Tag Archives for Tel Aviv
Image by Tomer Dvir via CrunchBase
Today Soluto.com released a new version of its crowdsourced cloud-based IT support network. Soluto is a software program that runs in the background of your computer that helps an IT expert solve any problem you are having in a way that prevents the frustration and the loneliness experienced in the IT help desk industry.
We talked with members of the team in Tel Aviv a few days ago, and here is the radio show, running live now.
The one thing we don’t have right now in the IT profession is a help desk that can be everywhere on every computer, at once.
Tomer Dvir, the CTO of Soluto.com is working with his team to release an update of the social help desk app they created not even one year ago. It’s a way to give thanks, get credit and “socialize” the IT help desk. Dvir says the company wants to create a market for friends helping friends, in order to help the billions of consumers of tech products solve some of their basic — but most frustrating — customer service issues.
The iteration that they release today will allow you to connect socially to experts who know the ins and outs of how your computer, tablet or mobile device work, and you may never have to worry again about the screen freezing, or software hanging up on you.
The point is to make IT help as social and as viral as possible for the billions of people who are your average everyday consumers of tech products.
From their website:
Unless you’re a power-user, you probably don’t know what’s causing the frustrations, those moments where some mysterious process is hogging your PC’s resources. Even if you are a power-user, it can take quite some time to pin-point the causes.
For your Monday morning commute we have a new radio show.
In this show, I interview Saar Shai, the co-founder of an ingenious device for touchscreens and his girlfriend, Alicia Zur Szpiro, who I met through Airbnb.
We discuss the technological revolution caused by apps. What will it mean for the the world of work, and what could it mean for the traditional education system?
Click here for twenty minutes of non-stop excitement from Tel Aviv, Israel. Thanks for listening to our show.
From the episode description:
In Tel Aviv, I talk to two entrepreneurs living together in their hotel apartment. They rent out a separate room for travelers, and I was one of them on this particular week.
We talk about the things we have in common and Alicia, who is working on a tech entrepreneurs project for the British Embassy, talks about how companies like Airbnb are revolutionizing not only how we live, but in also how we can make money and change our lifestyles through business.
Social business can be inserted anywhere in an enterprise. Raphael Ouzan, a 24 year old enterpreneur from Tel Aviv, says that BillGuard
Image via CrunchBase
will be the “anti-virus for billing statements” around the world.
His purpose in making BillGuard is to ensure that consumers can grow to trust and understand all of the transactional data listed in their billing statements.
I interviewed Raphael on my trip to Israel last week. Here’s our 17 minute chat about building a social layer for billing statements data.
Image via CrunchBase
Micha Kaufman, one of the co-founders of Fiverr.com, remembers receiving a package at the company headquarters sometime a few months ago.
“We weren’t expecting anything; it just arrived,” he says.
We are eating Tapas in a restaurant in a part of Tel Aviv that Kaufman says was designed to lure away from Neve Tzedek area the kinds of local shops that makes the twisting and turning neighborhood so enjoyable.
Kaufman, a former lawyer, is partly responsible for a rapidly growing — and organic — new type of outsource working environment called Fiverr that answers the question: what is to be done for all of these unemployed, talented individuals who have disrupted traditional work patterns and drifted toward a global, outsourced, permanent form of freelance?
Image by Yaniv Golan via Flickr
His son had had the packaged delivered, says Kaufman. “Inside was this digital underwater camera, worth maybe $100. My son was doing a gig on Fiverr where he would jump into the pool with a sign and someone else would take the picture. He would swim toward the camera with the company’s brand message on the sign.”
Now the kid, who is 14 and a half, will be able to make back the cost of the camera, and a nice profit, in a week’s time, maybe even a few days. Such is life now. Just as old traditional shops in old neighborhoods are losing ground to new shops and restaurants put into industrial complexes, a global marketplace that used to work in the industrial mainstream culture of office buildings is now drifting away from that and creating their own virtual clusters of shops and neighborhoods on the web.
By Kaufman’s estimation – he didn’t discuss exact figures — there must be millions of people doing this, in over 200 countries, the largest by volume being the US.
It makes sense why. Fiverr is a place where people who have jobs, or who are unemployed, may put up tasks that they are willing to do for $5. Okay, so how does that make sense? Who wants to work for $5?
Think of it this way, says Kaufman. If a person can do a simple task ten times in an hour, they first of all get a steady income, without breaking much of a sweat; this is especially true of their tasks are aligned along passion points — they do something they love like photography, or drawing, or even press releases.
That’s like having a global outsourcing platform where people put their projects online. Firms, individuals starting their own companies, digital advertising agencies, have a global labor force to choose from, and each bid for $5 to an individual is actually a physical multiplier of that person’s attempt to start a business.
In a global marketplace where there is so much friction for the young digital natives to find a place there, or for talented unemployed individuals to find a new job, Fiverr is actually creating jobs, according to Kaufman.
Image by Yaniv Golan via Flickr
This is the way the world works now. People can largely manage and take care of themselves and grow a business organically just by focusing on what they love to do. When Wired wrote an article about Fiverr, Kaufman wasn’t even aware of it, until people using the platform started telling them that Wired writers were buying services to try out the platform.
Kaufman says he said to staff, “go ahead, let’s let them do it,” because he knew that if something was wrong, of if they didn’t like it, it was on them to fix it. Which is what you do if you run a business.
My sense in talking to Kaufman is that he and the 30 people he employes aruond the world — some of them in their early twenties — are part of this global catalyst of young workers and innovative thinkers who do not need the pillars or foundatin of an established company to make them whole, fiscally or even psychically.
It’s like they are part of this hyper-aware organic labor force that is more concerned with finding relationships and thriving economically and socially from them, than being able to put on a resume a work history that shows stability (in the form of working with big names), or pedigree (in representing that they went to this school or that university).
“We find that when we look at resumes, we don’t even look at education background,” says Kaufman. “we look to see do they know what they are talking about, or do they have experience or skills.” The rest, you can probably bet money on this — is up to how they flow with the ups and downs of starting and maintaining a new kind of business.
I don’t mean to sound hyperbolic when I say I would like to suggest that the new labor force is all about continually creating new business, and a new form of business. This is not Detroit anymore, or building the best assembly line for manufcaturing dupllicates of the same product.
This is individual to individual, granular and highly personal.
Speaking of which, stay tuned for the radio show where I interview Kaufman in a Tapas bar called Vicky-Christina. That will be on Rewired Radio in the next two days.
Image via CrunchBase
Today I talked with the CTO and the co-founder of Soluto.com, Ishay Green, and his co-founder and CEO Tomer Dvir. The company, based in Tel Aviv, is getting ready to launch an iteration of their service solution.
Basically, they will offer a free service for the family and friends of early power users of Soluto that allows experts in IT management and solutions, or anyone with any basically great and geeky skills in IT support, use the social web to fix the problem using a very easy to use interface and even crowdsource problems.
The solution could fix a sometimes invisible problem: the products made by Microsoft and Skype are often only really fully understood by the people who make them. You and I don’t care how it works, we just want it to work.
As Ishay said, “I am supposed to be really great at tech, but I have this Mac here, and I’m busting my balls, trying to make it work a certain way.” The companies that make the products are too busy to make fixing any errors easy.
I can’t really reveal the release that’s coming up in a couple of weeks. But I can tell you that Soluto is launching a revolutionary product in their next iteration and it fixes this problem. You should look into how it currently fuctions at www.soluto.com.
I honestly think that Soluto will influence companies as big as Skype or Microsoft to change some of their products. Stay tuned. The radio show will run around December 12.
Soluto CTO Ishay Green points to the 2.5 billion people at the bottom of the pyramid who need tech help, but can't stand the noise
Here is a picture of Ishay Green explaining how Soluto seeks to help the 2.5 billion people who use tech all the time, but who really don’t understand how to fix the problems it has. If you are in tech and can take a look at this, I would love to know what you think of this stage of Soluto’s growth.
