Israel Innovation 2.0

IDF treats Haitian girl

The Israel Defense Forces’s ongoing efforts to embrace the Internet continues. A few days before IDF representatives explained to 140Conf participants how the army used social media to update the public about its efforts in Haiti and to help save lives there, the army announced that it created and is using a website modeled after eBay for the purpose of selling and buying surplus equipment.

The new site, called The Arena, is the army’s new effort to keep better track of inventory while potentially saving itself millions of shekels on “duplicate and wasteful equipment”. It is also partially a response to the poor capabilities it had in moving around equipment and materials that soldiers needed during the Lebanon War in 2006.

According to Bloomberg, Brigadier-General Maran Prozenfer, financial adviser to the chief of staff, explained,

“Every unit in the Israel Defense Forces will be able to put up for sale any equipment that it doesn’t need, so that other units can see and bid on it.”

Prozenfer expects the new site to significantly reduce equipment costs, which according to him currently accounts for nearly 40 percent of the army’s NIS 50 billion shekel ($12.9 billion) annual budget.

::Haaretz

Image via IDF Spokesperson Blog.

Yesterday Jeff Pulver’s second Tel Aviv 140conf took place. Conference speakers (“characters”) discussed how they’re using social media in real-time for different things from fashion and food to promoting Israel abroad. Speakers included Kfir Pravda, Yosi Taguri, Yoni Bloch and Answers.com CEO Bob Rosenschein.

Special thanks to Niv Calderon and Roniet Berci who took these photos and let me use some for this video. Check out more of their photos from the conference on Facebook.

The investment gap in Israel that has been left open by VCs in recent years is about to be partially filled with the recent launch of JANVEST.

JANVEST is an investment fund that pools together the money of angel investors in the United States and invests in Israeli startups with it. Founded by Danny Yatom, former Director of the Mossad, the fund seeks to fill the investment gap left by VC funds who have for the most part turned away from seed and early stage startups.

Unlike other companies currently investing in Israeli startups, JANVEST’s business model will enable a broader range of US investors to participate and help build deeper and stronger ties between US investors and the Israeli economy.

Starting out with a fund of $5 million, JANVEST plans to invest in 10 companies in six sectors: Information Technology, Alternative Energy, Software, Security, Internet and Telecommunications.

In an interview with Managing Partner Brian Rosenzweig, Rosenzweig explained that the first three things the company will look at in startups seeking funding are: the founders, the quality of the technology and market trends.

“We first invest in people. We look at the management team, the integrity of the founders, their track record, along with their vision and enthusiasm,” Rosenzweig said.

The company is currently raising its first round and will start investing in Israeli companies in the next few months. Along with Rosenzweig, JANVEST is lead by Managing Partner and CEO Felix Zilberstein and Managing Partner Gerry Sapir.

Related Stories
High success rates for female tech entrepreneurs

Illuminate Ventures, an early stage VC fund outside of San Francisco,  recently released a white paper on the performance of female entrepreneurs in tech in the U.S. The paper helps support previous research that shows higher success rates of ventures that are lead by women.

Some of Illuminate’s key findings include:

Fewer Failures: Despite often being capital-constrained, women-owned businesses are more likely to survive the transition from raw start-up to established company than the average.

Growing Influence in Tech: Women-owned or led firms are the fastest growing sector of new venture creation in the U.S., growing at five times the rate of all new firms between 1997 and 2006 – now representing nearly 50% of all privately held businesses.

Expanded IP Contributions: From 1985 to 2005, the annual number of U.S. female-invented fractional software patents increased 45-fold – three times the average growth rate in that sector.

Impact of Women Investors: Women now represent just over 15 percent of angel investors, but just 5%-7% of partner-level high-tech venture capital investors in the U.S. Firms with women investment partners are 70 percent more likely to lead an investment in a woman entrepreneur than those with only male partners.

Although these numbers are lower in Israel, efforts are continuing to be made to change that. Earlier today the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology and Google hosted “TECHLEADERS: Becoming a person of influence” in Tel Aviv. The event was a workshop that focused on helping women build the skills they need to break through into positions of leadership.

Note: To view Illuminate’s other key findings or to get the full paper, click here.

Image via Sprengben [why not get a friend].

Earlier this week, BostInnovation, a tech blog focused on the Greater Boston Area community, published a list of 12 of its favorite Boston-area female CEOs on Twitter. The list included the CEOs of Constant Contact, ZipCar and social media marketing companies among others and is intended to encourage members of the community to follow these female executives and learn from them.

It is often said that one of the ways to attract and retain more women in tech is to give them good role models. In addition to continued discussion on the topic and increased efforts to build a community and network of female entrepreneurs, there is still a lot more to be done to encourage more entrepreneurs. In the spirit of BostInnovation, here is a list of 9 Israel-based female entrepreneurs in tech on Twitter and a recent tweet of theirs. Please note this is by no means a comprehensive list. Feel free to add other female founders and CEOs in the comments below.

@darshu: Daria Shualy, founder of fashion social network, Sense of Fashion (@senseofashion).

Stylist Laurie Brucker creates a breezy bohemian look for you, on the Sense of Fashion blog http://www.senseofashion.com/blog/ @lauriebstyle

Daria Shualy

@yaelbeeri: Yael Beeri, founder of the Tel Aviv Beer Tweetup and co-founder of @TodayBackIn.

Hey Israeli tweeps & tweepettes, I met @zoharwine today, he moved back here from England, let’s welcome him to our Twitter community

@oritHashay: Orit Hashay, Associate at @CarmelVentures and founder of Ramkol.co.il and mit4mit.co.il.

At Oranim 1 – Microsoft online. With Yair Goldfinger & @yarongalai #HTIA.

@kloostermania: Karin Kloosterman, founder of GreenProphet.com, an environmental blog focused on the Middle East (@greenprophet).

Israel’s Organic Goats with the Wind Farm is Delicious Eco-Tourismhttp://goo.gl/fb/J9OGQ

@amitos: Amit Knaani,  co-founder of Vikido, a video messaging service designed for young kids (@vikidoteam).

Oh, this is cute (for kids) games/sites http://kidszone.schoolwebsite.co.uk/

@soltzvi: Sol Tzvi, cofounder of Genieo.

@Scobleizer mentioned #genieo on stage at #tcdisrupt as one of the great companies that filtering news stream

@yaelelish: Yael Elish, Founder of eSnips, VP Product at @waze and currently at a start-up in stealth.

Just installed @waze on my mobile phone – it’s a free navigation app with fun gaming & social elements! http://bit.ly/LkkkW

@michts: Michal Tsur, co-founder of Kaltura, an open source online video platform (@kaltura).

RT @Kaltura Kaltura thought-leadership piece in VentureBeat on HTML5 video : How JavaScript will lead the way to open video,http://bit.ly/ckpKMk

@blondmobile: Jasmine Aharon, co-founder of Mobile Monday Tel Aviv (@MoMoTLV).

Facebook and Google Maps Dominate Smartphone App Usage [STUDY] ttp://2.ly/bsfc

Who else would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments!

(Above image via jonklinger under creative commons.)

Disclosure: I am a GreenProphet.com contributor.

Related Posts:
Celebration of Ada Lovelace Day: 6 women who have contributed to Israel’s hi-tech industry
Why TechAviv and technology in general lacks women (Part 1)
What is keeping women out of technology in Israel?
Women in Technology: Rony Ross, Panorama Software (Interview)

Last week the international MBA program at Tel Aviv University (TAU) hosted an all-star panel of VCs and Google Israel’s Director featuring Chemi Peres, Tal Keinan, David Furst, Meir Brand, and Orna Berry with Saul Singer as the moderator. The panel was part of an overall event highlighting Singer’s book, Start-up Nation, which he wrote with Dan Senor, and was focused on “What’s Next for the Start-up Nation?”

The first question the panel discussed was “What’s next for Israel in a global context?”

In addition to the usual answers of biotech, cleantech and nanotech, and also mentioning expanding the success of the hitech industry to other sectors of the economy, the panelists connected these to the importance of human capital, education and the pace of innovation.

As Peres put it,

“The next 10 or 20 years are going to be dramatic, in terms of innovation. It will be a decade of breakthroughs and a pace of change we never knew before… Innovation is going to be the play in the world. The level of innovation that we will see in the next ten years will be bigger and more fascinating than the entire level of innovation that we’ve seen until now. To continue to be a startup nation we need to continue and intensify the human capital. Israel is a small country and needs to make sure the per capita advantage is kept all along, in terms of education and inclusiveness of large group of minorities.”

Peres also mentioned the need to focus on generating income in Israel that can be reinvested in technology and new areas that will be explored and innovated.

While the inclusion of minorities is often mentioned as being vital to the future economic success of Israel, education is usually just mentioned in terms of the brain drain. The discussion of education on the basic level being one of the next frontiers of innovation is long overdue and gives one a lot to think about. What role Israel will have and if it will take the lead will be interesting to see.

The panel discussion along with the rest of the event can be viewed on the TAU website.

Itzik Cohen, Founder and CEO of ClipSync speaking at The Israel Conference in 2009. Image courtesy of The Israel Conference.

Yossi Vardi was recently interviewed about the upcoming second annual Israel Conference in LA that he is co-chairing. The conference will include speakers from Israeli companies in the cleantech, enterprise and mobile sectors among others.

Asked about what the business connection is between Israel and Southern California, he responded,

“I’ve come to visit Southern California and a number of startups, and always find I have to prolong my visit, because of the interest and very strong links. There’s lots of potential between the new media community in Los Angeles, the telecom industry in San Diego, all across this corridor between Los Angeles and San Diego, and Israel. There are 10′s and 10′s and 10′s of companies interested in Israel, mainly because new media and telecom, which are two of the major components of Israel’s high tech industry. Qualcomm has a huge development center in Israel, as do other companies. There’s a very high level of affinity.”

The goal of the one-day event is to take advantage of this by helping Israeli startups to expand business and investment opportunities between Israel and California. Over $10 billion of investable capital will be represented by some of the largest venture capital firms that invest in Israel, including Sequoia Capital, Shamrock Holdings and Giza Venture Capital.

Some facts about Israel and its ties to California include:

• More than 3,000 start-ups have been launched in Israel, second only to the United States.
• Significant Israeli companies have corporate offices in California with job creation in the hundreds of thousands worldwide.  A number of these are Fortune 500 companies such as Check Point, SanDisk, Magic Software, VocalTec Communications, AudioCodes, and Amdocs.
• In 2009, foreign direct investment in Israel reached $3.8 billion.
• Israeli high-tech capital raising in 2009 reached $1.12 billion across 447 Israeli high-tech companies, with 124 companies raising $275 million in the fourth quarter.  Sixty-seven companies attracted more than $1 million each.

Returning to the conference this year will be Bob Rosenschein, the CEO and Founder of Answers.com, one of the twenty most-visited sites on the web.

During the week of May 2, 2010, it was revealed that Gemini invested in the fashion social network Sense of Fashion for an undisclosed amount.  The industry was busy with conferences including Techonomy, SeedCamp and TheMarker’s COM.vention. During Techonomy, last year’s winner, Face.com presented about what it’s been up to the past year, which has included expanding its technology beyond Facebook. Meanwhile, Israel Innovation 2.0 got a long-awaited redesign and added the Facebook Like button! What do you think?

Cleantech

1. Can drip irrigation break Africa’s hunger cycles?

2. SolarEdge Launches Its Solar Power Harvesting System in Italy, in Partnership with Albatech

3. C.E.S. Thinks Inside the Box to Save Energy

Investment
4. Exclusive: Gemini Invests in Sense of Fashion

5. Li Ka-shing May Tap Israel for Oil-Sands Technology (Update1)

Information Technology
6. Face.com takes its face-recognition technology beyond Facebook

7. How healthy is your online brand? (Peer39)

8. Interlude.fm: The future of entertainment and savior of MySpace?

Miscellaneous
9. Imagine a world where technology helps solve tough problems

10. ‘Chutzpah contributes to innovation’

11. Interview with Yossi Vardi

12. How To Do Business With A Large American Company

Israel’s largest Internet conference, TheMarker COM.vention took place in Rishon Lezion yesterday and offered three tracks: digital marketing, mobile and technology. The technology track included panels on investing in Israel with members of different investment groups and different companies as well as the future of content distribution and what that means for traditional media.

Perhaps the most important session for founders was a presentation by Alex Maghen,the CTO of MySpace, who spoke about the right and wrong ways for small Israeli startups to do business with big companies in the United States and Europe.

Some of the key points he made included:

1. Understand their Business
When meeting with a big company, understand who owns the company, what sensitivities it might have about its competitors and what the benefit of your product or service is for them in specific.

2. Focus – What are we?
Be able to define your startup, including in terms of how its relevant to the big company and to the people you’re presenting it to.

3. Scalability and business maturity
Show them that you are prepared to and understand what it means to work with a big company. Explain your abilities and limitations for scaling honestly and mention key terms that the tech departments at big companies deal with, including data security, auditability, redundancy and disaster recovery among others.

4. Do the work for them
Define the product and integration for them. Offer wireframes and mock-ups, functional phototypes.

5. Friends in high places aren’t everything
Even if you have a friend at a high level, in the end, the tech decisions might come down to someone with a position lower down in the scale who can kill the project if he or she feels threatened. It’s important to have personal relationships with many workers in the company.

Other suggestions Maghen made included to be cautious about what other companies you work with to avoid any issues with the original company, to run your pitch by one of your connections at the company beforehand and to have a lawyer as everything in large companies goes through lawyers.

During the week of April 25, 2010, Google acquired its first Israeli company, LabPixies, a widget publisher. Better Place started to make inroads in China and Al Gore-backed GreenRoad continued to receive attention abroad. For these stories and more, see this week’s 10 Israel-related headlines below.

Cleantech
1. Better Place makes inroads in China

2. Israel to share agricultural know-how with struggling African farmers

3. Israel’s Al Gore-Funded GreenRoad Seeks to Cut Emissions, Bills

Investment
4. Google acquires Widgets powerhouse Labpixies

5. Sapiens Acquires Harcase, a P&C Insurance Software Provider

Information Technology
6. MiniFrame Introduces New SoftXpand Product Suite to Address Multiple Vertical Markets

7. Clouds helping start-ups grow, but lack enterprise capability, investors say

8. Magic Software Looks to the Clouds

Miscellaneous
9. Israel, U.S. ink open skies pact

10. Israel Blesses iPad Saying, “Let The Tablets Go!”