Israel Innovation 2.0

Earlier this week, Interlude.fm, an interactive video platform from popular Israeli musician, Yoni Bloch, excited the industry with its presentation (and victory) at the second annual Techonomy conference outside of Tel Aviv. The company’s technology, similar to the “choose-your-own-adventure” stories that were popular in the early 1980s, offers viewers the opportunity to decide the actions of people in the video they are watching. In the sample music video Bloch showed, which was created in one night, there were 29 scenes and over 250 combinations.

Bloch also demoed sample videos of other ways Interlude’s technology could be applied, including to commercials and television shows (think American Idol). He explained that Interlude plans to make money by licensing the technology to the companies behind these and in other areas as well as by revenue sharing partnerships. The partnership opportunities and numerous fields it can enter make Interlude not only one of the most promising startups in Israel this year but also a possible platform from which the future of home entertainment can be based- from its current offerings, such as music videos and commercials, to possible future partnerships with companies, such as MySpace.

The future of home entertainment, which Microsoft is currently trying to shape with Project Natal (using Israel’s PrimeSense motion-sensing technology), is likely to be one in which people will be able to control the movie they are watching, music they are listening to or game that they are playing through hand and body movements and/or one’s voice using gesture-based systems. A partnership between Interlude and another Techonomy presenter, Omek Interactive, an impressive competitor of PrimeSense in motion-sensing technology, can take Microsoft’s idea to a whole new level and offer a true social experience that involves direct interactivity and engagement.

For example, imagine that you are sitting on a couch in a living room with some friends watching television. You and your friends are watching a brand new car on the screen zoom through the streets of a busy city. The color of the car is silver. You say “red” and the color changes. Your friend to your right says “hills”, and the setting, which had been urban, is now rural. Someone else puts his or her hands out as if holding a steering wheel and motions to the right and the car turns. Another friend lifts his foot and slams it and the car stops. Another friend says something and another change happens and so on, this goes on for two minutes. In the end everything is back to the original settings and some fine print appears on the screen and the next thing that appears is the television you were watching. It had been a commercial before.

Such an interactive experience can also be applied to music videos and television shows. In the direction of music videos, as Robert Scoble - one of the judges at the competition – said, Interlude can save MySpace. The floundering social network that has turned its focus to music can implement this technology to further engage its users and keep them coming back and staying on pages longer. According to Bloch, a recent test of the technology found that its interactive elements was able to triple time spent on a page.

Interestingly, the CTO of MySpace, Alex Maghen, was in Israel earlier this week looking for strategic technologies. Whether or not he heard of Bloch or Interlude before, it’s certainly on his radar screen now, and in one form or another will probably be on our television, computer and iPhone screens soon as well.

Yoni Bloch presents Interlude.fm:

Founder and CEO of Omek Interactive presents the company:

Israel’s largest Internet conference, TheMarker COM.vention took place in Rishon Lezion yesterday and offered three tracks: digital marketing, mobile and technology. The technology track included panels on investing in Israel with members of different investment groups and different companies as well as the future of content distribution and what that means for traditional media.

Perhaps the most important session for founders was a presentation by Alex Maghen,the CTO of MySpace, who spoke about the right and wrong ways for small Israeli startups to do business with big companies in the United States and Europe.

Some of the key points he made included:

1. Understand their Business
When meeting with a big company, understand who owns the company, what sensitivities it might have about its competitors and what the benefit of your product or service is for them in specific.

2. Focus – What are we?
Be able to define your startup, including in terms of how its relevant to the big company and to the people you’re presenting it to.

3. Scalability and business maturity
Show them that you are prepared to and understand what it means to work with a big company. Explain your abilities and limitations for scaling honestly and mention key terms that the tech departments at big companies deal with, including data security, auditability, redundancy and disaster recovery among others.

4. Do the work for them
Define the product and integration for them. Offer wireframes and mock-ups, functional phototypes.

5. Friends in high places aren’t everything
Even if you have a friend at a high level, in the end, the tech decisions might come down to someone with a position lower down in the scale who can kill the project if he or she feels threatened. It’s important to have personal relationships with many workers in the company.

Other suggestions Maghen made included to be cautious about what other companies you work with to avoid any issues with the original company, to run your pitch by one of your connections at the company beforehand and to have a lawyer as everything in large companies goes through lawyers.

Last month, Varonis Systems Inc., a data governance solutions provider, was selected as a “Cool Vendor” in the March 2009 “Cool Vendors in Risk Management and Compliance, 2009” report by research company, Gartner Inc. 

According to Varonis’ announcement, 

“Varonis’ Data Governance Suite provides IT administrators and data owners with the intelligence they need to control access to valuable business data by enabling complete visibility to all file and folder access. The software automatically builds permissions management workflow policies by generating recommendations about whose access to company data should be revoked or allowed, empowering data owners to sign off on access rights to their files and mitigate the risks of data misuse. Varonis allows organizations to ensure that data is only being accessed by those with business need – something that proves to be critical as companies increasingly seek data protection to prevent insider breaches or data loss.”

The news from earlier today about the MySpace data breach is a good reminder of how important and necessary data governance solutions such as what’s offered Varonis and other companies still are. 

Company Facts

Founded in 2005.

R&D office in Herzliyya, Israel.

Yaki Faitelson, CEO and Co-Founder.

Ohad Korkus, VP of Engineering, CTO and Co-Founder.

Products: Varonis Data Governance Suite (Varonis DatAdvantage and Varonis DataPrivilege).

Website: www.varonis.com

Customers: Large financial institutions, health care services organizations as well as leading energy, technology and manufacturing firms. Specific customers include, DSM, CondeNast Publications, MoMA and SanDisk.

This past week saw big announcements from MySpace and Facebook, the U.S. market continuing to struggle and OpTier named Globes Israeli Start-up of the Year. How this will all affect technology and investments in Israel will be essential to follow in the next few months for innovations. In the meantime, review the news related to technology in Israel in this week’s Israel Innovation Companies in Brief: Week of October 21 slideshow.

For a larger version, you can go here,

The VON Israel telecommunications conference was held this past Sunday and Monday in Tel Aviv. Although I was unable to attend it, I have been following it in some blogs and have watched some of the speeches on PulverTV. In his keynote address, Jeff Pulver, the conference’s founder, mentioned that VoIP is the future of communications on the Internet and now is the time for companies to find the right innovations and solutions for VoIP.

In the spirit of what he said, here are examples of how I think social media areas can integrate these technologies:

Facebook- Have a special application that will let friends voice chat or video chat with each other. This would also be good for the marketplace section, especially for job seekers and potential employers, and for sales, similar to eBay having the call buttons.

MySpace- Musicians can hold special “conference calls,” or interviews, with their fans, similar to the idea of how companies have quarterly conference calls with their investors. Also, musicians can create their own TV networks and broadcast fan mail by embedding it on their MySpace page.

Flickr- While looking at pictures, you can chat with the friend or family who posted them using an application on Flickr.

For more on VON Israel, check out Jeff Pulver’s blog and if you want to view some of the speakers from VON Israel, including Pulver’s keynote, check out PulverTV. Also, if you have any ideas of your own on how social media can integrate VoIP technology, feel free to add a comment below.

UPDATE: Skype and MySpace have announced that they will integrate their chat services to add Internet voice chat to MySpace’s instant messenger and allow Skype users to contact MySpace friends through its service.