I put some pictures from the Microsoft Israel R&D Labs launch event yesterday on Flickr…
A detailed even summary and notes will soon follow…
Tags: ILDC, Innovation, Israeli Startups, Microsoft, MSFT, Steve Ballmer
My Moo MiniCards finally arrived!
The Moo MiniCards are like a ‘hip’ little full color business cards that can also teach us a lesson in product innovation - mutating a standard product we all know by changing some of its properties to make it unique.
By making they’re card about half the size of a standard business card and featuring a a full-color picture Moo turned their product from the same old business card everyone is making to a unique and interesting product that creates a buzz (and a brand).
Designing these little cards is a simple process as Moo connects to your Flickr account and provides an simple interface to select and manipulate the pictures you want printed.
On the back side you can put a thumbnail and some text. I decided to go with the ‘modern’ look with just my name and my homepage address.
Now I need to start passing them along… Maybe TechEd 
Oh, and you can also turn them into small magnet cards… Nice…
Some more pictures on my Flickr set….
Tags: Flickr, Innovation, MiniCards, Moo, Moo Cards
If you haven’t heard of Modu by now you’ve probably been living under a rock for the last couple of weeks.
The company who’s product has been a kept secret so far, has been spreading teasers around the net for the past couple of weeks until it finally announced and exposed their product yesterday.
Modu Mobile, led by Dov Moran - the mind behind the USB flash drive, aims to revolutionize the cellular world by introducing a modular phone, called Modu.
The Modu is a device, smaller than a credit card, containing flash memory and a cellular SIM and is meant to fit into different “Jackets” that can make use of its abilities. From cell-phone like devices to car radios, digital cameras and TVs - simply plug you’re Modu device into the jacket and it’ll have cellular abilities and access to the personal information you’ve got stored on it.
Basically, behind all the PR, teasers, and claims for revolution, the Modu simply adds cellular capabilities to the Disk-On-Key we all know - A DiskOnKey Evolution. Not such a big surprise given Dov Moran as one of the inventors…
Can the Modu really deliver the revolutionary promises of its inventors?
To answer that question lets examine the DiskOnKey. Like the Modu, the DiskOnKey was also meant to be a small device that holds your personal data allowing you to carry that data with you anywhere and provide any device with a USB socket access to this data. Pretty much the same concept as Modu’s Jackets “revolution” only based on a wide-spread standard - USB- rather than a proprietary one.
The main problem with the DiskOnKey is that the master copy of the information is saved in a single location which can only be plugged into one device at a time - not a limitation that is easy to live with, especially when there’s an existing alternative of using wireless technologies (Wifi, Bluetooth, etc.) to sync the different devices and have all the data available anywhere and not locked in a single location on a single device.
The fact that you’ll rarely find a USB socket in a newly purchased TV, car radio, etc. proves that the DiskOnKey failed in achieving its goal and penetrate the market that’s beyond computers.
The Modu is exactly like the DiskOnKey only it uses a new proprietary connection standard…
Which leads us to the big question, what’s so special about the new Modu Mobile that will make it succeed where the DiskOnKey failed?
Tags: 3GSM, Gadgets, Innovation, Mobile, Modu
