Israel Innovation 2.0

During the week of May 8, 2010, Israel was invited to join the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development along with Slovenia and Estonia. Israel’s membership in the international organization is expected to increase outside investments in the country. Multi-touch innovator N-Trig demoed new advanced multi-touch gestures that will be included in laptops later this year and it was leaked that Microsoft will release Project Natal also later this year. For these stories and more, see this week’s 12 Israel-related headlines below.

Cleantech
1. Israel’s Erdan Sees China Market in Clean Technology (Update1)

2. China’s Suntech, Israel Electric May Team Up on Solar Power

3. Multimatrix Invests Millions In Israel’s Small Wind Market

Investments and Economy
4. Better Place Closes Massive $350M Round

5. Emefcy Raises $5 million For Commercial “Green” Sewage Treatment Pilot Plant

6. AudioCodes to acquire Natural Speech Communication

7. Israel unanimously invited to OECD

Information Technology
8. N-trig demos advanced N-act multitouch gestures, coming to laptops and tablets later this year

9. What Silicon Valley could learn from these 14 Israeli companies

10. Clarizen Selected as a Winner of 2010 CODiE Awards in Project Management

Miscellaneous
11. Beating the copycats

12. Microsoft Plans Worldwide Launch Of Project Natal In October

As budgets get tighter and software-as-a-service (SaaS) matures, there is an increasing amount of interest among small and medium-sized businesses and now the eneterprise to use SaaS solutions.

In an article by Kevin White about online project management software that appeared on CBRonline.com earlier this week, White mentions that in addition to companies turning to SaaS solutions for managing projects because of the low price point, another benefit is that SaaS is “inherently collaborative since it allows any user of an application to access information anytime from anywhere.”

The company that he focuses on that is proving this theory right is Israel-based Clarizen. Clarizen, a project management software company, has enjoyed popularity in the past few months because it allows contributors to edit at the same time and for the changes to be visible immediately to anyone involved on the project. In addition it covers all the aspects of managing a project, from assigning tasks to budget tracking.

Clarizen has also received a lot of positive attention as a significantly cheaper alternative to other enterprise collaboration solutions ($25 a month per user vs. $125,000 entry point). Though it currently faces steep competition from other free or low cost solutions such as Google Docs and Basecamp, Clarizen is expected to roll out new enterprise features in the upcoming months that will set it apart.