Minime in 3D

3dteam

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So, there is this magical co-working office space called Hacker Dojo. It’s the best kept ‘secret’ in the Silicon Valley. It’s in Mountain View (close to Castro St.), it has all the amanitas a startup needs and the rent is super affordable (very unusual for the Mountain View/Palo Alto area).

In this magical place there is a magical room called the pink room (or the Maker Space ;). Where magical things happen! (3D printing, laser cutting, robot making).

I’ve been fascinated with 3D printing for a while now, and when the opportunity came to participate in a 3D project, I didn’t think twice.

The project was to learn about the 3D printing process and test a 3D printing machine from Formlabs.

First, we were given instructions on how to use it. Then came the scanning and printing. We were a group of 3 people from team VentureOut; Helena, Adonis, Sean.

Here is the story told by pictures:

Welcome to the pink room

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Let’s show you around

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Now it’s time to get scanned

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You can even increase or decrease the size of a character 🙂

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Then you put the liquid material (resin) in the printer

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3D printer in action! (kinda reminds a scene from the Terminator :))

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Anddddd, it’s alive!

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3d need to cut

Now we gotta clean it up and cut the courts (the spikes support)

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Next is to solidify the characters under a UV light

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And that’s it! We have our own 3D minimes! 🙂

Eating Healthy While Running a Startup

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During your day as a startup founder, you don’t really want to spend time cooking. You just want to grab something quick to to fill up your belly so you can get back to work.

While doing so might save time, you forget that you have to keep yourself healthy to perform well. Staying healthy will therefore have a positive impact on your startup.

Here are some tips I found helpful to maintain healthy eating habits while not spending too much time on preparing meals…

– Drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day. It will not only keep you fresh and alert, but it will also fill you up and suppress hunger. Water-rich foods like soup, salad, fruit, and vegetables will also fill your belly without contributing a lot of calories.

– Thoroughly chewing your food increases what researchers call “oro-sensory factors,” which send satiation signals to your brain, helping you feel full on less food, according to a 2009 study by Dutch researchers. Study participants who chewed each bite for an extra 3 seconds ended up consuming less.

– Bread: Always pick whole-wheat over white for the extra fiber. Look for at least 3 grams in each slice.

– Greek Yogurt is great for breakfast or as a snack, you can add granola to it which will make it extra yummy and healthy.

– There are a lot of vitamins and nutrients that can be cooked out of foods. To avoid that, just save time and eat it raw!  Raw foods can be anything from fruits to veggies to even fish ( sushi 🙂 ).

Make sure to schedule a day each week to go to the grocery store (my favorites are Trader Joe’s and Sprouts) to stack up on all the ingredients you’ll need to quickly put together meals. You can make quick and simple things like sandwiches, veggies & meat snack plates, salads, etc. Some of the items I buy are tomatoes, mixed greens, mini carrots, hummus, celery, apples, oranges, turkey meat, grilled chicken (great for salads), almonds, avocados, whole-wheat bread, greek yogurt, granola, healthy energy bars (like Kind).

Also, taking vitamins is a great way to keep your immune system strong, thus not wasting time on getting sick 🙂 I like taking Vitamin C and Omega 3 fish oil. When I do feel like I am getting sick, my secret ‘vitamin’ is garlic 🙂 I chop half a clove to small pieces and swallow it just as it was a pill. Works like magic.

Get outside every day for a few minutes to breath fresh air and soak in on some sun to optimize your vitamin D levels.

Have fun and keep it up.

Hacking Cancer With Wheatgrass Juice

This is a true story about how drinking wheatgrass juice helped my grandma flight and concours breast cancer. Originally posted on my wheatgrass magic website.

Year 2008.

Rosa was 72 when she started to feel some sort of lump inside her body under her left breast. She noticed that it made her breathing difficult.

Several months before that, her granddaughter started growing and drinking wheatgrass juice.

One day Rosa came to visit her granddaughter and was curious about this green grass her granddaughter seemed to juice and drink. “Helena, what is this thing you’re drinking she asked (in Russian)”, Helena explained that it’s called wheatgrass juice and it has enourmase health benefits. Rosa wanted to try it out, so after a thorough explanation and demonstration, Rosa gathered all the ingredients and started growing and drinking wheatgrass juice as well.

After a month and a half of drinking the juice, Rosa suddenly discovered a tumor on the surface of the same left breast. She couldn’t feel the lump inside anymore, so she concluded that this tumor must be the original lump coming out to the surface.

When she went to the doctor, he checked the tumor, and sent her to do a mammogram.

After the results came in, the doctor confirmed it was a breast cancer tumor and she needs a surgery to remove it. He was surprised that she found it herself because it was an aggressive tumor, usually can only be found inside the body and not on the surface. He didn’t see any roots and the surgery would be enough to get rid of it.

Rosa had the surgery and the tumor was successfully removed. The doctor was also surprised to find no spread or branches of the bad cancer cells, which are common with these types of aggressive tumors.

For precautionary measures Rosa was still asked to go through chemotherapy treatments, and even during that time Rosa recalls that the nurses were surprised to see such good blood results.

Rosa finished the treatments successfully and went back to her normal life. She embraces drinking wheatgrass juice as part of her every day routine.

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Ben Gurion Airport, Israel, 2013

The happy lady on the right is my grandma 😉

* If you find yourself wonder and having questions about how wheatgrass juice works, read this.

What I learned about SEO

I took a great SEO class at Stanford Continuing Studies. Here are some of the things I learned that put things in prospective.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about planning, you start by defining how you want people to find you on the web. Brainstorming and defining the keywords you want to be found by is going to be the foundation for all the engine optimization work you’ll do.

Set up Goals – define what you sell, who your customers are, and how best to reach them.

Keywords – with goals in mind, identify the best keywords for your company and measure your rank on Google searches. Remember that you want your website to show up at least on page one (first ten results) and ideally in the first three results of a Google search.

Optimizing:

1. First step is looking at your HTML and strategically placing your keywords in the right page tags so the search engine will recognize it.  Main tags are: <TITLE>, <H1>, <A HREF>, <META DESCRIPTION>, <BODY> or keyword density, <IMG ALT>, <STRONG>, <B>.

Page tags communicate to Google what your page is “about” on a priority basis. Note: If you are using WordPress or another web editor, the editor will produce the HTML for you, but you still want to “View, Source” to check that the HTML produced actually outputs keywords inside critical tags like the <TITLE>, <H1>, <META DESCRIPTION>, etc.

2. On page linking: When you write sentences, make sure keywords you care about in those sentences link back to your page. Where possible, add keyword heavy links on your site navigation to your major landing pages. Keyword heavy <A HREF> tags tell Google which pages are most important on your site, and which keywords matter to you.

3. Off page linking: After you set everything up with your own page, it’s time to ask other websites to link to you to improve the importance of your website, a search engine needs to recognize your website among million others, especially when it’s a common keyword.

Keep in mind about links:

Syntax – the best links have good syntax with your “keyword / keyphrase” nested inside the <A HREF> tag as in <A HREF=“http://www.yoursite.com/”>your target keyword</A>

Authority – the best links come from high PageRank websites inside your community.

Quantity – the best links occur in substantial quantities. More is better.

4. Blog: The search engine likes fresh updated content, by creating new content you expand the number of times you will be found in search queries. Blogging with keywords in mind is a powerful tool to get you to the top of Google. Moreover, your blog can connect to your social media strategy as a “long read” to complement the “short reads” on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+.

Steps to good SEO blogging:

  1. Define your target keyword / keyphrase. Blogging is especially good at long tail keywords and/or trends in your industry. Be a trend watcher.
  2. Write a blog post that is keyword heavy, i.e., contains frequent repetition of the core keywords and help keywords.
  3. Make sure that the blog post itself follows SEO-friendly page tags, i.e., TITLE tag with keywords inside it, good META DESCRIPTION tag, H1/H2 tag, Image ALT, <STRONG>, etc.
  4. Upload the blog post to your website.
  5. Rotate three blog posts on your home page as “freshness signals” to Google, and also to pull Google into your blog.

5. Social media is a plus especially the high traffic websites like Twitter, FB. And in Google’s case, G+ is the social child Google wants to promote ;). You can write your own content linking to your site, or you can do this trategy I learned:

Google and Bing now pay increasing attention to “social mentions,” i.e. the mentions of your website URL in the social chatter. Go to Bing Social (http://www.bing.com/social), input your keywords and identify the top Twitterers and Facebook posters that share content in your keyword communities. Reach out to them to see if they are interested in your blog posts, news releases, new products or services. Make getting social mentions a part of your SEO strategy.

Once you implement your SEO strategies you are pretty much set. Of course fresh blog or social media content is on an on going basis. But as long as you still care about the same keywords and you have an increasing amount of websites link to yours, your SEO will keep improving.