rights from leading sport organizations such as the International Olympic Committee, the NBA and others and created interactive sport encyclopedias about sport.

My business partner and I took the company public in London in 1996 and then saw our whole market change with the growth of the web. I moved on to co found Manna which developed a real time personalization engine, idealive an attempt to create a market place for developing. funding and distributing media. I moved on to work with several other technology companies both as an executive and consultant and earlier this year teamed up with Tal Barnoach my partner from SEA days to start Sportingo.

I will not go into to many details about Sportingo today you can read what Techcrunch thought about us TechCrunch. What I will go into in this blog are my thought about the Internet how it is changing media and my general experience as an entrepreneur and CEO.