Israel Innovation 2.0

Two big deals were announced during the week of February 8, 2009. Solar energy company BrightSource inked the largest solar energy deal ever that will help power Southern California, while Web 2.0 news and blog recommendation engine, Outbrain raised an impressive $12 million. Google Israel announced that it will be restructuring and Dell introduced the Latitude XT2 Multitouch Tablet, its latest laptop to use N-Trig’s multitouch technology. For these stories and more, check out this week’s 16 Israel-related headlines below.

Cleantech
1. BrightSource Inks 1.3GW SoCal Edison Deal

2. Lamar Testing Solar-Powered Digital Billboards

3. Crisis Bodes Well For Electric Cars

4. Israeli Solar Company AORA Raises $5 Million

Investments
5. Israel’s Pontis gets $19.65 mln in equity financing

6. Outbrain, the news story recommendation service, gets $12M

Information Technology
7. Dell Intros Latitude XT2 Multitouch Tablet

8. Google Israel restructures

9. Startup Neocleus building bare-metal desktop hypervisor 

10. Industry’s Only Clientless Endpoint Security Management Solution

11. Acronova’s Entry Level DVD-R Duplication System Now Shipped with TrusCont Copy Protection System

Telecom/Mobile
12. Modu unveil modular cellphone jackets, promise big MWC launch news

13. Apps the new battlefield for mobile industry (Nexperience)  

14. Having Text? Cell Phone Users Are Cheating on Their Partners

Miscellaneous
15. How Social Media War Was Waged in Gaza-Israel Conflict

16. ‘Waltz with Bashir’ named WGA’s ‘best documentary’

After watching some of the livestream of the TechAviv founder-investor’s meetup in Herziliyya last month and posting  about it, I had the opportunity to attend the monthly meetup last Thursday and listen in person to Israeli startups, SundaySky, FlyScreen and HYPick present their technologies. 

After SundaySky co-founder Yaniv Axen spoke about the company’s impressive dynamic video production technology, Gilad de Vries of Carmel Ventures, which recently led SundaySky’s $8 million A round, talked about what he looks for when considering funding a company. It can be assumed that de Vries and his colleagues applied these same things when Carmel Ventures agreed to lead news and blog recommendation engine, Outbrain’s $12 million B round that was announced this week.  

Here is a video of de Vries’ presentation at TechAviv last week.