During the week of March 22, 2009, it was announced that Israel will share its farming technology with Kenya and more details of the government’s water technology initiative, NEWTech were given. The sale of Aladdin Knowledge to Vector Capital was completed with the news that Aladdin and SafeNet were under common management and information security company, Tufin, added new features to its firewall management platform. Facebook became even more stalkerish with a new photo facial recoginition and tagging application by Israel-based Face.com and SEO guru, Barry Schwartz shared what he found Israeli SEMs are looking for. These stories are only some of the main ones that made it into the media last week. For links to these and the rest of the stories from the week of March 22, 2009, check below. 

Cleantech and Environment

1. Israel NEWTech, A Government Initiative To Promote And Grow Israeli Water Technology And Innovation

2. Israel to share farming technology with Kenya

Investment and M&A

3. Value of Israeli high-tech M&A fell 19 percent in 2008

4. Funded: GoViral, BriefCam, Extreme Reach (BriefCam)

5. SafeNet, Aladdin Knowledge Under Common Mgmt

Information Technology

6. HP to Provide Compaq My Bhasha with its Desktops

7. New Cyber-Ark controller clocks all super-user activity

8. SkillIQ is set to Revolutionize the Human Resources World

9. Dell Certifies Aternity as ISV Partner

10. Tufin adds white lists to firewall management platform

Miscellaneous

11. Israel’s Explay helps you see the big picture

12. First Look: Photo Finder facial recognition app for Facebook

13. Drops in the bucket

14. Partnerships between Florida, Israel are key

15. What Israeli SEMs Want

Bonus: TechCrunch’s Sarah Lacy in Israel and reactions. 

Sarah Lacy, August 2008

Last week Twitter and the Web erupted when the newest member of the TechCrunch team, Sarah Lacy, posted that Israeli entrepreneurs lost their mojo and that investing in Israel was overhyped. Here are are just some of the responses to Lacy’s post as well as her post and its follow up. 

Now that China Is the New Israel…What’s Israel? (TC)

What’s behind Sarah Lacy trash talking the Israeli VC scene

Israel is the new Israel (Israel Innovation 2.0 response)

Israel Hype Cycle

Sarah Lacy, David Li and the Wrong Side of Historical Performance

Risk Aversion And The Perils Of Selling Too Early (Israeli Startups, Part II) (TC)

Twitter responds