As most Jews and non-Jews know, Passover is coming up real soon. And for Jews that means two dreadful words: Passover cleaning!

But don’t fret, tapTank is here to help!

Since ancient times, people observed Jews doing what it seemed like spring cleaning, which seems like the most sensible thing to do - clean your house thoroughly at least once a year.

Well, apparently, Jews are obligated to do so by the Torah. You may have heard the story: when Jews escaped Egypt lead by legendary Moses (“Go down, Moses, waaaaay down to Egypt la-a-and…”), they didn’t have the time to sit around and wait for the bread to rise and so the uncooked bread resembled matzoh crackers.

In honor of this great escape filled with miracles, such as Red Sea being split into two, we now suffer through 7 days of matzoh crackers and constipation. But we’re not complaining: we’re free of slavery, and now, every year we celebrate our physical and spiritual freedom.

Nevertheless, the period before Passover strongly resembles what Jews have undergone in Egypt before they were free. People, and especially women of the households, and in some cases those are men :), are slaving away trying get their dwelling free of any crumbs and making sure the place is kosher for Passover.

We wanted to make it easier for you to deal with this stressful and emotionally draining period by creating a plan for your Passover cleaning. And if you are not Jewish and not obligated to clean before passover, it wouldn’t hurt you to clean your house anyway!

Enjoy!

Prepare my house for Passover plan on tapTank.com

tapTank.com has added a few new features today in response to our users’ feedback.

1. Behold! A shiny new logged-in home page design that features users’ latest 3 plans, feature plans & a way to browse plans by life category

Check it out:

2. Another awesome new feature is a new sponsor profile layout.

This actually is really exciting news for tapTank’s content partners. Now businesses can feature their plans and package multiple plans into “Lists.”

Here’s an example of a sponsor list from our awesome sponsor in the teen self-improvement area, Superfutures:

3. You asked for it - here it is! Private comments!

We added a private comment mode for users’ actions so that the comments that are posted in a private mode are only visible to the owner and the poster of the comment if the owner chooses to turn on that mode.

Please see the example here:

If you have any questions about the new features, please ask contact us at support@taptank.com.

If you are a business interested in using tapTank’s platform to leverage your social plans and campaigns on social networks, e.g. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, please let us know at contact@taptank.com.

Wish all your plans come achieved!

Team tapTank

What’s the value of a company that has had no revenues, qualifies as an extremely risky investment and does not have a registered patent/IP that could be licensed?

In other words, how to you justify a valuation of every other startup in the high tech field?

It’s true that valuation is very subjective. A company is only worth as much as an investor is willing to pay for a part of its equity.

However, the conversation has to start somewhere.

Valuation starts with a business plan.

1. The business plan starts with assessment of costs for the next 3-5 years.

2. Next we estimate the sales projections based on a variety of parameters, such as the product’s market and the expected market share, the breadth of the company’s technology and its market disruption, market segmentation (amount of market players and their dominance), the unique features vis-à-vis competition and market opportunities (such as M&A via strategic partners).

3. Then we decide on the method of valuation.

Check out a tapTank plan for creating an early stage valuation:

http://www.taptank.com/plan/757

There is a number of methods for early-stage company valuation.

There are 6 key methods used to valuate technologies(1):

We prefer the regular discounted cash flows model to create a valuation based on the uncertainty (stage) coefficient.

Mathematically, it is expressed as (2):

The significance of this method lies in the fact that it allows for a matrix of risk parameters in order to receive the most conservative assessment of the company’s value. The main risk on which we based our discounting, consistent with literature, is the uncertainty (stage) risk, the higher value (in percentage) signifying higher risk.

High risk signifies new and unknown, possibly revolutionary, technology in early stages of development while lower risk signifies a more proven technology, possibly existing in the market in different modification, as well as in the later stage.

The risk-adjusted hurdle rate is approximated as follows (3):

An example for a startup company with positive profit in the second year of the three-year forecast is as follows according to the formula shown above:

This company is moderately high risk - k coefficient of 60%. The present value for the revenues in each year (2012, 2013, 2014) is calculated separately and then summed.

The Net Present Value of this company is about $5 million or its current valuation is about $5 million.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us at contact@taptank.com if you have any questions of would like to learn more about the current methods of early stage company valuation.

Check out a tapTank plan for creating an early stage valuation:

http://www.taptank.com/plan/757

____________________

Source (1), (2) and (3):

Razgiatis, Richard. Early-Stage Technologies: Valuation and Pricing. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1999

New Platform Lets You Achieve Socially With Friends

NEW YORK, NY, February 29, 2012 - tapTank (http://taptank.com) will unveil the Beta version of its new personal development tool for planning and achieving goals with friends in March 2012. Early adopters, who signed up in advance to try tapTank, as well as journalists, bloggers and other media outlets, can take a look inside before the Alpha Invite code is lifted.

Sign up at http://taptank.com to become an early adopter.

Bloggers, journalists and other media outlets should email press@taptank.com to receive an Alpha Invite code.

Some of the things you will do on tapTank:

• Plan your goals (e.g. learn salsa, get a promotion, get into Harvard, travel to India)
• Share goals with friends on social networks & invite them to help you accomplish them
• Track your achievements by life category, e.g. Career, Health, Hobbies, Learning & Leisure
• Get some achievement tips and learn productivity techniques
• Get suggestions of people to tap and things to do

Analyze Your Life Balance:

Users can sign up using their existing social profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Furthermore, users can monitor their success rate on plans in different categories and track their “life-balance” graph making sure that not one single domain overpowers the rest, which is frequently the case with goal-minded individuals.

#tapYourNetworks across all of your social networks to achieve your goals:

Create Your Own Plans or Do an Existing Plan

Users get to use our exclusive plan templates, create their own and share them with friends to achieve goals using their social networks.

tapTank has nearly 5K users who joined as early adopters. These early adopters will be notified of being able to use tapTank before anyone else on Monday, March 5 2012. In addition, all the early adopters, journalists, bloggers and the media are invited to the #TapYourNetworks pre-SXSW party hosted by tapTank on March 5 at the Empire State Building’s elite Empire Room lounge in NYC. For more details and to RSVP, please visit http://sxsw.taptank.com.

And the story continues…

Last year team tapTank went to TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco and met a lot of awesome entrepreneurs and startups. This year, tapTank will continue the tradition at SXSW. 

tapTank has created a special plan for launching a startup at SXSW, complete with videos, blogs and expert advice, which you can use right now by going to http://www.taptank.com/plan/592.

Product Snapshots:

Please email press@taptank.com for more info, materials or assets.

Download tapTank’s logo and screenshots here: http://yousend.it/Apr4f7.

Useful links:

tapTank blog: http://blog.taptank.com

Twitter: @tapTank

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tapTank

YouTube: http//www.youtube.com/taptankdotcom

Skype: ladymyyuli (Yael)

Here’s a #TapTip vlog about the importance of setting goals in order to compare your decision outcomes with what you need to achieve according to your plan.

Posted by: Yael Tamar Greenberg

The article about Cassanova McKinsey can be found here.
   
tapTank is a platform to manage goals, achieve & stay motivated with a little help from your friends. Friends that achieve together grow together.

Sign up to be an early adopter here:
www.taptank.com/alphainvite

More of us on the web:
http://www.facebook.com/tapTank
Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/TapTank
On linkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/2262377

Key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

By Yael Tamar

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell builds an impressive case of why very talented people succeeded. He uses examples of famous composers, musicians and scientists to show that it was not by talent alone that they got to being incredibly good at something. 

He calculated that one needs to work on something for about 20 hours of work a week for 10 years in order to convert your “talent” to greatness. In other words, talent is simply “practice makes it perfect.”

Some examples that Gladwell gives are the Beatles, who before becoming the most popular band in the world logged more than 10,000 hours of playing on stage in a German bar (over four years, sometimes 10 hours a day), an experience to which other bands could not come near.

Another example is Bill Gates, who by sheer luck had logged in more than 10,000 hours of programming by the time he dropped out of Harvard.

Of course these historical examples have to do a great deal with opportunities. The Beatles got invited to perform at the German club and Bill Gates lucked out to be one of the 50 guys in the world (allegedly) who had an unlimited access to a computer at the time he grew up in.

However, opportunities present themselves all the time. We just have to have an eye for them and work hard logging in hours at something we want to be great at.

And this is good news for most of us!

Start planning your achievement today, sign up for http://taptank.com

Author: Farhana Rahman

  TapTime with: Daniel Feldman, Social Media Manager of @Waze

You can tap Daniel for: Customer engagement advice, help building a fantasy football team. I’m going to tap him for Hebrew lessons.

Daniel will tap you for: Networking purposes

Where do I start talking about Daniel? He’s one of those personalities that makes look forward to getting on Twitter. When asked of his interests, Daniel responded, “I play squash, fantasy football, cook, go salsa dancing and study for an MA degree in conflict research resolution and management. I also work at Waze which is an amazing, top of the line startup. Shameless plug: For those who aren’t familiar with Waze, its a free GPS application that routes you around traffic http://www.waze.com”

Daniel landed his first position in Social Media in 2008, ‘before anyone even knew what social media was,’ while living in Israel and seeking a position as an English teacher. He originally used social media to keep in touch with his friends. As time went on, he used it to “keep up with my interests, get useful ideas that I can use at my company, as well as make connections that could serve me well in the future.”

He also likes connecting with people of positions similar to his, such as: Liz Heron (Social Media editor at New York times), Meghan Peters (community manager at Mashable) and Martin Beck (Social Media/Reader engagement at LA times). In approaching people of such influence, Daniel simply tweets them with direct questions, and comments.

Most of Daniels connections are in the U.S, Canada, Israel, Taiwan, the U.K, Hungary, and Australia. But from what I have seen, he really has ‘em all over. Feel free to reach out to him through Waze, or his personal Twitter handle.

Author: Farhana Rahman

The biggest rule-of-thumb when it comes to handing out business cards is to not hand them out like playing cards. Presentation is key. That doesn’t mean presenting your card on a mini silver platter though! If handling a small number of cards, you don’t even need a business card holder, so long as your cards are easily accessible, and neat. Also-do make an impression in your delivery. Show your personality, and add a humanistic element to your card.

I like to perk myself up before handing one of my cards over to a person-of-interest, and I like to come off as a personable professional, rather than a pitchy annoyance. Below is one approach I take. Works very well for me:

Clearly you could see that I am being personable and professional- not pitchy or ridiculously fake. People love praise, so praise them. Let it all come naturally, because the whole point of exchanging business cards is in the prospect to have a professional future with the contact.

One thing I learned the hard way: Business cards- never leave home without ‘em!

Author: Farhana Rahman

TapTime with: About.com Video Producer: Pelpina Trip

You can tap Pelpina for: Production and hosting of videos, host events, conduct presentations, help with brand awareness, review products/websites on video, etc.

Pelpina will tap you for: “I would love to help with a company or product’s brand awareness if someone wants to talk about their social media/marketing/PR expertise on video with me (Skype works), and I would love to teach you Dutch over Skype if you can create a cool Twitter background for me!”