Savvy Avi

Name: Stonebreaker Description: The Stonebreaker is a massive broadsword forged for the Onarks , its chipped blade a testament to countless battles, capable of smashing through stone and armor with raw, unrelenting power. Name: Bloodreap Description: The Bloodreap is a hauntingly curved scythe favored by the Saängwyr , its blade eternally stained with blood, perfect for swift, lethal strikes that drain both life and vitality from its foes. Name: Gilded Terra Description: Forged by the royal ironsmith from rare earth materials and gold, the Gilded Terra channels the elemental mastery of the Horas , resonating with the raw power of earth and fire in every strike. Name: Verdant Sovereign Description: A masterfully crafted spear with an emerald blade, the Verdant Sovereign channels the ancient Nature Magic of the Elari , striking with both regal precision and elemental fury. Name: Stellar Edge Description: Crafted using advanced alien technology by the Tingava , the Stellar Edge ...

Apester helps editors in media outlets tell compelling stories using visual interactive units. Increasingly, media is moving from broadcasting information in text or video format to interacting with users. When a reader presses a link to an article on Facebook, they'll usually skim the article, grab the information piece they were looking for and quickly return to Facebook. However, if a reader engages with the article she is more likely to stay longer on the page, continue exploring the website and to remember what she read. Soon publishers won't just post articles on their websites. In the future, articles will be independent media snippets that are published in multiple media outlets (social platforms, aggregators, blogs). Those media units will be small frames that combines multiple reach media to tell engaging stories: visuals, video, text and a two way communication. Content editors will create and publish those detachable media snippets using services like Apester. ...

Instructions for using a search engine: Type in a keyword. The search engine comes back with results. Then scan through them one by one until you find what you’re looking for.  That’s how search engines are used, right? And it works fine. In most cases. Kinda.  Really, a search engine user has only two options. Reject a result “it’s not what I’m looking for” and scan on. Or accept a result “that’s it” and press on it.  How about results that are close to what you’re looking for but not quite it. What if you could cue the search engine “this result is relevant, show me more like it”? How much better will search become?  All major search and recommendation engines are one dimensional with a single direction. Scan from top to bottom or on a carousel from left to right. Kluster presents search on two dimensions and the users can move in multiple direction. It can be used for any type of visual search: pictures, gifs, book covers, paintings, merchandi...

Search engines and recommendation engines display results ranked by relevance, in a list or a thumbnail layout. That’s useful in many cases but sometimes it’s more useful to explore the relation between results. Consider the human mind. When we try to remember something we hop between bits of memories, one memory leads to another, and using associative thinking we eventually find what we are looking for.  Here’s a joke about associative thinking. Two couples meet for dinner and while the women leave for the living room the men stay at dinning table and talk. “Hey” says one “I ate at a great restaurant the other day. What was the name? Something to do with flowers. Daisy, Blossom. No I got it.” Then he shouts to the living room: “Rose, what was the name of that restaurant?” For that propose Roi , Natali and I built Kluster a search tool for associative exploration. The name comes from a combination of cluster and K-means, a popular clustering algorithm that we used in an ...

The online industry is struggling to strike a balance between ad revenue and user experience. In reaction to "heavy" and aggressive ads many users began using ad blocking. Despite conflicting interests, eventually publishers, readers and ad-tech share a common goal of accessible and entertaining content online. With that common interest in-mind I published an editorial piece in MediaPost on what publisher and ad-tech companies should do to keep online video ads without deteriorating user experience:  With the threat of ad blocking looming ominously over both publishers and ad-tech companies, it would be an easy way out to pin the blame on Flash or rich media — the very tools whose ad revenues have long allowed publishers to thrive. Although this easy scapegoat exists, the ad-tech industry seems to understand that the real key to maintain the advertising monetization model is improving the user experience -- doing something along the lines of the new L.E.A.N. approach by th...

Nowadays most media outlets provide their content free of charge, that's what users expect; And with the rise of content aggregators and social media many publishers are struggling. As a result publishers try new ad forms such as content marketing, native ads and video. In response users, annoyed with the increasing distraction, adopt ad blockers. As always, a balance between conflicting interests will be reached. A balance that will keep publishers profitable, or at least afloat, while restraining the negative impact to the reading experience. Video ads may be the best option for consumers and publishers. Video ads, in contrast to native and content marketing,  maintains the clear boundary between content and advertisement. I recently wrote a post for publishers on how to add video ads to their sites. The article was published in Video Ad News magazine. Take a look here . Here's a screen-shot of the article (notice the ads in the screenshot, I stand by publishers and I...