Headup

Asa Zaidman shares the room with me here at headup and somehow we manage to arrive at work nearly simultaneously every morning. Under these circumstances I felt a little weird about the idea of arranging a “formal” interview with him. I think that it speaks volumes of his character that he managed to make the interview not only an entertaining experience but an informative one as well.

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Asa and the Web – a love story

Me: Seems like most of us here at headup have an intense relationship with the Internet. What’s your story?

Asa: My first experiences of the Web were during my studies at the Technion in 97. At the time I remember thinking “cool thing this Web – shame there aren’t that many sites around…”. Next thing I knew I was looking for a job that would allow me to work nights when I found a wanted-ad advertising a job at “Hotbar”. I’ve been working in Web companies ever since. My last position before coming to headup was product/project manager at IncrediMail.

Me: And what made you come over to headup?

Asa: A friend of mine introduced me to Eitan Burcat, one of the company’s first employees. He and I got along pretty well, one thing led to the other, and here I am.

A scruffy pioneer on the frontiers of the Semantic Web

Me: And how is it turning out for you so far?

Asa: I had the good fortune of joining headup early enough to experience the excitement that is part-and-parcel of a being a startup pioneer on the Web’s wild frontier. It seems to me now that with all the talk about Semantic Web and Google’s move in this direction that the dust of the first wagon trains is visible on the horizon and soon this wild frontier will be bustling with enterprising city slickers.

In the time that I’ve been here at headup we’ve made the transition from being a concept, to becoming a tangible product that people can actually use and experience. On the whole it’s been gratifying.

Me: Can you give an example of this process in which a concept becomes a product?

Asa: I think that’s a bit of a tall order, but I can give an example of how a feature evolved from an idea.

Me: Yes….

headup anywhere – birth of a feature

Asa: Pretty early on in the development, but after headup was already able to identify and underline terms, we realized that we had a UI problem on our hands.

Me: Do tell.

Asa: Well it’s pretty simple – users could access headup data easily enough from the items headup underlined, but they had no way of prompting headup to supply them with data for anything else. headup was basically devoid of any choices for users.

Me: And how was this overcome?

Asa: We had a brainstorming session in which we debated methods to enable users to “headup” anything they wanted on the pages they were browsing. The highlight-rightclick-menu solution was an early winner because the learning curve it required from users was close to nil. They were already familiar with this type of interaction from copy-paste operations and the like.

Me: Ok, so now users can highlight and headup any term that they encounter on a webpage, but what happens if they want headup data for a term that isn’t on the page they are browsing?

Asa: That’s exactly the question that led to the development of the headup google enhancement that you chatted with Guy about last week…

Me: Don’t you just love how everything is connected?

Asa: That’s what being product manager is all about.

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