Amazing India: Magai Paan

Have you ever tasted Magai Paan?
It is probably among the strangest, weirdest food items I ever tasted. It's not really delicious but it is really fascinating. To make it short, Magai Paan is the Indian version of a chewing gum, people eat it after a heavy and spicy lunch to kind of change the taste and keep on chewing for a while.


It is made of maybe 20 or 30 ingredients including the famous betle, it has the betle leaves as well as the nuts, but you can also find there many fragrant things like clove, rose petal, I suspect some other types of nuts (cashew?), many spices and a lot of secret ingredients coming from small bags, tin boxes, plastic bags, etc.

What is amazing is that you are supposed to keep on chewing this thing for a long time and that at least the first few minutes are full of surprise. First it is a really big bite, then it is surprisingly made of many different tastes all very strong and unfamiliar. So you keep on chewing and suddenly there is this new taste happening, maybe you're cracking the clove, or maybe it's a betel nut, you don't really know.


Take a look here, this is the work table of the paan cart - See all the boxes?


This is the man at work:


This is a close up in mid preparation - you can see some of the ingredients:


This is my friend Grish after eating his double bite magai pan:


This is me just before attempting my double bite:


Now you can judge it yourself - Take a look at this movie, it shows the whole preparation for the magai. This is taken from the streets of Bangalore.

The writing on the wall

I saw this sign at Ben Gurion airport - I guess the guy who did this just didn't know what to write and in what language, so he asked his 3 year old son to draw something that would indicate a low latrine for boys :)

Dahi Puri Chaat

This is a real delicacy I just discovered - The amazing thing about it is that it is a really entertaining snack or light food. It is really fun to eat. Why?

• It crunchy outside, tender inside and liquid too
• It is spicy, sweet, salty
• It is cold inside, wam outside
  
• Usually it is served on a plate containing 5-6 servings, and each serving is supposed to be eaten in one gulp. This is not so easy as it is big and juicy

So when you eat it, the puri breaks in your mouth and then you start feeling all these different tastes explode one after another, the hot and the cold, the crunch and the soft. It really makes for a fun eating experience.
I think Dahi Puri is the Indian answer to a fusion Panko Crusted Fried Avocado Maki Sushi with Wasabi Crème Fraiche :)


Here's a picture with the Puri bread formed as a shell - This is the toughest one to eat.





Here's a picture of the version in which the puri is crumbled - Delicious -





Sometimes I am wondering why European food is so blend and unsurprising. Are European spice impaired? I mean compare this to a steak or burger, what a difference !!

On usability, adoption rates and deadpool for Web 2.0 services

There's been a number of posts on the net about the fate of RawSugar since we announced that RawSugar stopped its R&D operations. See for example these blog entries:

• RawSugar crashes, sells assets
• RawSugar in deadpool
• RawSugar runs outof Energy
• Tagging Site Raw Sugar Tanks, Put Assets Up for Sale

Besides the journalistic headlines (I felt like David Beckham for a day or two), and the number of good words for the RawSugar team from users; what mostly interested me was the reasons mentioned either in the blog posts or in the comments for RawSugar's failure. Here are the leading causes of failures that are cited:

1. Poor marketing (weak focus on blogs, no differentiation with delicious, poor communication, poor positioning, etc.) - 5 mentions
2. Poor UI design (colors, homepage, coolness, overall usability) - 5 mentions.
3. Simply a victim of the bubble - 4 mentions
4. No business plan (nor revenue plan) - 2 mentions
5. Poor innovation - 1 mention.
6. Ofer Ben-Shachar (Founder/CEO) stubbornness :) - 1 mention.

As RawSugar's former VP Engineering, I find this very interesting to see what people really think about this. The first conclusion I draw is that the technology was not to blame, indeed, as I write this blog, RawSugar's investors are negotiating with several potential buyers of the technology. So I believe that the RawSugar tag-search technology will find a new home and that's a good thing.

However, what stroke me most on the comments of people above is that I don't believe any of these is responsible for RawSugar poor adoption levels. When I look around at other services I see all these points in successful services. See for example:

• Did Youtube have a business plan?
• Did Delicious havea good UI design (starting from the hard to remember domain name)?
• Is gmail a model of usability? Maybe yes, but only after you get it.
• Was Craig's list done with a great marketing strategy in mind?
• Where is the innovation in myspace?

No, I don't think these are the real reasons for RawSugar underperformance. I don't think you need a business plan, a great UI design, a solid marketing plan and a huge innovation to make a winning Web 2.0 service. I am not saying it hurts but I don't think these are necessary nor sufficient criteria.

I have my own explanation but I won't share it on my blog right now, maybe in a later post. What do you think? Leave me a comment.

Frank

Why I love spam and gmail

Here's the story. I used to read email from several Yahoo! managed accounts using Outlook and over time I realized that even though Yahoo! was catching a large majority of the spam mail I was getting, and Outlook was also catching a big chunk of what was left (all the false negative); I ended up spending more time cleaning up my Inbox than actually reading my email.

So it was time for a shakeup !!

Here's what I did:

• I set up my gmail account to be able to send email from multiple accounts. So that gmail could now be used to send email on behalf of any of my other email accounts.
• I set up all my Yahoo! email to forward all my incoming messages to my gmail account.
• I created filters on gmail so that email coming from my Yahoo! email account Account1 was labeled "account1" and email coming from my Yahoo! email account Account2 was labeled "account2".
  

And voila!!! The result is amazing, I only have a couple of spam mail that gmail misses out of about 200 a day. That's pretty good I must say. In fact it is so good, that I sometimes go into the spam mail in gmail just to watch all these spam getting caught. And I smile at all this time wasted sifting through these. I also smile when I see the "spicy spam kabobs" ad they put up.

Sometimes software can really solve problems. Congratulations to the gmail team.

Related: Check out Jonathan Boutelle discussion on the comparison of several spam filters here.

Alexa broken?

Am I crazy or is Alexa.com not responding for a few days already?
Somehow I either get a very very very very slow response from the site or no response at all.

I would expect something better from an Amazon site.

Tags: alexa, bugs,

Google accounts strange behavior

I don't know if it's me only but lately all my Google services have been acting strangely. They all seem to get stuck at or near the authentication stage. Specifically, I can't log in to Adsense, Sitemap or Blogger.

The only way for me to make it work is to delete all the Google cookies. This is painful and it only solves the problem for a few hours.

Here are some screen shots that explain this a bit.





With Adsense the login frame simply does not show.
















With Blogger - The page is truncated somehow.








With sitemap the whole page is blank.









I've sent mail to Google support but to no avail so far. Oh, by the way, this happens likewise using IE and FF 2.0 :-)

Tags: google, bugs.

Why startups condense in Israel?

This post is in response to Paul Graham's: why startups condense in America. In there he gives 10 reasons why America is a great place for startups and even generously gives a few hints to the "rest of the world" on how to beat the US on a few points.
Incidentally, Paul Graham specifically mentions Israel and says: "... it might be a lost cause to try to establish a silicon valley in Israel. Instead of no Jews moving there, only Jews would move there, and I don't think you could build a silicon valley out of just Jews ..." -

I find this remark (in footnote 4) so strikingly wrong that I felt compelled to post my own entry on this. I know that there's been a number of threads on Reddit or Digg and I don't really want to revive them but I just felt like adding my own 5 shekels on this topic.

First things first, startups do condense in Israel. In fact, Israel is probably right after the Silicon valley in terms of sheer density and number of startups, probably fighting for a second place with the Boston area. This is so strikingly statistically abnormal considering the size, location and GDP of Israel that Mr. Paul Graham was not only off the mark but he could have chosen any other country in his footnote but Israel.

Let me just throw a few more points here:

• Israel's population is about 6 million whereas California's is about 33 million. So there's a proportion of 1 to 5 here. If I use these sources Israel VC Funding and Silicon Valley VC funding we see that in 2004, there were a total of around 400 Israeli startups who raised VC funds for a total of around $1.4 billion; whereas in the Valley there were a total of 773 startups who raised VC funds for a total of around $8.2 billion. There is about a ratio of 6 in total funding and a ratio of 1.75 in terms of number of deals. If you factor in the GDP of Israel I believe that this is not bad at all for such a small country and at worse it is very comparable to the Silicon Valley.
  
• Israel has a large number of companies listed on NASDAQ and NYSE. Probably more than most European or Asian countries. In fact Israel is number 3 after the US and Canada.
  

Now, just to keep the spirit of Paul Graham's original article, I also have my own explanation of why Israel is a great place for startups. Here's my list:

Israel IS a startup as far as countries go. Here's why:

• Israel is young. Israel will turn 49 this year, it is one of the youngest countries in the world. The vast majority of Israelis come from somewhere else within a few generations. This is pretty much like all the startups I know.
• Israel is not sure of its future. The recent Hizbollah's attacks and the declaration of Iran's Ahmadinajad just show you how incertain is Israel's future. Again very much like a startup and very different from IBM or France :-)
  
• Israel is changing rapidly. Today's Israel is so different than it was some 20 or 10 years ago. Cities grow fast, people's lifes change fast, habits change, etc. In comparison, most places in the US or in Europe have not changed at all. This is again very much like comparing a 2 year old startup to a very established company like say GM or Microsoft.
  
• Israel politics is very unstable, what is right today was left yesterday, extreme right politicians go into a coalition with labor party, etc. This is exactly like a startup trying to re-invent itself and changing marketing strategy and CEO.
  
• Many people in Israel are multicultural. In fact, besides NYC this is probably one of the places in which people come from so many different horizons. It is true that the bias is still towards Jews but the cultures and languages are very different. I think this brings a lot to the overall culture.
• Israel knows that it is small and young; therefore Israel is not afraid to copy big countries. By copying other places Israel is able to improve rapidly instead of being stuck in "doing things their own way."
  
• Israel is not afraid to challenge big countries. Again this is what makes startups successful, when you think of Google 8 years ago trying to do a better Internet search engines for example.

In addition, Israelis have a few personality disorders that make them good entrepreneurs:

• Israelis have a thick skin. You can shout at an Israeli or push him around in the street or cut the line in front of them and this is not going to unphase them. They will probably return the push or scream but that's about all; nobody will lose sleep on this. Just looking at the latest events this August when several thousand katyusha rockets kept falling on the north of Israel and people were just going to shelters and kept on working as usual. I don't think this could have happened in the same way in most places in the word.
  "למה מה קרה?"
  
• Israelis are risk takers. Not taking risks is often not high in the priority list of the average Israeli. "נחייה וניראה"
  
• Israelis believe things will improve. "יהיה בסדר"
  
• Israelis are impatient: "נו?"
  
• Israelis do not feel compelled to follow the rules. For example, it would not bother anybody to smoke just under a "no smoking" sign. "אז מה?"
  

That's all I had to say, but I had to say it. I feel much better now, thanks.

For those of you who want to read more on the Israeli high tech front here are a few Blogs, news and sites to check out more:

• Six Kids and a Full Time Job by Michael Eisenberg
• Israeli VC on Sand Hill road by Tali Aben
• Just check the action, deals and dynamics on places like Globes or Themarker
• Some other bloggers who think like me:
• Draper Fisher Jurvetson
• Israel becomes the Middle East's Silicon Valley
  

Fixed:

• Israel turns 59 not 49. (Thanks to Jeremy Fain)
• See also Ouriel Ohayon's blog for some more on the Israeli startups landscape. See for example his entry on Israeli Web startups here.

Tags: Israel , High tech , startups.

Mafe - Senegalese Peanut meal -

Mafé (pour 4 personnes) [Selon Francois N'Dour]:

Ingredients:

- Beurre de cacahuètes Dakatine ­ 2 cuillères à soupe
- Agneau ou poulet en morceaux
- Tomates concentré ­ 1 petite boîte
- Maggicube ­ 4
- 2 gros oignons ou 3 moyens
- 4 gousses d¹ail

Preparation:
- Mettre de l¹huile à chauffer et faire revenir l¹agneau. Quand c¹est doré,
réserver l¹agneau.
- Faire rissoler les oignons coupés en petits dés et l¹ail râpé. Touiller
jusqu¹à ce que ce soit bien doré. Rajouter la tomate concentrée. Touiller
pour éviter que la tomate n¹accroche au fond. Surveiller.
- Recouvrir d¹eau et ajouter les maggicubes émiéttés (+ légumes si
souhaités)
- Remettre la viande et laisser mijoter en couvrant à moitié pendant 15 à 20
minutes.
- Diluer la Dakatine dans de l¹eau pour en faire un liquide compact (et non
une pâte).
- Verser sur le reste et c¹est là que tout se joue, remuer délicatement pour
éviter que ça colle et que ça retombe, et que ça fasse une sauce homogène,
il faut surveiller régulièrement !

Accompagnement : riz nature (que l¹on mettra à cuire avant toute la
préparation du mafé).

food>recipes>mafe, food>recipes>locations>africa>senegal.

Watch the result here:

Gratin de brandade de Morue

Ingredients:
De la morue ou n'importe quel autre poisson blanc
persil, poivre, noix de muscade
Pommes de terre
Gruyere rape ou en tranche
Ognons
environ 10 Olives

Preparation de la brandade:

• Faire bouillir le poisson, le nettoyer enlever les arettes et l'ecraser a la fourchette.
• Faire revenir les ognons decoupes en des
• Denoyauter les olives
  

Melanger le tout

Preparation du gratin:
Faire bouillir les pommes de terre. Ecrasez les a la fourchette.

Passer a la moulinette le melange de la brandade et des pommes de terres. Ajouter quelques cuilleres a soupe d'huile d'olive. Il faut que le melange soit assez gros, il ne faut pas le transformer en patte.


Prendre un plateau pour le four, y etaler un couche du melange. Etaler une couche epaisse de fromage, puis recommencer avec le melange, etc. Terminer par le fromage.

Mettre au four jusqu'a ce que le gratin ressemble a un gratin.


food>recipes>brandade