Israel Innovation 2.0

After watching some of the livestream of the TechAviv founder-investor’s meetup in Herziliyya last month and posting  about it, I had the opportunity to attend the monthly meetup last Thursday and listen in person to Israeli startups, SundaySky, FlyScreen and HYPick present their technologies. 

After SundaySky co-founder Yaniv Axen spoke about the company’s impressive dynamic video production technology, Gilad de Vries of Carmel Ventures, which recently led SundaySky’s $8 million A round, talked about what he looks for when considering funding a company. It can be assumed that de Vries and his colleagues applied these same things when Carmel Ventures agreed to lead news and blog recommendation engine, Outbrain’s $12 million B round that was announced this week.  

Here is a video of de Vries’ presentation at TechAviv last week.

Cleantech and Environment

1. ‘Israel has no plan for water economy past 2010′

2. Better Place Raises Financing for Denmark Electric Car Project

3. BrightView Secures $6 Million From Israel Cleantech Ventures and Hasso Plattner Ventures

Investments, M&A and Economy

4. Number of laid-off Israelis set new high in December

5. SAP cuts likely to reach Israel

6. MyThings Acquires ViewScore

Information Technology

7. Safend Achieves Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 2 for Sensitive Data Protection and Reaches Key Stage in FIPS 140-2 Certification Process

8. Waterfall Security Solutions to Attend the 2009 DistribuTECH Conference

9. Cordys Award-Winning Process Factory(TM) Now Available as Community Platform Free of Charge

10. IBM to expand Israeli XIV production facilities

11. How flash is changing storage (Axxana)

12. SIMCom Licenses Red Bend Software’s vCurrent(R) Mobile for Remote Software Management of M2M Wireless Devices

Web 2.0

13. Peer39 matches online content to advertiser’s message

14.  Time to Headup

15.  Interview : HYPick – hype a topic

16. Email: 2Pad Grabs Media Attachments from Your Webmail Accounts

17.  MocoSpace a Global Top 10 Social Network on Mobile

Miscellaneous

18. Mobile TV chip co Siano wins major Chinese deal

19. Free Internet-Calling Services for Cellphones (Fring)

Bonus: HYPick.com

If you want to know what the hype is– the real hype and not just what people vote on by clicking–check out HYPick.com. Founded by Oren Todoros, HYPick is the anti-Digg-type site that determines the top content based on user comments and views and not ranking, like Digg. Todoros recently sat down with Ezra Butler of LuckyStartups to discuss  HYPick. See what the hype is for yourself with this video.

You can add to Israel’s technology hype, by joining in on Israel Innovation 2.0 HYPick.com discussions, such as this one.