New Media Sport & Community

Selling Sportingo

2009-04-04T22:02:00.003+01:00

It is Saturday night and I wanted to share with all of you the latest news about the sale of our sites, Sportingo, Caughtoffside and Getsport.
In the past few months it become clear that with the current business climate our best chance to succeed would be by joining forces with another company. We are very fortunate to have met the folks at Tixtaq who are building a fantastic business and share a lot of the same values that we at Sportingo do. Combining the audience and platform from our sites with the innovative ticketing information and services at Tixtaq creates a much stronger company.
As much as I am pleased with the outcome of our transaction I am writing this post with mixed feelings. We started Sportingo three years ago. Build a fantastic team and created something new which touched the lives of millions of sport fans around the world and gave hundreds of you the chance to express your passion about sports. As CEO and co-founder I do feel that three years was not enough to reach all of my goals and that I wish I had the opportunity to realize the full dream that drives the process of starting a new venture.

I can’t help but think about what must be going on at Twitter these days. They have build a phenomenal business and it is rumors that after three years are being offered a fantastic amount of money to sell the company. No matter how much money is on the line, I am sure the founders will have some regret if they sell. A part of them would have wished to see the journey through, in a way they would never be able to as part of Google or Microsoft. I don’t know any entrepreneur that started his/ her business simply to make money. Don’t get me wrong, the financial return is very important to all of us, but is never the reason you start your venture. Ventures are created because you just need to make it happen, check what if? Spend sleepless nights trying to figure out how the world should work, or get carried away by someone’s vision or technology.

This urge to figure things out and come up with a new product or service is to my view at the core of any type of new beginnings. For me the sale of Sportingo will close another cycle in my life. I was fortunate to meet and work with extraordinary people during my journey and wanted to thank all of you for your hard work. Oleg, Hadassa, Phil, Donna, Mark A, Mark R, Gabriela, Yaniv, Yoram, Udi, Derek, Mick, Chris, Tal R, Tal B, Nick, Dean, Matt, Dave, Michelle, Avi, Ori, Aya, Ilana, Itzik, Natalie, Uzi, Shai, Boaz and the rest of the people who helped along the way, thank you for your contribution over the past three years.

I will most likely be closing down my blog, if you want to stay in touch or have an interesting opportunity for me to consider you can follow me on Twitter zrozov .

New life

2008-06-13T00:39:00.002+01:00

It has been a very busy week in my life and the life of Sportingo. On Monday night my third son was born. He is a very sweet boy and we now just have to wait until he learns that he is suppose to sleep at night.

On Wednesday we went live with the much anticipated new version of Sportingo. In addition to a brand new design and improvement in functionality we have also introduced the very early stages of what we believe will become a hit service among sport fans Sportingo Buzz. Buzz is a service that aggregates threads from top forums around the web and allows fans to have a look at what other fans are talking about. I have enjoyed finding out what Chelsea fans think about their new manager or tracking the latest conversations about the transfer market.

We also separated our online media guide into a proper site GetSport.tv and have loads more coming on the new site in the next few months.

Site stats

2008-05-30T16:50:00.000+01:00

I have stayed away from the subject of site statistics for some time now but thought there were a few interesting numbers I could share.

Last week I spoke at a seminar about sport rights for my presentation I run a search on the most popular events viewed on our media guide.

The results were fascinating

The most popular event on Whatsonline this year was the Joe Calzaghe fight. Second most popular was the Australian F1 race. The rest of the list is mostly football matches with two surprising entries. At number five cane the IIHF World Championship in Russia and at number nine the European Weightlifting championships. These numbers are far from scientific but show that a niche sport can have a sizeable audience online as they opportunity for watching that sport on TV is limited.

One last statistic I would like to share is that we finally broke the 100,000 daily visitors mark. Congratulations to the team for a marvelous effort, any bets on when we will hit the 1,000,000 mark?

Red Herring

2008-04-21T18:53:00.001+01:00

I am on my way back from the Red Herring Europe conference in Malta. Sportingo was short listed as a finalist at the event which was a nice honor and I got a chance to present the company. Overall the conference did not seem to attract as much as an audience as it did last year. I am not sure if it was due to the location or a change, marketing of the event or a change in the industry. Bret Hoffman the founder of MyDeco gave a very interesting presentation about his new venture and some key learning from his past at Lastminute.com . If he succeeds in his goal MyDeco will become a very important company and the site is worth while visiting although I feel that it still lucks focus and seems to just have to many different features in it.

There seemed to be a lot of companies in the mobile space all talking about better browser experience the shift introduced by the iPhone and social networking. I still find my Blackberry very limiting in surfing the web and that most of my surfing is to find sport scores, weather and check that the Sportingo site has not crushed. There are clear advances in mobile technology which will offer a lot more to users from location based services to better data transfer using Wifi etc I am just still not convinced how quickly they will be adopted by the majority of the market place.

On a separate note we launched a beta of our new site redesign this week. Please visit the site and send us your feedback. We still have a lot of fixing to do but wanted to share it with our audience sooner then later and get feedback on the layout and functionality. More about the beta and site redesign in my next post.

New Partnerships

2008-04-11T10:07:00.001+01:00

In the past few weeks we launched a couple of interesting new partnerships. The first with the BBC which now includes links to What’s Online from its sport pages. The second new partnership is with Virgin Media which now encourages its users to sign up and write about sports through Sportingo. Virgin has been at the forth front on sport and Internet in the past year. They acquired the rights to broadcast highlights of the Premier League over the Internet then introduced a very bold new design to their website. We are very pleased to be associated with Virgin as they lead the way in getting more fan participation on their website.

Israel Web Tour

2008-02-08T13:01:00.000Z

I am at SFO on my back from the Israel Web Tour and wanted to share some observation of the week. The tour brought together 15 “promising” Israeli web start ups for meetings with leading silicon valley companies, investors etc. For me the tour was about evaluating how should Sportingo approach the US market. Since founding the company we have focused on the UK and European markets and in 2008 we are thinking about how to approach the North American market (more on this subject on some future post).
A few observations from the visit. Yahoo Microsoft merger will go on but most people think it will fail and will distract both companies for the next couple of years. I heard some VCs stating they are telling their companies to look at ways to exploit vulnerabilities in both companies since this is the time to make an impact. There is also a feeling this will not be good for the market as it will leave Google as the only real acquisition option for many companies. Lots of question marks about the future of Facebook and the quality of its platform. My view is that if they are able to execute on their vision of a social utility they will prove everyone wrong but this is going to be much harder then building the social network which they have done so well.
As someone who spent four years in the bay area in the 2000-2003 I felt that the tour did not give us enough insight to the true culture of the valley and what it means be a successful entrepreneur building a company in Palo Alto vr Herzeliya. The cultural difference is something that is very hard to understand without spending a lot of time close to it. We all tend to view the world through our own point of view and it is to easy to just “not get” why Myspace, Facebook, twitter etc work so well and claim it is just because we are of a different age group.
The only session which truly addressed the culture of silicon valley was an interview with Sarah Lacy. She is about to publish a book “Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0” in which she follows some of the top entrepreneurs in the valley of the past 10 years. Her remarks about the industry were insightful and I am sure the book will be a very good read for any entrepreneur around the world who wishes to understand the key drivers for success in the most competitive market in the world.

Thoughts about the Super Bowl

2008-02-05T00:12:00.002Z

I am in California for the Israelweb Tour. In between meetings I wanted to share some thoughts about yesterday’s Super ball. I am not a huge American Football fan and did not watch all of the game but was fortunate enough to watch the four quarter of the game. What I found so fascinating was the pressure and volatility of the game. The two moments which were the most powerful for me in the game illustrate what is so great about sport and why so many of us are passionate about it.
The first was Eli Manning making a great pass that gave him a much needed first down which then lead to the touchdown. The second was the last moment through Tom Brady that almost made an impossible come back and last second touchdown.
What made these two moments so special was how close the were yet ended in completely different results. Manning pass was almost dropped (sorry I could not find the name of the person that caught it) while Brady’s pass was an inch away from being caught. Image how different today’s headlines would read today with only a few inches making the difference between winning or loosing the most watched sport event of the year.

Welcome 2008

2008-01-01T09:04:00.000Z

Hello to 2008, want an exciting year for sport ahead of us.

2008 is going to be the biggest year for the online sport market ever, with Euro 2008, Olympic Games and Ryder Cup all taking place this year we can expect the interest is sport to reach new levels. Billions of dollars will be spend by sponsors and advertisers to show their connection with sport and fans will be searching, talking and arguing about sport more then ever.

A key driver to watch for will be the growing availability of legal quality live streaming of sport online. With most of the online users in the Western world connected over broadband the technology is finally available to allow up to consume sport over our computers.

My main prediction for 2008 is that by the end of the year we will be talking more about watching live content online and less about short clips on You Tube and Joost.

Social Giving

2007-12-24T15:09:00.000Z

As this is the season of giving I have been thinking of ways to get us the social media/ citizen journalism/ bloggers more involved in giving back to the world. I realize this sounds bombastic but I do strongly believe there has to be a way to harness the power of the millions of people who blog to support noble causes. Many bloggers have Adsense or similar type of advertising on their pages. My guess is that 90% of the people that have advertising on their pages are making less then $3 a month (if anyone has that stat please forward it to me) and are participating in social media because they want to, and not in hope of making money from their writing. I am sure that some people don’t ever collect the royalty checks from commission junction, Amazon or Google as the amounts are to small. But what if all of this money could be easily donated to support UNICEF or a similar type of an organization. These small amounts could end up making a big difference. For only a few dollars UNICEF in South Africa get children to play with a real football instead of paper tied up in string. In my recent visit to South Africa I met some of the people from UNICEF and am sure that even small amounts of money could make a big difference for their programs.

I believe that best way to make this work is with the commerce platforms. Google Adsense, Commission Junction and the other technology platforms should add an option in the sign up that will allow us to contribute. As a blogger you could set a limit on how much you are willing to give and then have the technology platform collect all of the money on behalf of millions of people and transfer it directly to the charitable cause.

Anyone participating in this program would get a button that would display as part of their Adsense stating that revenue from this advertising will be contributed.

The technology is fairly simple to implement and the benefits to the community are clear.

If anyone of you knows the right person at Google/ Amazon/ Commission Junction or any of the other major blogging platforms please forward them my post and I promise to keep you updated on the progress of my idea.

Socerex

2007-12-18T08:43:00.000Z

This is a post I wrote several weeks about after Soccerex and by mistake was not published. It is a bit out of date but still relevant in many ways.

Soccerex is the largest football related conference in the world and brings together football clubs, associations, and all types of business that surround the beautiful game.

The conference was hosted at a suburb of Johannesburg and hospitality was superb. It seems very important for the South African to show what a great host country they will be for the upcoming World Cup and the amount of security around the event was almost ridicules. I doubt they will be able to have this much security with hundreds of thousands of fans visiting from all over the world in two years. My view is that the World Cup in 2010 will be a success. Visitors will enjoy the fascinating and friendly land of South Africa and unfortunately crime will also be part of the games with a fair share of muggings robbery etc. Hopefully no tourist will loose their life. I am looking forward to the World Cup and to many more visits to South Africa.

For Sportingo the show was another opportunity to advance the cause of social media and sport and expand our partnership base for the fast growing guide What’s Online. We have several new partners (more in a separate entry) and the amount of coverage of the media guide is growing each week. We are considering renaming the service, if you have any ideas please leave a comment on email me.

First Tuesday

2007-11-08T05:18:00.000Z

Tuesday night I was invited to give a short presentation about Sportingo at the First Tuesday event. It was my first time attending a First Tuesday event and I was impressed by the amount of people and interested in still draws 10 years after it started. The subject of the evening was UGC and Jay the VP of Operations from My Space shared some very good insight on the growth of the social media space and My Space view of the world. I particularly liked the way he presented their vision of creating a portal that was based on social interaction. I think that is a very good way of explaining why My Space has been so successful.

All of the ingredients to create My Space have been around for years but it took a lot of hard work and focus to turn it to such a huge success. We can sometimes under estimate how small parts can make a huge difference to the success of a business. The key to succeed with a new venture is truly understanding what the small drivers of success are and then fanatical focus on doing the best job possible in execution. As they say the devil is in the details, the problem is figuring out what is the key functionality that is so important to drive your product success.

Which team should I support

2007-11-08T05:09:00.000Z

Last week I published an article on Sportingo asking for suggestions on which team I should support. The response to the article was for the most part very positive in particular by Lyton Orient fans that have been very welcoming.

I wanted to quote a couple of my favorite comments which for me symbolize all that is good about supporting a team

The first by MarkR “great ot see the Os fans rallying to the cause...i was new to london a few years back and because i live in clapton (remember clapton orient?!) i took to following the Os. and i can tell you all, it's the best club in the UK, great supporters (i was there at leeds, amazing), great local pride and this season great football.”

And the second by Steve Jenkins

“Sample a game at Brisbane Road and you will be hooked. So many Orient fans started their support of the mighty O's by paying a casual visit - once you have sampled the real guts and thunder of life in League 1 with the Orient you will be with us always! Leyton Orient have such a proud history and are the second oldest professional league club in London and the oldest London Club in the Football League - check out the O's WW1 history on the club's website or just Google and see for yourself. The Leyton Orient Supporters' Club has over 1400 members and will serve you one of your best pints you will ever have!”

With this type of response I will just have to make to an O’s game and see what is like.

Sportel

2007-10-22T23:01:00.000+01:00

I am on my way back from Sportel. The show is the largest market for sport rights in the world. Media right holders, TV broadcasters and sport organizations all meet to discuss rights. Around these meetings lots of service provides pitch their offering. Sportingo exhibited at the show for the first time and got a very good response from the market. Our push to create the most comprehensive guide for watching sports online is welcomed by an industry that is very fragmented. If you look at the total number of sport events run every week you will realize that even the largest broadcasters such as ESPN, Eurosport or Sky only show a fraction of all the sport out there. Sportingo’s What’s Online is becoming a central place for fans from around the world to find the sport media they are interested in. We will soon be announcing a number of exciting new partners and before the end of year will be realizing a new version of the site that will both improve our platform and the user experience for fans searching for media. We are also looking at localizing the service into additional languages, any suggestions on what should come first? French, Spanish? German? I would appreciate your comments.

More about London

2007-10-12T18:32:00.000+01:00

It has been a month and a half since we relocated to London and I thought I would share some more of my experiences in the city.

It seems that we finally found a place to live, as simple as it sounds finding a place for a family of four is not that simple in this city. With so many neighborhoods to choose from and considerations in finding the right place the search got very complicated. For example I had no idea that we need to register our 3/12 year old to school now or we will not be able to get him into a good school in two years.

Everybody is obsessed with celebrity gossip and sports. The obsession for sport is a good thing for us and I can only appreciate the passion for the game now that I live in London. Once I move into our new home I will write more about this and about the whole process of choosing a team to support.

It seems that the whole media world is centered in London, the access to partners, clients and suppliers it wonderful. In some cases things take longer then I would like the to but that is the nature of working with large media partners.

Everything is so expensive. I am about to sub lease a small office for our London based team ( a basic room with four desks). The price for this room is going to be over 50% more then we pay for a large office that can fit more then 20 people in Israel.

We will be off to Sportel next week. This is the major sport conference of the year in which media right holder, sport federations and media companies all come together. A very intense few days, the only upside is the location in lovely Monte Carlo.

New round of funding

2007-10-02T15:18:00.000+01:00

Today we announced a new round of funding from Ingenious Media. Ingenious is a top UK media investor (and have one of the most amazing offices I have ever visited) and will be helping us grow Sportingo and expand our UK presence. We raised a total of $3.2 million which should give us additional marketing resources and help in continue to develop the site. This is the 12 round of funding I have been involved with since starting my first company in the early 90’s. Every round is different and you end up learning a lot from the process and get ideas on how to improve your business. As a new company that is not profitable yet raising money is a very important event since it shows that the market values what you are trying to achieve. We need to remember that it is just one step that gives us more resources to continue and grow the company.

Thanks to all of the team who worked hard on the deal I would especially like to thank our lawyer Efrat that put in a lot of work (and is due to have a baby any day now) to finalize all the documents.

More about how we plan on spending the money and grow the company in my next few posts.

Move to London

2007-09-29T23:49:00.000+01:00

I have not updated my blog for a while and wanted to apologize to my devoted readers (all three of you). In late August I relocated to London with my family and am in the process of opening our local office and getting situated in a new city. This major life change has left me with zero free time and as my blog shows. A few impressions about life in London. It is very expensive, I was told to expect that but it is still even more expensive then you expect.

Pubic transportation does not work for a family with young kids. I don’t know what they were thinking about when building the public transport but it is virtually impossible to get around with young kids and a stroller. Fortunately people are very nice and help you carry the stroller up and down stairs.

It is a great city for kids. If you manage to get from one place to the other it is a fan city for kids. Lot’s of things to do, wonderful parks and the never ending entertainment (ta least for my 2 and 3 year olds) of watching the Queen’s guards.

From a company prospective I am having to adjust to managing the team remotely, skype is very useful and my new blackberry makes it possible to go out to meetings and stay in touch (very useful when our nanny called in sick and my wife was out house hunting so I ended up taking the boys to the park).

There are a number of new partnerships that we have been working on that I would love to share and hope that in the next week I can make them all public knowledge.

Wish me luck in our hunt for a new family home in London.

Moving to London

2007-08-16T21:32:00.000+01:00

It has been a while since I have updated my blog and I hope that I have not lost my few readers. On Monday I will be moving to open our London office. I wanted to write more about my plans for London and our new office but have had so little time in between the growing demands of the site, some of our soon to be announced partnerships and getting ready to move the family over to London. I will do my best to blog some more about the actual moving experience and live in a new city.

2007-07-18T15:26:00.000+01:00

We have reached a new stage in the establishment of Sportingo as equal players in the world of sport media. Sportingo was approved for official press coverage for several prestigious sport events. Through our partnership with FIBA we will be sending a fan on assignment to cover the semi finals and finals of the Americans Basketball Tournament in Las Vegas. For those of you that do not follow basketball this is the tournament which decides which teams qualify to play in the 2008 Olympics. We have launched a contest on Sportingo to determine the best person to cover the event.

For all you rugby fans we are offering a chance to report on the up coming Rugby World Cup in France. I will share some more information about our contest and the experiences of fans that get a chance to be part of the accredited media.

This is a good opportunity to praise the great work by Ed McGrogan who was sent to cover the Fed Cup tie between the US and Russia.

Managing Sport Rights follow up

2007-07-12T07:59:00.000+01:00

A BBC reporter that attended the Sport and Technology Conference just published an interesting overview of the growing controversy about online sport rights. If you read all the way to the end of the article you can read some of what I was said at the conference.

Managing Sport Rights

2007-07-08T15:43:00.000+01:00

A week ago I was invited to participate as a panelist in the Sport and Technology conference in London. The subject of the panel was protecting rights. There was a great panel and a very lively discussion. I think that we need to change the way we look at rights and start talking about managing your rights instead of protecting them. Right prosecution is only a small part of the equation and right holders that will focus on that aspect alone will find that the market has moved and they stay behind. In an economy that has so much to offer the main problem is gaining share of mind, making sure a fan spends time reading an article on Sportingo and not on any other sport site. The same is the case for any right holder, if you don’t’ make content available to your fans and potential fans they will easily find other ways to fill their time and end up spending more time watching another sport. That does not mean that if you own lucrative rights and have signed TV deals for hundreds of millions or billions of dollars you should just put all of you content out for free. It does mean that you need to be a lot more proactive about learning what your fans are interested in and figuring out a new model that can address this emerging need. Make video clips, highlights or archives available and figure out new ways to prove their value.

Assuming that the life time value of a sport fan is in the many thousands of dollars (if anyone has that number please email me) the focus of right holders should be on how do I use new media to acquire more customers so in the longer term I can be more profitable. The value of gaining another 100,000 fans around the globe that will spend the next 50 years following your sport, watching it, buying merchandize, attending events etc is by far larger then any possible loose of revenue in the short term.

My take from the conference was that most media right holders realize that the world is changing and that they have to experiment with new models and ways to enageage fans.

Buying Caughtoffside

2007-06-27T13:32:00.000+01:00

I am very pleased to post about our recent acquisition of Caughtoofside and Chris joining the team and Chief Editor. Caughtoffside were one of Sportingo’s first partners and are a very well respected and successful football blog. Chris who started the blog over a year ago shares our passion for sports and has built a great following of avid fans around the world. Earlier this year Chris quite his day job as an advertising executive to focus on building Caughtoffside. We started our dialog in April and after spending several days together it became clear that we had a lot in common and the way to having Chris join was paved.
Chris will be filling a new position as Chief Editor and will take over responsibly for the content on the site, working with our partners and contributors to improve the quality and depth of Sportingo. For more information you can read Paidcontent’s account of the transaction.

Partnership with FIBA

2007-06-03T07:59:00.001+01:00

Last week we started a new basketball section on Sportingo. The new section is a combination of the increased interest in basketball we get from our writers and a new partnership with singed with FIBA (the world governing body for the game). FIBA recently launched a new website with a massive amount of new content and features. As part of the new launch they were looking for a partner that could help them add quality user generated content to their site. FIBA has traditionally used fan reports to provide articles and statistics so partnering with Sportingo was a natural fit.

The partnership with FIBA adds to our existing relationships with the ITF www.daviscup.com the New Zealand Allblacks and is part of our ongoing effort to help leading sport organizations around the world to add quality user content to their sites. This partnerships affirms the growing importance of UGC to traditional media organizations and I believe that we will see this trend continue to grow as highbred models are developed that integrate social media in a better way to traditional media.

Setting new records

2007-05-18T14:59:00.000+01:00

Today’s post is a bit of aself promotion. Since launching Sportingo we have seen a steady growth rate, in the first month we got excited about any article that got more then 100 views then the bar went up to 1,000 and soon after 5,000. In April we had several articles that got close to 10,000 views but none managed breaking that barrier. In early May one of most proflic writers midnightjester submitted a two part article about how the Spurs can become one of the big four clubs in England the article did very well and reach about 11,000 views within 2 days. Several days later the article got picked up again and this time went through the 15,000 then the 20,000 mark fell and the article now stand on 23,375. The Midnight Jester who has been writing for us over the past few months and is an avid Spurs fans managed creating a nice following on the site and drove a lot more conversations about his team. Incidentally although the Spurs are a London team our writer is based in South Africa proving that great writing and passion for sports are an international skill.
This article success paved the way for other articles to break the 10,000 market with several other reaching very impressive numbers Luke Durkin’s article about Gareth Bale reaching 12,548, Tom Harness article about Xabi Alonso 11,338 Orion Assante piece about Arsenal’s signing for next season at 11,085 plus a lot of very negative response from Arsenal fans around the web.

The articles and authors I mentioned are all great pieces and deserve the attention they got online. I still can’t predict why one article will do so much better then the others, and for each great article that got read by 10,000 viewers we have 5 other articles that are as good and got read by less then 1,000.

Joost

2007-05-07T18:32:00.000+01:00

I have been getting requests from several people for invites to the Joost beta, I am very sorry that I did not respond but I seem to be having some problems with Joost and just can’t seem to be able to access the codes. I promise to send them out once I manage getting them.

A general note about Joost I am less then impressed at this stage, the quality is not as good as I thought it would be and there is not that much to see yet. The people behind Joost are some of the best in the industry so I am sure they will fix it, I guess this is a matter of having setting very high expectations and not delivering on them yet.

Breaking the 10,000 mark

2007-04-29T08:54:00.000+01:00

It has been another record breaking week at Sportingo. In April we had several articles that got a lot of attention and flerted with reaching 10,000 views but all seem to have lost steam after the reached 9,000.

On Friday night the mark was finaly broken by The Midnightjester. His article Arsenal and Liverpool at risk of Spurs decide to muscle in on the top has almost 11,000 views to date and seem to have stirred a lot of reaction from football fans.

Our next goal is to have an article reach 10,000 views in one day, and by end of year I am hoping to see the first article reach the 100,000 mark. Anyone willing to bet on the date for that happening, my personal bet is 15 of November 2007

Responsible Commenting

2007-04-22T13:46:00.000+01:00

Last week I read about a blogger getting threats to her life by people commenting on her blog. Kathy Sierra who writes at http://headrush.typepad.com/ (a fantastic blog with some great insight into user interaction) received several life-threatening comments along with some ugly sexist insults. I suggest that you visit her blog to read the details. We get hundreds of comments on Sportingo every day and for the most part they are insightful, add value to the debate and present a supporting/opposing opinion or correct facts.

But a small amount seem to cross the line and turn personal and ugly. Sexual or personal insults that have nothing to do with the article or other comments add nothing to the debate.

As a founder of Sportingo, a site which encourages civil conversation among sport fans around the world, I feel it is my responsibly to tackle the issue of inappropriate commenting and take a clear stand about what we want, and most importantly what we do not want to see in comments.

We (that means all of us, blogers, writers readers) want to be treated with respect. We want to be listened to and listen to others, we want to argue, voice our opinion and raise controversy. We want to keep the right to our opinion, and we don't want to be censored, but we do want and expect to be treated with respect and dignity even if people find our opinions disturbing.

I realise that 'free speech' proponents will yell 'fool' and call this post an attempt at censorship. I also realise that the line between keeping a civil discussion and censorship is a very fine one. But sexual insults and life threats have nothing to do with censorship - they are plain wrong. Calling someone a c**t just because she wrote that her football team is going to beat the team you support is plain wrong.

We need to set our own borders, define a set of morals and apply some plain common sense, and then go out and state our opinions, get a conversation going about what we as a global society of bloggers/ writers/ net citizens feel is the make-up of a responsible conversation. But most important let's make it clear that we will not accept members of our community abusing our fellow citizens. And we will stand up and use our keypads to state our disgust.

To encourage this dialogue I set up a site http://www.responsiblecommenting.com/ My friend and very talented designer Udi Bobrovsky designed a button which I urge you to put on your blog, forum or website which shows your support for this issue. Please visit the new site and give me your suggestions on what else we can do to support this initiative and improve our community.

Joost beta

2007-04-18T16:38:00.001+01:00

I finally got the chance to download and test the new Joost client. Overall I was a bit disappointed. I don’t think the interface is that intuitive and was having a hard time figuring out how I can go back or stop the video from running. Coming from the world of sports I was looking for what sport content was available and could not find much. Even what I found would not play through and seemed to be jerky. It could be due to the fact that I was connected at the office and the network was busy, but I was expecting more from the people that created Skype. Perhaps the quality will get better once more people sign up.

The good news is that within a year watching TV on the Internet will be as common place as using the Internet for international calling. I believe that Joost will fix some of the initial problems get a lot more content and tens of millions of users. I will keep you posted on my future experiences using Joost.

Red Herring and General updates

2007-04-18T16:30:00.000+01:00

I have not published on my blog for some time as I find myself extremely busy with work and life. A quick update regarding the past few weeks. I attended the Red Herring Venture conference in Cannes two weeks ago. The conference took place at the Internconntinental hotel which is one of the prim hotels in Cannes. A very interesting event which exposed me to several very interesting European companies and investors. My insight is that Europe is still far behind the US or Israel in terms of the opportunities for an early stage technology/ new media company. It seems that the culture and infrastructure do not support the level of commitment and risk taking that is needed for a successful entrepreneur culture to evolve.

We are getting very good feedback about our partnerships with leading sport organizations such as the allbalcks. Are partnerships allow sport organizations to add quality user generated content from Sportingo writers to their site as fan driven news. The articles that are published on these sites seem to get a lot of attention and we will be announcing several more partnerships in the very near future.

Our team continues to grow and we have several open positions. I am interviewing for an online marketing manager and looking for a web developer to join our team.

Our online media guide is about to launch which has been keeping us extremely busy in the past few weeks, I will post some more information once we launch.

Sportingo makes short list in the market competition

2007-03-13T07:12:00.000Z

Several weeks ago we entered a competition hosted by Themarker magazine and Microsoft for the most promising Israeli Start Up in 2007. This is a fairly prestigious competition and I was very pleased that Sportingo was selected as one of the top three companies (the article is in Hebrew). We now get a chance to present the company on Sunday infort of a crowd of over 1,000 people and a panel of judges. Yesterday when it was announced that we made the short list I got to talk to one of the judges and asked him what sport he follows. He said that he is not a big sport fan, but when he goes to work all his partners just keep talking and analyzing the latest games, so he figured that giving them a platform to write and discuss their love for sport must be a good idea.

We could not have said this any better ourselves and the hundreds of contributors to Sportingo, thousands of people commenting and hundreds of thousands visiting the site also agree with this statement. I better get back to work as I need to prepare a captivating presentation for next Sunday. If you have any ideas on what should my best 5 minute pitch include please don’t be shy in sharing your thoughts.

Cricket World Cup

2007-03-10T13:56:00.000Z

Let me start with a confusion I am not a cricket fan and know very little about the game. Four months ago if you would have told me the Ashes were about to take place I would have given you a blank look. I am still far from an expert of the sport and have not had the privilege to see a live match at Lord’s but I am beginning to get a better idea of what makes this game so special. This is mostly due to the fantastic contributions we have been getting from our growing number of cricket writers. With the World Cup starting in a week we are offering an alternative for avid cricket fans to get coverage of the matches. We now have fan writers covering all the contending teams and expect to have some great stories coming in following each match. Will Australia get back to form and dominate the game, is Sri Lanka the big surprise for the tournament, or perhaps South African can overcome its history to win the Cup. I do hope you come to Sportingo to read comment and write your views about this great tournament.

New version of the site

2007-02-25T15:04:00.000Z

The new version of the site is finally up and running. We started this project with some minor changes to the site based on feedback from our readers and ended up with a full redesign of the site and some great new functionality. The beauty of the web is the instant feedback we get to the site, and our ability to continue and make changes in very rapid development cycles. As CEO one of my big challenges is deciding how much we should follow our instincts compared to going through the rigiours process of market research. I expect that companies such as Google, Yahoo etc go through a lot of research for any change on their site. As a young company we relay on feedback from our audience and integrate it into a vision for the site and what we think our users would like to see.

Our next big release is due early April when we launch our media guide (I will write more about it and the changing face of sport broadcasting over the Internet).

I hope you like the new design and would appreciate feedback on the site.

Citizen journalism, sport and the future of human life

2007-02-07T09:09:00.000Z

I was invited to an event hosted by scoop the Israeli citizen journalism site. The event marks the one year anniversary of the site and brought together about 100 of their writers and several speakers to discuss the phenomenon of citizen journalism the achievements of the site and its future.

A have several observations from the event, first is that people do have the power to effect change. You don’t need to go through a long investigative process to do good in this world. It is enough to shed light on a small problem and get it fixed to create a better society for all of as. This is the true power of people on the internet. We don’t need to try and solve world hunger or create a utopian society just use this media to constantly make small improvements in peoples life’s. Highlight the good and criticize the bad, encourage a public debate and make people/ companies/ and the public sector accountable for their actions.

This reminds me of the opening ceremony to the Atlanta Olympic Games. I was fortunate enough to have an amazing seat on the 8 row (just behind Demy Moore and Bruce Willis, I will elaborate on that experience in a separate post) and got a very close view of the way the very elaborate show was conducted. The whole process was broken down into very simple tasks which many volunteer dancers and children could follow. But put tougher the effect was magnificent. I view citizen journalism in a similar way make it simple for many people to take one small step and together create a magnificent show that remains in peoples minds for many years to follow.

Another observation from Scoop’s event was the power of the comments. Time and time again the writers talked about the importance of the comments to their articles and how personally they take the negative feedback. As Sportingo deals with the very emotional world of sport some of the comments get to be very negative, I hope that our contributors are not deterred by these type of comments. My favorite example is the articles by Orion Assante, he seems to get a very strong reaction from fans who end up accusing him of being a supporter of there opposing team. I do not know which team Orion supports but based on the comments on the site he has to be supporting Manchester United, Everton, Chelsea and possibly Manchester City a very unlikely situation.

More stats

2007-01-25T15:54:00.000Z

Sportingo is growing and on the 16 of January we hit a milestone, the first time we had over 10,000 visitors on the site in one day. To be exact we had 11,663 visitors on the site on that day. We have been flirting with the 10,000 figure since early in January and it felt good for the moment to break it (our next goal 100,000 a day). Measuring traffic can get to be addictive. I got emails from some of our authors that go back to check the stats on their article every 10 minutes. It is very satisfying to see people responding you’re an article you wrote and knowing that someone out there took the time to read it. I wish I could meet with every one of the people that visited the site on that day, unfortunately I could not even manage reading all the articles that we published that day. Turning a general number into a specific person is what makes the social web so unique. In the past week I have emailed with a new contributor from Australia, a Shaun who is working on their Phd on English history from Oxford, a Mathematics Phd candidate from the US and an Indian Engineering Phd candidate (I guess we are attracting a smart crowd). I will try featuring some of the more interesting people that I get to meet through Sportingo in future posts.

Site Stats and long tail

2007-01-09T13:08:00.000Z

I have been analyzing the data about the sites first four months of operation and wanted to share some of my insight (by the way if there is anyone reading this blog that is expert on Google Analytics I could use some help).
Our traffic is growing considerable and we are reaching thousands of readers each day. We are running an internal bet on when the site will hit 500,000 visits a month with my bet on April 26 2007.
An interesting phenomenon I have noticed that about a third of my daily traffic is directed toward older articles. The extreme example is an article about Rugby published on Nov 26 2006 that continues to get comments about it almost six weeks after it was published (it is up to 90 comments). I guess this is an example of our own long tail. The more quality content you create and get indexed on the web the more people will come to visit the site. With our current growth rate and the amount of great new content being published on the site I expect these numbers to grow considerably over the next few months. I wonder how much of the traffic for traditional sport site is directed to their archive compared to the day to day news.
Our traffic remains predominately European with over 40% coming from the UK around 20% from North America other important markets are Australia, Singapore, India, Malaysia, Ireland, Norway and Israel.
Cricket was our most popular category in December with a lot of coverage focused on the Ashes. While Tennis had the highest number of readers per article.

We continue to see a serge in the number of people signing up to write on Sportingo and overall the quality of articles is excellent. I will try getting some data about the writers for my next update.

New Year New Media and New Trends?

2007-01-03T09:35:00.001Z

The web is full of end of year summarizes and predictions for 2007. Time’s selection of You as the person of the year has been covered extensively as the idea of user generated content seems to have taken over day to day conversations (do conversations about UGC also count as UGC?) .

Is UGC over hyped? What can we expect for 2007?

I think that the term might have been over hyped recently but not the reality behind it. People connect with other people, we spend most of our life talking with other people, arguing, and sharing our opinions with the people we know. This has been true from the beginning of time. Technology has enables our circle of friends to grow and created better opportunities for us to reach out and find some other person that has an opinion we care to hear or share our own opinion with more people then we could ever imagine.

I believe that when people write a blog they don’t think of a number of people that will read it but rather about how they would present the point in a discussion with a friend, or possibly a stranger they strike up a conversation on a plan on train ride. That is what makes UGC so interesting for the majority of us, we feel the human contact. It is not a crafted message created by a spokesperson, PR maverick or bureaucrat but rather represents the most basic way of communication we all feel so comfortable with.

With more and more of the media becoming alienated we have an inherent desire for the simple conversation that UGC can offer. A feeling that we can get to know the writer, they are just another person and not the mouth piece of some unknown media organization. This is a simple truth that is part of our human experience and will continue to grow the amount and popularity of UGC.

At Sportingo we are offering a platform to deal with one aspect of UGC which is fans passion for sports. The amount of articles on our site continues to grow at a brisk pace and we are already working on next versions of the site that will include more media and even better ways for fans and writers to share their thoughts.

The notion that if you build it they will come is proving itself as more and more people find their way to Sportingo and many other UGC sites share their thoughts with a growing global audience.

The unpredictable nature of user generated content

2006-12-25T13:52:00.000Z

As a follow up to my last entry I wanted to share an anecdote of working with user generated articles. If you have been watching the Sportingo site you can see that on average we have been publishing around 7 articles a day in December. But since we depend on submissions from our users this average can have big swings. Tuesday was a slow day with only four new articles. Wednesday morning also started slow but by mid day we already had 11 new articles and tow of our editors out for the day. Our editing system is very fluid as it is difficult for us to predict the amount of work required at any given moment as we therefore have a lot of highly qualified editors that come in and out of the system based on the amount of work we have. Usually this works out very well and it the most efficient way to manage a site of our nature. But some days, it can make it very difficult to keep up with your users. The good thing is that more articles mean more traffic to the site, which should then generate more articles and help building the site. As Stuart Little says there is always a silver lining, just sometimes you need to look harder for it (my cultural references are mostly tied to the stories/ videos my boys are watching that week).

Time people of the Year

2006-12-20T12:54:00.000Z

Time just announced that the person of the year is You, a generic term which stands for all of us that are taking part in a revolution in the world of media. A change from you the editor deciding what is important to US the users saying what we care about. As the CEO of Sportingo I feel that a bit of this selection is also due to the efforts of the scores of writers that have been publishing their opinions on Sportingo. You are shaping a new agenda in the world of sports, talking about subjects ranging from how did cancer effect Lance Armstrong’s performance, to taking a child to watch their first football match. The numbers of people taking part in participatory media is growing and we are very glad to lead the way for so many talented writers in the world of sports. This is also a good opportunity to highlight the results of our first writer competition and an amusing view of why football is the greatest sport of them all.

Long tail and sport

2006-12-03T19:25:00.000Z

I just read a very interesting presentation from Bear Sterns about the long tail and media. Worth reviewing, in short the presentation is about how the long tail is becoming more important and over time will be a bigger market then the “big media”. It also states that the big opportunity is to aggregate the long tail and organize it in a way that users can find something useful to them.

I agree with most of what this presentation states and wanted to add a view about the long tail and sports. Most sport fans follow more then one sport team or event, we will typically have a big name team that we follow, it can be a football club, basketball, national team or tennis player. At the same time we also have a local favorite or a more obscure sport which we were introduced to and still have an interest in this is the long tail of sport. Growing up in Israel I was a natural football and basketball fan. In a very early age I was introduced to golf by father and took to the game, for years I would spend all summer at Israel’s one and only golf course and would devour any piece of information I could get about the game. My ex roommate from boarding school remains an avid follower of swimming as he continues to support his University football team. As we add more sports on Sportingo we are noticing that fans want to share their thought on more then one sport. A Westham fan might have a lot to say about cricket or rugby and our own Mark Rivlin who is a passionate Leads fan shares his love for the game of chess. The beauty of the web is how easy it is for a person to find a way to express all of their areas of interest and find easy access to more like minded people. Our goal of for Sportingo to enable sport fans to find more ways to express their full range of interests.

Looking for a few good people

2006-11-25T21:55:00.000Z

I have been neglecting my blog recently, a combination of travel work and an ambitious attempt at writing an entry on how the TV world will change due to broadband have delayed posting for a while. Sportingo is growing faster then ever, which is very good news (and leaving me with very little sleep) and we are looking for more people to join the team. If you are or know talented hard working people that want to take part in building a great new media company contact me. In particular we are looking to fill a couple of development positions, a manager level business development/ account management position, an entry level marketing position (could also be part time) for work with blogs and forums and a research/ data management person for managing statistics and schedule content from our partners. A perfect command of English is a must French or Spanish a plus.

traffic

2006-11-05T21:11:00.000Z

We had a very busy week (they all are) and in the past few days have been seeing some good results to some of our articles. A key factor in the fast pace growth in our traffic has been better placement on Goolge news. Over the past two days Ilana’s article about Federer withdrawing from the Paris tournament was the number one result under Roger Federer in Google News. The interesting fact was that most of the new traffic we got was not directly from Google but rather from people reading the article and forwarding the link to other friends or posting it in other sites. I thought it was a very good article and am glad it generated so much interest.

Esnip which is an Israeli web 2.0 company run by a friend recently announced a round of venture funding. Yael their CEO is one of the most savvy CEO’s out there and I wish them best of luck in their continued growth.

One more thought about traffic, we all use Alexa to gauge the level of traffic for our websites, and many people have written about how inaccurate it is. The day we went live we got covered by Techcrunch and hit an Alexa ranking of 8,700. Are daily traffic is three times the amount we got from the TechCruch article yet our daily Alexa ranking is at around 40,000. I guess alexa have some work to do in figuring out their ranking system.

Copyrights

2006-10-29T20:22:00.000Z

The Internet has opened up a lot of issues regarding copyrights, I will not even try to cover this huge subject just attempt to highlight a number of aspects we I recently noticed. Sportingo like many other content sites actively seeks ways to promote its content on third party aggregations sites. Services such as Google News, News Now and many others are a great platform to drive relevant traffic to your articles. The value for the aggregator is getting free content which they can then package and present to a larger audience. One of the issues that we are dealing with is presenting images on these third party aggregation sites. Sportingo licenses images from several sources including Getty Images and Reuters (more on the image licensing business and how it has changed over the past five years in a separate entry), the license allows us to present images in an editorial context. Currently most third party news aggregators do not present images, but rather headlines and in some cases a short insert from our articles. But some of these aggregators are beginning to show images on their sites. This needs opens an interesting licensing issue. Do the news aggregators need to licensee the right to present the image? Do the publisher need to re negotiate the right to present the image on third party aggregation sites? I will be investigating this subject over the next few weeks and promise to update as I learn more about the subject.

Busy week

2006-10-27T09:49:00.000+01:00

It has been a very busy week. We had two new team member join. Derek is our new VP of Online Services and Michelle joined as a Marketing Manager. Choosing the right people at such an early stage is crucial for your success. The mantra of every VC is that it is all about the team, the quality of your team and the interaction between team members is probably the second most important factor in the success of a new venture (the first being good luck off course). As CEO I view building the right team as a key aspect of my job, the same as the board should view hiring the right CEO. Getting a great person to join the team is only the first step, you must then be able to clearly define your expectations, set good communications, a way to measure success, and turn this all into a great team. The sport analogy is obvious, I hope that I have more of an effect on the outcome then some coaches. For an interesting article about the role of coaches have a look at Mark's entry on our site.

Sportel

2006-10-18T19:35:00.001+01:00

I am on my way back from Sportel. The past few days have been very intense meeting over 30 sport organizations, media companies and teams. It seems that the sport world like most of TV is still trying to figure out the whole new media world. They have built very successful business on selling TV rights and charging advertisers a premium to cover their costs. The Internet is changing a lot of that, the broadcasters that paid hundreds of millions of dollars are afraid that the Internet will cut into their audience while the right holders are trying to figure out the balance between embracing the new medium and protecting their bread and butter TV deals.

I believe that the industry needs to look at new media as a way to increase the contact with the fans and fill a growing appetite for fresh content. TV will never have the time or the resource to show a 4 day golf tournament, they will show highlights and a few hours of life coverage on the weekend. If the right holders provide full coverage of the tournament on the Internet it will only grow the interest in the tournament and the amount of people that will view the live coverage on the TV.

We hope that Sportingo will be able to work with many of these right holders and provide more ways for fans to enjoy their favorite sports.

Interesting traffic statistics

2006-10-15T12:06:00.000+01:00

We have been live for just over a month so this might be a bit early to come up with conclusive traffic analysis but with the power of Google analytics I can’t help myself but share some of my insights to date.

80% of the people accessing Sportingo are connected through broadband. This is a very encouraging number as it supports the next stage in our development – streaming of live sport events.

Over 30% of the users are accessing the site using Firefox, this is a much higher number then I ever expected. I wonder if this number will continue to grow or the launch of Microsoft’s Vista will reverse the trend.

English readers spend more time on the site and are more likely to click on a related article then American readers. Since we are targeting European sports this should not be surprising, yet it is a good to see that we are managing to target our core audience.

People surf a lot more during the week, I was very surprised by this stat. Since so much of sport happens over the weekend I expected to see more of our traffic on the weekend. Apparently people log in to read about sport during work hours. Our site typically gets busier as the work day progresses.

The ability to track and analyze makes the Internet such a fascinating medium. I will keep sharing some of the interesting stats that we learn as we continue to grow.

I am off to Sportel tonight and will try sending up daily updates from the show.

Sport movies and tribes

2006-10-12T13:27:00.000+01:00

Last night I rented the movie Green Street. If you have not seen it yet I recommend it. The movie follows a firm of fanatic West Ham hooligans through the eyes of an American college student/ journalism major played by Elijah Woods. The part I found so fascinating is the social aspect of being a fan.

It is another example of our need to find something to identify with, a hero, a group, a leader. A way to define ourselves as part of a special group and to different from others. As an avid sport fan I have a deep feeling about why I am a fan of my team and why I despise the opposing team. As a humanist I find the notion of hating another team or person very problematic.

Shortly after my wife and I moved back to Israel. My favorite team had a basketball game with an opposing team from Greece. The game happened to take place in proximity to the Jewish holiday of Hanukah. I explained to my American wife that this is game has an extra significance at this time of year because the holiday celebrates a struggle between the Jews and the Greek Empire that took place over 2,000 years ago and the Maccabi fans where chanting songs about beating the Greeks. To this date my wife finds it very odd that we would be moved in a basketball game by a battle that took part over 2,000 years ago. If you think about it from a pure logical place she is right. But the passion for sport runs much deeper then any logic.

I guess that is why last week when we had an article criticizing West Ham it only took a few hours for the article to reach a couple of West Ham fan forums and for us to be flooded my angry West Ham fans. The beauty of the site was our ability to offer these same fans a way to respond and within 12 hours we got a submission through one of the fan forums providing an opposing view and backing their team. This is part of what I love about my job, the opportunity to view the controversy and dialog between opposing views. Lets just hope that we can create a world that can leverage this type of dialog on a wider scale.

YouTube and the future of TV

2006-10-10T10:50:00.000+01:00

You Tube – what an amazing story, I am sure there are probably thousands of entries about YouTube today and most of them will have a lot more insight then I will. Especially I am not a big YouTube user and usually prefer Metacafe. Video on the web and clearly arrived, be it user generated, sport and funny clips, porn or news. Similar to the growth of music, for the most part it disregards copyright laws. The point at this stage is to figure out what people want, how do they wish to interact with video content and then to build related models to support the creation of excellent content. I believe that biggest threat all thee new services present are to the TV industry and the events that rely on hundreds of millions of TV licensing fees as their main source of revenue. Why would Sky, NBC, ABC or any other major channel pay the billion + fee that the major event holders (be it music or sports) are asking for as the number of people watching these events through their channels is eroding.

I believe that broadband and the web can present a superior viewing experience to some users. It will be up to the rights holders to embrace this new technology and find ways to provide the viewers with a superior user experience so they deiced to view the game through a channel that can generate revenue for the rights holders instead of looking for alternatives.

Next week I will be attending Sportel in Monaco. Sportel is the major conference for buying and selling of sport TV rights. This year the conference is emphasizing new media, how the industry is effected by mobile and Internet broadcasting. I will do my best to update my blog on a daily basis from the show (a better use of my time then visiting the casino)

Organic farming and Internet marketing

2006-10-03T20:23:00.000+01:00

I am a novice organic farmer and have learned that it is very difficult to predict how my crops will develop. A few months ago I planted a row of corn, several of the seeds grow fast and in no time offered sweet corn, while others lingered and some did not develop at all. I have no way of figuring out why this happened, they all get a similar amount of water, sunlight and nourishing soil. The same happened with the watermelons I grow earlier in the summer, a few became huge and ended up being very sweet while others remained pink and did not achieve that deep red color of a wonderfully sweet watermelon and ended up as food for the local goats and horses. What does this have to do with new media? Actually I find a similar behavior with the traffic on our site. We see a growing number of visitors but for some reason (which I don’t fully understand yet) some articles are getting hundreds of visits while others linger with little attention from our audience. For my organic gardening I turn o the local framers and seek advice, and once in a while they visit my garden and give me some tips on plant rotation, time of year to plant extra. For web traffic we turn to SEO experts or as I call our expert algorithm influencers. As their job is to influence the all mighty Google algorithm to notice our little site and spread the word. I still can’t fully figure out why so many people preferred the story about Ronaldo to that about Beckham or why the story about the semi finals of the Australian Football League was so much more popular then the report about the finals. I guess that jus like gardening the only way to figure this out is time and a lot of trial and error.

New media

2006-09-28T07:53:00.000+01:00

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

2006-09-22T21:46:00.000+01:00

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

2006-09-21T09:06:00.000+01:00

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.