Israel Innovation 2.0

During the week of October 5, 2008, Israel’s cleantech industry continued to make progress and headlines. The biggest cleantech story being that the Cleantech Group has partnered with the California Israel Chamber of Commerce. In telecommunications, JaJah which hasn’t made any significant headlines in the past few months, “re-emerged,” while in Trusteer made another announcement that caught attention. Of course, there was plenty of IT and financial crisis-related headlines making this week’s 14 Israel-related technology headlines as well. For the full list, scroll below.

Cleantech
1. Cleantech Group Partners With California Israel Chamber of Commerce

2. An electrifying solution for wastewater treatment

Information Technology
3. Zoran’s IPS(TM) Interpreter for XPS Earns Logo Certifications From Microsoft

4. JAJAH Gives Voice to Global Innovators

5. CopperGate Communications Named Most Promising Start-up in Israel

6. Beijing Website Aims at High Performance w/ Crescendo

Information Security
7. IBI: SAP profit warning danger to Israeli firms

8. PineApp Ltd. Positioned in Niche Player Quadrant for E-Mail Security Boundaries Magic Quadrant

9. Trusteer Receives “Best of the Web” Award from Online Banking Report

Miscellaneous
10. Israel’s booming hi-tech industry

11. Mobileye Answers Call for U.S. Driver Safety Solutions

12. ‘Universities can’t open academic year’

13. How many Israelis will lose their jobs due to financial crisis?

14. The Five Plagues of Israel: 5 reasons for the exceptionally low Q2 results

About the author: Lisa Damast is the Membership Manager of ebizQ.net and currently resides in Israel.  Any questions or inquiries regarding this blog or ebizQ membership services can be directed to her via email at ldamast (at) ebizq (dot) net. She can also be followed on Twitter, where she covers additional Israeli technology companies and Israel-related headlines and topics.

*About the Weekly Headlines image: The Star of David in the image was found on Flickr and is used under the Creative Commons license. It was originally uploaded by Flickr member, zeevveez. The overall Weekly Headlines image was designed by Lisa Damast.

The week of August 3, 2008 was a good one for Israeli companies announcing funds raised. Israeli-Chinese social networking company, Koolanoo raised $25 million, and Confidela, software-as-a-service document security and control company that’s still in stealth mode raised $5 million in second-round funding. Water management companies, Tahal and Environmental Energy Resources Ltd. (EER) made headlines with their projects while VoIP company, JaJah made headlines with its new translation services. For Information Technology news and more, check below for the complete 17 Israeil-related technology headlines from the week of August 3, 2008.

Cleantech
Tahal obtains financing for €41m Ghana water project

UK to use Israeli waste-disposal technology

M&A and Investments
Koolanoo Group raises $25M

WAN optimization co Expand raises $10m

Confidela raises $5MM, completes second round of financing led by seasoned entrepreneur, Shlomo Kramer and Gemini Israel Funds

YouLicense.com Secures Funding From Ofer Media and Logia Group

Carl Zeiss SMT to Acquire Israeli Start-Up Pixer Technology

Telecommunications
Micronet to expand its presence in the North American Mobile Resource Management Market

Jacada Signs Material Contract with New Telecommunications Customer in North America

New Translation Services Come to MS Office and JaJah

Information Technology
Shunra Software Joins the VMware Technology Alliance Partner Program

PineApp’s Mail-SeCure Provides North Florida Women’s Care with Unparalleled Spam Blocking and Secure Email Communications

ClickSoftware Products Excel in the Preliminaries, Now Ready for Prime Time During 2008 Beijing Olympics

Crescendo Scales to Meet Web Applications’ Need for Speed

Miscellaneous
Applied Materials Promotes Gilad Almogy to Senior Vice President

From Silicon Valley to Silicon Wadi

N-trig Announces Availability of Multi-touch Gestures Software Development Kit

Blogging is a phenomenon that isn’t just perceived as important in the United States, but in Israel, too. Back in October, I wrote a few posts about blogging in Israel and the different networks and platform technologies that I noticed being used. A lot of the attention I gave to blogging in Israel was in anticipation of attending the first annual WordPress Israel conference.

Recently, there was some discussion on the Digital-Eve Israel listserv (an email list for hi-tech professionals in Israel) about how to start a professional blog and which blog platform to use for it. In one of the posts, Miriam Schwab, CEO of Illuminea Marketing and Media and an organizer of the WordPress Israel conference, directed everyone to an entry on her blog about how a “really professional blog” is hosted on WordPress.

As there are several blog platforms aside from WordPress that are used by some highly-regarded professionals, including Blogger and MovableType, I decided to leave a comment disagreeing with the idea that “really professional blogs” are only on WordPress. I also included my belief that professionals just starting to blog should consider different platforms and that if the blog isn’t directly for their company, then it would probably be fine to start off on Blogger while learning the ins and outs of blogging.

Miriam’s response to my comment and Jacob Share’s short list of Digital Eve Israel members who blog (only 11!), piqued my curiosity as to how many Israeli companies (including VCs) that I have covered in my posts, have blogs. Surprisingly, and not so surprisingly, most of the companies I checked (especially the biggest companies, such as Teva Pharmaceuticals and Alvarion), don’t have corporate blogs. Many Israel-based venture capitalists on the other hand, do.

Here’s a list of a few of the Israeli companies that I have mentioned that do have blogs:
RedBend
eSnips
Metacafe
Gemini
Tvinci
Jajah
ooVoo
Aladdin
Commtouch

Here’s a list of some companies, including ones that I haven’t covered, that are noticeably missing:
Comverse
Commtouch
BluePhoenix
Magic Software
InfoGin
Alvarion
Vringo
Ness Technologies
Teva Pharmaceuticals
Voltaire

Update: August 8, 2008.