Israel Innovation 2.0

Benchmark Capital Partner Michael Eisenberg recently spoke with Erin Burnett on CNBC’s Street Signs about what he thinks the next best thing is and discussed social search as the main trend and the different social tools that are out there to enable content discovery and engagement. One company he spoke about is Benchmark portfolio startup Conduit.

Founded in early 2005, Conduit provides publishers with a tool to create applications and toolbars using their content that enables easy sharing. It has over 220,000 publishers signed up and 100 million active views and is used on popular sites such as TechCrunch, eBay and Amazon.com. According to Eisenberg 19 new users install Conduit every second and has helped major brands, such as Coke, engage with users on a large scale (in the millions).

It faces competition from another Israeli startup Wibiya, along with Myspace, Yahoo and others.

The week of November 2, 2008 was filled with conferences and awards. Deloitte announced the 50 fastest-growing high-tech companies in Israel for the year 2008 with Runcom taking the top honor and last year’s top company, Voltiare coming in second place. On Monday, at the Globes and Ernst & Young Israel Journey ’08, Amobee was named Globes “Start-up of the Year.” Companies in the Top 10 that have been covered in Israel Innovation 2.0 in the past include, Aternity, Inforgin and N-Trig. Also making headlines was SportVu, which provided the hologram technology that CNN used on Election Day in the United States and iSkoot, which raised $19 million. For the links to these stories and the rest of this week’s 14 Israel-related technology headlines, scroll down.

Cleantech
1. Electric cars of the future at the Web 2.0 Summit

Investments and the Economy
2. Downturn-Busting Venture Round For iSkoot: $19 Million

3. Pawlenty’s Israel trade trip takes shape

4. Central bank chief says Israeli economy resilient

5. Top 8 Creative Ideas For Startups To Triumph Over the Current Economic Downturn

Information Technology
6. Red Bend Software Earns MobileVillage’s Mobile Star Award

7. Runcom Technologies Ranked First Place in the Deloitte “Fast 50″ Program for Fast-Growing High-Tech Companies

8. Tufin Technologies Moves Beyond Firewall Auditing to Support Cisco Routers and Switches

9. Aternity Named To Annual Top 10 List of Most Promising Startups

10. N-trig Offers Suite of Multi-Touch Solutions for Windows 7

Miscellaneous
11. XIV head Yanai named most influential figure in high tech

12. CNN’s ‘Hologram’ Shows How Far TV Has Come

13. Agent Vi Announces Launch of Video Content Analysis for Digital Media Processors Based on DaVinci(TM) Technology

14. ANALYSIS / Obama will star in Israel’s election campaigns

Caption: Panel discussion at the Ernst and Young and Globes Israel Journey ’08, titled “Digital media – trends, developments and future outlook,” with moderator, Michael Eisenberg (far right). Panelists from right to left after Michael Eisenberg: Shmil Levy (Sequoia Capital), Tomer Ben-Kiki (Oberon Media), Guy Bauman (Pelephone Communication)Uri Shinar (aniBoom), Peter Hirshberg (Technorati).

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.

Israeli email company, IncrediMail announced last week that Google has dropped the company from its AdSense program. According to TechCrunch, IncrediMail’s stock dropped 40% and lost about 1/3 of its value on the Nasdaq in direct response to the news. The reasons for Google’s suddenly ending the partnership is currently unknown, but IncrediMail may have “been dropped for fraud.”

Last month, Zack Miller of BloggingStocks.com interviewed IncrediMail founder and CEO, Yaron Adler. One of Zack’s questions for him was what the company’s business model was, to which Adler responded that the company relies heavily on viral marketing (though it is not the main means).

This is probably not the viral marketing that Adler had in mind.

It’s unlikely though that this is the end for IncrediMail and not just a relatively minor setback for it. Israeli VC Michael Eisenberg has an interesting take on this in a post on SeekingAlpha.com, as does Zack Miller’s buddy, Aaron Katsman, on BloggingStocks.com.

The week of December 16, 2007, was filled with new headlines related to the future of nanotechnology in Israel and abroad. Cleantech received its usual attention about investments, plans and government initiatives, and internationally, speculation of a recession in the U.S. and inflation continued. Check out these headlines and the rest of this week’s 29 Israel-related technology headlines below.

Cleantech:
Israel And The US Partner For Clean Energy

World Bank mulls financing Negev solar project

Evogene and Ormat subsidiary receive biodiesel grant

Ben-Eliezer offers plan to promote renewable energy

Israel Cleantech Ventures invests in Citrine Renewable Energy

Solar Market to reach $40 Billion in 5 Years

Investments and M&A:
Value of Israeli VC exits rises 30% in 2007

Don’t believe them: Brokers will tell you TASE stocks are a bargain. Here’s why they aren’t.

Noise control co Silentium raises $1.8m

Plenus invests $2.5m in Logia Content Development

Radcom raises $2.5m in PIPE offering

American VC funds favor Israel, China

CopperGate to be the 1st Israeli start-up to list on NASDAQ in 2008

Nanotechnology:
Israeli Nanotechnology companies have doubled since 2005

Yissum gives birth to biotechnology start up Nanolymf

Nanotechnology Companies Planning to Sell Shares

International:
South American trade block signs trade pact with Israel

Jim Rogers: US is in recession, the administration is lying

Your Taxes: Korea welcomes Israelis

Global Agenda: It’s back

China Less Willing to Be America’s Piggy Bank

Telecommunications:
Ericsson to equip Partner Communications with advanced 3G equipment

Breakthrough deal for Alvarion

Why The Internet Needs to Become a National Priority for Israel

Miscellaneous:
IBM Unveils Semantic Search For Corporate E-mail

Plexiglas-like DVD to hold 1TB of data

Meeting of the minds

Israeli women: Harassment vs. high-tech

The 1st Human Operating System