Talmon Marco - iMesh

It took me more than a month to continue the "Israeli interviews" process, but finally - here is the 2nd one. Talmon Marco is a real serial entrepreneur, as he actively founded a few companies, most of them before the age 0f 30. Gemini did not invest in his past companies, but I hope we will manage to do so in the future.

He is currently with iMesh, one of the first legal P2P download music sites, and the only site (to date) that has managed to settle with the music industry (See Coverage on Red Herring, MP3.com, and ZDNet). Personally, I am not a subscriber to iMesh (Not possible from Israel), but I am planning to do so when I move to the US.

here it is:

1. Can you give a bit of background on iMesh and about yourself

Launched in 1999, iMesh is the world's longest standing file sharing service. iMesh enjoyed instant popularity, due mainly to innovations such as multi source downloads (the ability to download the same file from multiple users at the same time), offline downloads, support for multi file types, reliability, and many other features that made it better than other file sharing services available at the time.

In 2003, the Major record labels sued iMesh, claiming that we contributed to massive copyright infringement online. In July 2004 we announced a settlement agreement. Under this agreement iMesh was to migrate to a legitimate service. In late 2005, we launched iMesh 6.0 - an authorized file sharing service that blended free and paid content with an active community, allowing users to not only share music, but also explore music by other users, chat, and more. You should try out iMesh. It's free and includes no adware, spyware and all the other things we all hate.

As to me, I am one of the original founders of iMesh. I am also the founder of Expand Networks a venture backed company that provides enterprise network optimization gear. The company employs over 100 and boasts several thousand customers worldwide with millions in sales.

I'm currently President and Chief Marketing Officer at iMesh and live in Manhattan. You can find at the local Starbucks or in one of the many Bars in Tel-Aviv…

2. What is the most challenging moment you remember through your entire career (Expand, iMesh)

I'm afraid this is not going to be a typical business moment. Standing in front of our US employees a few days after 9/11 and talking about recent event was probably more challenging than any other moment in my professional career.

3. What are the 2 or 3 most promising (or just good) startups in Israel today (in the Internet space).

Google Israel

4. What do you think about the hype around Web 2.0, and do you see this reflected in Israel.

Web 2.0 is a really term coined by analysts/media (specifically O'Reilly and MediaLive International). It's a trend that shows that the Web - both from the technology as well as usage side - is evolving. This is normal behavior and happens everywhere there is technology. It's easier to open a can of coke today, compared to the cans used 20 years ago, Continental has adjustable winged headrests. If you wish, you could call these CokeCans 2.0 and Headrests 2.0.

At the end of the day, Web 2.0 reflects the fact that the Internet is evolving. Yes, it's important. And yes, it's happening in Israel too. Enough said.

5. Any specific areas or technologies, on the web, that you feel are very exciting.

I think "webficiation", while about 10 years late, continues to happen and indeed poses a long term threat to classic installable applications. Long term, most applications will be server driven with very little code, if any running on the local PC.

This means that local storage will eventually become irrelevant (though we are likely more than a decade from that happening) and the control of the entity controlling the operating system will be diminished. While Google is making every effort to accelerate this trend, it's not clear whether they can survive long enough against Microsoft. Microsoft has another 5-10 years until things get difficult for them. By then, Google may be gone.

Other interesting technologies have to do with portable delivery of information, foldable screens, direct projection to the eye, natural speech recognition, augmented reality, and other technologies in the space will likely change the way we interact with information and with each other. I guess this is not a web technology, but it's still cool.

Comments

[Guy Grimland]

A voice from the past. Wow. It hase been 3 years since iMesh was born. I almost forgot them. Thx Danny for reminding me.

[shelethia casnave]

87.00 imesh stole from me how do i get it back without sueing