Tag Archives: israel

On July 13th the Israeli high-tech community gathered at TWS2009 to to discuss and preview  new trends and technologies from Israel’s hottest Web and Mobile.

As one of the judges, I was chosen to help TWS select the top 10 companies to present at this year’s showcase. From the hundreds of top-notch applicants, it wasn’t an easy process to funnel applicants down to 10. Other judges included, Ron Conway, Rafe Needleman, Andrew Baron, Stowe Boyd, Ayelet Noff, Deborah Schultz, Jeff Pulver, Kfir Pravda, Gil Ben-Artzy, Dave Sifry, among others.

Congratulations to this year’s TWS2009 Top 10:

Shidonni is a web based virtual world for young kids, based on the simple joy of drawing. In Shidonni, kids draw their virtual pets and play with them as they magically ‘come alive’. After creating their pets, children enjoy over 30 different activities and games featuring their own creations and can even share their creation with their friends.

Confidela provides businesses and individuals with hassle-free document control, tracking and protection services to facilitate the sharing of sensitive documents with customers, partners or suppliers. Confidela’s flagship SaaS product, WatchDox, is the easiest way for organizations to send documents securely, and control and track who views, edits, prints or forwards them.

Cmycasa is a first of its kind “Handshake service” between home owners and furniture retailers. With Cmycasa, users of real estate web sites and “do-it-yourself portals” will be able to visualize in stunning photo-realistic 3D how their new home will look once furnished to their taste.

Cellerium is the maker of MobileCanvas, a mobile application platform that delivers rich, mobile tailored web experiences across leading mobile platforms. Cellerium AppOnce approach resolves device and operating system fragmentation and combines a rich UI experience that rivals client centered applications with the flexibility of web deployment.

ContextIn is a semantic media-buying platform for display-advertising. Using semantic algorithms for automatic extraction of the discussed topics in web pages, ContextIn addresses the display advertising market problems of absence of visibility and control over the media-buying and poor performance, especially over user-generated-content sites. ContextIn offers a new and innovative solution, which proved to show significant increase in the online campaigns returns, using automatic ads targeting, real-time bidding, unique BI data and dynamic ad-creative creation according to the web-site content.

Tweegee is a pioneering destination site designed exclusively for kids. The site empowers children and pre-teens, ages 7 to 12, to express themselves creatively and safely in an innovative and customized online environment. Tweegee integrates social networking, digital content, and interactive tools to offer a complete web platform for kids. Tweegee’s platform has been released with great success in Russia and soon in Turkey and many other countries.

KIDO’Z is a web operating environment intended for children between the ages of 3-8yrs. KIDO’Z creates a personal protected Internet space with a collection of special tools that enable the children, for the first time, to carry out everything that adults do on the Internet; but simply and intuitively, and without needing to know how to read or write

CamSpace is a ground breaking computer vision platform that connects the virtual and the real world through motion games, experiences, activities and navigation of application and websites through your browser and using any standard webcam. The platform can detect human gestures and turns everyday products (like cans, bottles, boxes, etc) or objects into exciting computer controllers that can operate new or existing games and applications. The company is active in the advertising space (creating games and experiences based on products), in the educational space and in the social/fun gaming space. (Disclosure: I advised the company in the past).

Virtual Web provides innovative social network marketing solutions. Its SociaLAVA™ platform enables online publishers of any scale to instantly deploy a fully-functional social network as a transparent layer over their existing websites, powered by a unique social network interaction analysis engine™. Publishers can offer users personalized content to keep them on the site for longer visits, enhance conversion rates, monetize their sites through segmented ads, increase site ‘stickiness’ and link a consistently growing number of online communities to their domains using a unique community-clustering mechanism.

Reimage is a fast growing company that offers a web-based service that automates all PC repairs (due to software problems), and makes PC’s run better than new using unique boosting technologies. To date, Reimage has repaired tens of thousands of Windows based computers.

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by Michelle Lentz

On this, the last day of Passover, it seemed oddly fitting that I received a press release on the Israel Web Tour 2009.  The third annual event will take place April 20-23 and is a showcase of Israel’s most exciting start-ups.

This year’s selected start-ups comprise a wide range of technologies, including content creation, content syndication, social and rich media. Throughout the tour, the participating companies will have strategic meetings with everyone from industry insiders to investors and consumers. On April 22, each start-up will present its product to the industry and press at a semi-public showcase hosted at the Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati offices in Palo Alto.

The following start-ups will be participating:

• Conduit: Conduit provides website syndication solutions for web publishers by creating a direct, always-on connection between publishers and subscribers. More than 180,000 publishers have joined the Conduit network worldwide, including Fox News, Lufthansa, Major League Baseball, Greenpeace, TechCrunch, Softonic and organizations in 180 countries around the globe.
• ContextIn: ContextIn’s proven proprietary multi-lingual semantic algorithms significantly increase relevancy and targeting to deliver the most valuable, targeted advertising inventory and traffic quality. Their algorithms have been proven to maximize both relevancy and monetization for Ad Networks, Advertisers and Publishers alike for increased ROI.
• EyeView Digital: EyeView Digital provides a complete rich-media solution for web sites. EyeView developed an advanced rich-media conversion platform that includes a number of products dedicated to conversion, creative services, and consulting services.
• Footbo: Footbo is the place for soccer lovers world-wide. Headquartered in London, UK, Footbo is the leading international social media platform with an exclusive focus on soccer. It combines the concept of social networking with the world of soccer to provide fans with a one-stop platform for all their soccer needs.
• SemantiNet: Semantinet is pioneering the development of “Top Down” Semantic Web technologies. SemantiNet’s Headup Semantic Web plug-in, currently available as an add-on for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, presents textual and rich media content related to the objects and terms it identifies on the web pages. Headup not only identifies these objects but has a basic understanding of the relationships between them.
• SundaySky: SundaySky enables publishers to quickly, easily and cost-effectively infuse their website with video clips. SundaySky’s DynamicVideo™ Platform allows mass generation of always up-to-date video content, while leveraging existing content repositories. Videos are personalized for each user, interactive, and are intricately linked the site the user is viewing, even if that site is totally dynamic.
• Superfish: Superfish has developed a unique, 3D object-recognition engine to bring high-accuracy visual matching, browsing, and comparison into the world of search engines. The company puts together machine vision, machine learning and advanced search algorithms to allow for users to intuitively find similar objects visually.
• SweetIM: SweetIM is focused on delivering fun content and self-expression tools. SweetIM products are intended to allow users to upgrade their social engagement, by offering fun content and an add-on for IM, webmail, and social networks that is easy to use.
• Triond: Triond publishes, distributes and monetizes users’ content over a network of niche websites. This way users get to focus on the content creating process, while leveraging the service in order to get more readership, recognition and revenue than they would if they were to publish individually.
• WorkLight: WorkLight enables businesses to reach customers, employees and partners securely in they places they frequent. The flagship product, WorkLight Application Platform, securely syndicates enterprise applications in a multitude of consumer online channels, such as widgets, social networks, personalized homepages, iPhone applications, blogs and RSS feeds.

I’ve embedded a highlight reel from last year’s tour below:

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Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology, Friendfeed: michellel
Sites: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net

by Brian Solis

Orli Yakuel, Om Malik, and Kfir Pravda at TWS2008

Recently I was invited to be among some of the most influential people in tech on a panel of judges for TWS08, Israel’s official dot com.petition. I was and still am humbled to be included.

I’m revisiting the competition, because as much as we hear about emerging Web 2.0 communities outside of Silicon Valley and San Francisco, we mostly focus on Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Portland, Austin, and very little do we spotlight the incredible innovation taking place around the world.

In July, the Israeli high-tech community convened to highlight the new trends and promises of Israel’s Web 2.0 and Mobile industries. Over 100 companies applied, but only 10 startups were selected to present a seven minute presentation to influencers, entrepreneurs, and investors.

Here are your 10 winners at this year’s TWS2008 conference:

Wixy is an authoring platform that allows users to create striking and easy-to-build web content in flash (web sites, widgets, blogs etc), and publish it anywhere they want online. Users can create content without coding in flash/html or being constrained by templates. At the heart of the product is the drag & drop editor that allows users to pull in any content from the web or from their own media files (video, audio, animation, text etc) and create web content.

WorkLight develops and markets a line of server products that allow organizations to do more business securely using popular consumer Web 2.0 tools and technologies, like iGoogle, Windows Live, Netvibes, Facebook, and others. Through WorkLight, employees, channels, partners, and consumers connect to protected enterprise data (and to each other) using Web 2.0 services.

HiveSight helps marketers discover new facts about consumers. The technology sifts through and analyzes millions of social media profiles and blogs to construct consumer profiles. HiveSight’s customers use the online application to write simple queries that define consumer panels, and get instant reports on demographics, consumer interests, trends and more. It’s the fastest, easiest and most affordable way to explore consumer markets and discover new insights.

Qoofy is the video commerce platform that bridges the world of Online Shopping, Internet Video, and Direct Response TV to create a distributed, targeted, and personalized video commerce network. Think QVC for the internet. The most powerful way to sell a product online is with video and as more merchants are looking for video solutions, the Qoof Platform is their answer.

WikiAnswers gives you useful answers about anything by harnessing people’s collective knowledge, but with a wiki-twist. The mission is to grow a collaborative answers resource; anyone can ask, answer or edit questions, building a global Q&A database covering all topics.

Dapper’s vision is to allow people to consume the web where, when and in whatever format they choose. Dapper users point and click on the content they want from a website, and Dapper turns this content into a live semantic feed that can be used in a variety of formats (RSS, widget, XML). Dapper is leveraging its core technology to create live content-based ads (MashupAds) that combine publisher and advertiser content within an interactive ad — creating the world’s first content ad network.

Mo’Minis is a revolutionary platform for the development and publishing of mobile games. The platform allows advanced as well as non-skilled developers to rapidly create original games from scratch and have them seamlessly supported on a wide range of handsets. Furthermore, developers can collaborate and share game assets on Mo’Minis developers’ community and enjoy distribution and monetization services through various on\off-deck channels.

Kaltura provides the first open-source video management platform, empowering any site with online video. With Kaltura, web publishers can seamlessly and cost-effectively integrate interactive and collaborative rich-media functionalities, including uploading, importing, editing, remixing, and sharing. Kaltura also offers its global network of publishers content hosting, transcoding, advertising, merchandising, and syndication.

MocoSpacey is a mobile social network that allows anybody with a web-enabled phone to have a full social networking experience on their most trusted device, the mobile phone, whenever and wherever they want. Members Users enjoy expressing themselves and staying connected to friends by setting up a profile page, sharing photos and video, chatting, inboxing, instant messaging, blogging, debating in forums, sending mobile cards and playing games.

Nuconomy’s Studio is the world’s first “performance insight platform,” built from the ground up to provide completely new ways to measure today’s interactive Web. Go beyond the old page view model and start to measure the new metrics of the web – your users and site engagement and contribution metrics.

Yaron Orenstein’s closing remarks. Credit: CleanZap

All Star judges included:

Guy Kawasaki,Om Malik, Meir Brand, Baruch Gindin, Joey Simhon, Ofer Adler, Itzik Ben Bassat, Deb Schultz, Pete Cashmore, Jeff Clavier, Yair Goldfinger, Barak Shein, Yaron Galai, Emily Chang, Ofer Sela, Kfir Pravda, Ziv Koren, Martin Duval,Chris Brogan, Allen Stern, Izhar Shay, and Michael Eisenberg

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