TechCrunch vs. India Mess - Entrepreneur Around the World

Frognector has been moving around the world and has already visited 14 countries during the last year. Being on the road allows us to meet up with collectors in different locations and some dedicated members of Colnect. It also creates an interesting story we use to make Colnect more known. We've had amazing experiences in lovely and exciting places and have met wonderful people on the road.

Frognector enjoying a red/yellow corn in Laos

Throughout this journey a column has been made public on NewsGeek (in Hebrew), sharing some experiences and insights learnt throughout the journey. Recently, we wanted to appeal to a larger audience of English readers and have tried to pitch the story to various publications. A few publications have shown interest in the story and we might soon be published in more places.

One publication, however, has made some very interesting mistake that has created vast amounts of anger amongst its reader. A sample that was sent to TechCrunch to evaluate the level of writing and judge whether our column would interest TechCrunch technologically-oriented readers, has been published by mistake. It was first attributed to someone else and has been put with wrong pictures. But the best part here was that the title was changed and, lacking any introduction to our journey, created the false impression that we're bashing India's hi-tech scene. Quite saddening that this happened as many readers became very upset about it. You're welcome to read the TechCrunch post and the comments there.

As we're now in China and couldn't see the comments (Facebook is blocked in China), we didn't even know they existed. When we got access to them, we could finally respond and here's the full response below.

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First and foremost, please accept my deepest apologies for this post that has been MISTAKENLY made public on TechCrunch and completely taken out of context. This post was a part of a series of posts describing my PERSONAL experiences as a startupist traveling the world. It was sent to TechCrunch only as a SAMPLE to evaluate the level of writing and see if this could interest TechCrunch readers. I was shocked to find out it was published without any prior request. Its title was changed by TechCrunch and made many of you think it's an opinion about India's Hi-Tech industry. It's not. Many have thought it's bashing India. It's not. I've spent about a year of my life in India (passing through most of its states) and have much appreciation for this diversified nation.

NOW THE REAL CONTEXT: I'm the founder of Colnect ( http://colnect.com/ ), a community website for collectors worldwide available in 60 languages (including a few Indian languages). Coln

ect is offering collectors unique services, such as automatically matching exchanges between collectors based on their personal collection, and has been built by over 500 volunteers from around the globe.

Over a year ago, I've left my home and decided to keep developing Colnect while on the road. There were various reasons for that decision: meeting Colnect members and other collectors, promoting Colnect locally and through the "Entrepreneur around the world series" and enjoying an ever changing work environment. The journey has so far passed in UK, Iceland, Denmark, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Israel, Jordan, India, Thailand, Laos and China.

The 22 posts made so far described personal experiences of a traveling startupist and shared my personal tips on how to facilitate traveling and working. One of the posts, published in Hebrew, was titled "7 Reasons to Leave Everything and Start your Startup in India" ( http://www.newsgeek.co.il/startup-in-india/ ).

In an effort to reach a wider audience, I've decided that the series should be made available in English and so we've addressed a few publications we thought would be relevant. One of them was TehcCrunch. They asked for samples and got them. We didn't hear from them. Then I get a Google Alert and saw this post online. Although shocked, I thought that any publicity is better than no publicity, even though the post was first attributed to another person, contained wrong pictures (first isn't mine and second is me in Thailand) and no links to Colnect. Beeing behind China's firewall, FaceBook was inaccessible and I wasn't aware of the comments until my brother let me know about them. So here I am now, explaining how all this happened.

If you've actually read this far and want to keep bashing the post, myself and TechCrunch, feel free to have another go at it.

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