Blog/March 2015/Mar 27th
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< Blog | March 2015
| March 27th (See this week's devar torah) | Comments or questions? Click here! |
Another busy week, as you’ve come to expect. The construction continues. We attended a conference. Apple remains enigmatic. Reaching a turning-point in our business: don’t you want to invest in us?
The construction next-door continues, with the most inept workers I’ve ever witnessed. At the beginning of the job they built a wall only to tear it down again. Fine, “stuff” happens. But the litany of stupidity is never-ending. During the week our gas was turned off, because they thought it was for the neighbor’s house. Yesterday they hooked up the water, and in the process caused a leak in our water feed. It was a minor leak, but overnight developed into a shower. So we’re waiting for the guys to come and “fix” it. Not holding my breath that it’ll be done correctly; at least the leak is before our water-meter. Update: they just came and fixed it; don’t know if they did it properly, but we’ll soon see.
Esther and I attended the Cybertech 2015 conference. There were a ton of people there; we went to do some networking, see what kind of technology was being promoted and to see if there were any possibilities for partnerships. Did I mention there were a ton of people there? The exhibition hall was enormous and yet still packed. Lots of Europeans, but mostly Israeli companies.
Out of the several hundred companies we looked at, there were a few which seemed like they might have something we could use (or with which we could help them). We shook hands, exchanged business cards and now are connected on “LinkedIn”. One thing which screamed out at us was that there seems to be a lot of duplication. The theme was "cyber security", and there are hundreds of companies just in Israel battling for that space, many of whom seem to be doing the same (or very similar) thing.
Last week I told you that I was having some issues with iOS. After shabbat I fixed them, and then on Sunday I made a submission to the Apple App Store. It’s a surprisingly difficult process. Once your app has been submitted, you wait for Apple to review it and tell you what they don’t like (or perhaps if you’re lucky, that your app has been approved). The process takes a week, on average; they got back to us rather quickly and told us that we need “64-bit support”. That’s a new requirement as of February, and unfortunately means we needed a “64-bit” device to test on. Those are expensive…
So we made a request to all our friends and acquaintances, asking if anyone had an appropriate device we could borrow. Since nobody did, we ended up buying one, which was an unexpected expense — but since we’ll have to keep testing on such devices, it’s at least justifiable. When I loaded the version of the app we had submitted onto the new device, we found that — guess what? — it worked just fine! In fact, there’s no actual need to support 64-bit; the 32-bit version works just as well. But Apple has its enigmatic requirements and you cannot gainsay them if you want to play in their courtyard.
Thus I find myself working on producing a 64-bit iOS version of 8th, and working through the debugging process. That must be done, for technical reasons, without good tools. It’s like performing brain-surgery, blindfolded and using a knitting needle. However, the process is just about finished, so probably this coming Sunday we’ll re-submit to the Apple App Store. Hopefully this time they’ll approve the app!
Our company has reached a turning-point. We’ve spent the last year or so developing our product to the point where it’s stable and marketable. Our initial group of “early adopters” is happy with it, and our forum is quite active. Now we need to take things to the next level: we need the budget to hire sales and marketing staff, an executive, and more technical staff. Up until now, we’ve done everything with our own money — a shoestring budget. But now we need investment capital to take our finished product and make it a profitable business.
So we’re asking you to spread the word: if you, or someone you know, is interested in investing in an Israeli start-up which already has a marketable product, please contact us. We have worked out a business development plan which we think is reasonable and should bear fruit within a year and half to two years, depending on the amount of capital we can raise. C’mon, you know you want to be part of the “start-up nation”!
In other news: the weather has turned warm, and it’s supposed to reach 26C today (in Jerusalem), dropping back down to seasonal temperatures over the weekend. We’ve done most of our shopping for pesaḥ, only lacking vegetables and dairy products. We’ll take care of that next week — pesaḥ’s almost here, can’t wait!
This week Dinah’s here. The four of us will enjoy:
pastel de papas (veggie and non-veggie),
red lentil soup,
short-rib cholent,
salatim,
wheat salad,
beet salad,
roasted veggies,
and date-pecan-cake.
Until next time,
shabbat shalom !
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