Israel Innovation 2.0

Israeli companies Kaltura and Clarizen have been included in IDC’s top 10 innovative applications companies under $100M to watch.

According to IDC chosen companies were identified based on whether they exemplified one or more of three key trends in applications today, which the company cited in January 2009 to be:

• Acceleration of software as a service (SaaS), business process outsourcing (BPO), and open source over traditional on-premise software
• New business models for software use by service providers (software-within-a-service)
• Web 2.0-like functionality moves into the enterprise (e2.0).

Clarizen is a project management software company that allows contributors to edit at the same time and for the changes to be visible immediately to anyone involved on the project. Last week it reported that it gained over 100 new customers in Q3. Clarizen is headquartered in Israel with its US headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

Kaltura, according to its site, is “the first open source video platform for online video management, creation, interaction & collaboration.”  Earlier today it was listed as one of 49 hot new open source applications on Earthweb.com as a video tool.  The company has an R&D center in Israel.

During the week of October 18, 2009, 70 countries gathered to standardize electric car chargers. The decline in venture capital investments in Israel during the third quarter was analyzed as was the mark Israel is leaving on Information Technology software, specifically as relates to security. For these stories and more, check out the headlines from the week of October 18, 2009 below.

Cleantech
70 countries gather in TA to standardize electric car chargers

Innowattech Proves It Can Collect Energy From Highways and Byways

Investment
Can VC succeed in cleantech?

IVC Report: VC Investments in Israeli Companies Decline 50% in Q3

Information Technology
Israel carves a niche in IT security

Tools for Semantic Targeting (Peer39)

WordPress.com automates PicApp images for bloggers

Miscellaneous
Facing Tomorrow tech exhibition focuses on Israeli brain power

Israelis working to save endangered species through cloning

When Big Blue was a start-up

Congratulations to Ada Yonath who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry today for her research on ribosomes, which has allowed her to identify how bacteria become resistant to antibiotics.

She is one of only four women to ever win the Nobel Prize in chemistry and the first to since 1964. She is one of nine Israelis to have won a Nobel Prize and the first Israeli woman to do so.

The win is a bit unexpected (by me) as in recent days most of the media’s attention was on Yakir Aharonov, the Israeli physicist who was seen as the likely choice for the Nobel Prize in physics.