Israel Innovation 2.0

Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has launched an Israel MFA app for the iPhone.

According to the Foreign Ministry, the app (which is in English and free) can be used to,

“Get up-to-date information directly from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs right to your iPhone. Access the Information Department of the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s app in order to receive the latest official news from the website, newsroom, featured videos, and photos of current events going on in Israel and the Middle East.”

It was developed by the Israel Ministry of Finance and is compatible with iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, and provides up-to-date information directly from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to your iPhone, Pod or Pad.

It is available for download in the Apple app store.

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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.

Pythagoras Solar’s new photovoltaic glass unit can lower the cost of energy in commercial buildings and find strong markets in China and India.

Israel’s Pythagoras Solar recently unveiled its new photovoltaic glass unit. The clear glass panes that can be used as windows, curtain walls or skylights double as solar panels and are intended to change the way commercial buildings are built.
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Israeli business newspaper, Globes has reported that Google acquired Israeli app publisher LabPixies. The purchase, which is estimated to be at $25 million, is Google’s first in Israel. LabPixies will be integrated into Google’s R&D office in Tel Aviv which focuses on web and mobile development, such as YouTube Annotations and Google Trends, and will focus on iGoogle efforts in the Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The acquisition is expected to also help Android app efforts.

Below is a timeline with some of the major events showing Google’s road to Israel and its acquiring LabPixies.

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.

I recently met Daniel Shein of the Media Innovation Lab (miLAB) during Jeff Pulver’s Breakfast in Tel Aviv. Shein told me about the different research going on at miLAB and the projects he is working on in specific. In this video he gives a brief overview of miLab and one of his projects. 

A little more on the Media Innovation Lab, according to miLAB’s website, 

“The Media Innovation Lab at IDC Herzliya (miLAB) is a research and prototyping lab that explores the future of media and technology; Through a collaborative creative process new concepts for media experiences are transformed into working prototypes.”

Several of its projects are in collaboration with other research labs around the world, including MIT’s Media Lab. Some current miLAB projects include a study on the “Media in Context”, answering “How does the context of use influence a media experience? What types of context have a stronger influence than others?”; Urban Insights, a social-computerized system that more accurately connects you to the help you need; and ARG’s, a lab experiment in which the lines between “real and virtual, true and false” are blurred. 

In addition to the website, more information on miLAB and these projects is available on the miLAB channel on YouTube.

The week of March 29, 2009 was one of the busiest weeks of the year for Israel’s Web industry, with conferences and events happening everyday. Three bigg events were TheMarker’s COM.Vention on Sunday and Jeff Pulver’s Tel Aviv breakfast and Techonomy on Tuesday. While these events showcased Israel’s most promising Web startups, there was buzz about Israeli companies starting to bypass the US market and target the market in China. For more on these stories and the rest of this week’s 13 Israel-related headlines, see below.

Cleantech
Israel’s Aora Solar To Begin Clean Energy Production

Leviathan looks to wind energy device sales

Global VC Funding of Clean Tech Plunges

Investments and M&A
Building A Bridge Between Israel & China

Israeli Entrepreneurs: Know What Game You Are Playing

The tycoons’ companies don’t create jobs

Information Technology
AICC member Unisfair Launches Channel Program to Capitalize on Growth of Virtual Events 

Savvy entrepreneurs tapping risk (CTERA)

XMPie and NowDocs Introduce XMPie-enabled NowPrint 7.0

SaaS’ Testuff Nabs 2,000th Customer

The curious case of face.com

Miscellaneous
Techonomy 2009: Great Startups And Amazing Event

MyHeritage: Avoiding the MetaCafe Curse

Impressions of TheMarker’s COM.vention from a new immigrant (Israel Innovation 2.0 coverage from guest blogger Jessica Korman)

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

Sarah Lacy over at TechCrunch posted today that Israeli entrepreneurs post-bubble have lost their mojo and VC funding has reflected that. There has been a lot of reaction to her post in the comments section and off the site, but it is really much more complex and wide-ranging than a post on TechCrunch or even here on Israel Innovation 2.0 can handle. I think that Sarah is both right and, of course, wrong.  

She is right that the crop of Israeli IT and Web startups are disappointing when compared to Check Point and ICQ from the 1990s. There have been many theories, denials and other responses of the lack of companies of this caliber in the past few years and I have to say, when researching these different companies, there definitely is a difference. 

The theories for this that I believe and have often mentioned (sorry to anyone familiar with those posts) are the ones Daniel Cohen of Gemini Israel Funds wrote about in an article on Venture Beat back in the fall of 2007: “Entrepreneurs want to retire with $3-$4M, Impatience of investors, ‘Think small’ mentality and The lack of $1bn experience.” Add to these reasons the brain drain of top engineers and entrepreneurs and relocating the company outside of Israel and Lacy has a very good point. 

Fortunately though, Lacy’s post on TechCrunch was only fulfilling a certain agenda and only relevant for the IT and Web 2.0 sectors which TechCrunch covers. No matter what happens with Israeli IT companies in the future (and I believe Israeli SaaS and security companies, such as Clarizen, Imperva and Trusteer all have a lot of potential), Israel is almost guaranteed to be the main player beyond this in the next tech revolution, clean technology. 

A lot of VC funding has gone into cleantech companies in wastewater management, solar energy and wind energy that won’t mature and really show its worth for another few years. In addition, there is a noticeable trend over the past year of people from Israel’s IT sector considering and heading into cleantech.

So, where does China fit into cleantech? I haven’t researched it to say, but on the Israel end I know that China, along with several other Asian countries, countries in Africa and Australia have all expressed interest in Israel’s innovations especially to deal with water conservation management and solar energy. If in relation to Lacy’s article, China is getting more investments in IT (the greatest tech sector in the past) in comparison to Israel but not in relation to cleantech (the likely greatest tech sector in the future), the answer to Lacy’s question about “If China is the new Israel..” would really be that Israel is the new Israel.

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.