Israel Innovation 2.0

Extreme Reality impressed the crowd at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week when it unveiled its gesture control technology for mobile devices. The technology will be on some new mobile phones debuting later this year. Content recommendation engine Outbrain raised $11 million and Israeli consumer web companies have attracted the attention of at least one prominent VC. For these stories and more, see this week’s headlines below.

Cleantech
1. Arison Group’s Solaria Teams With Soltec To Build Solar PV Field in Israel
“Israel-based Shikun & Binui Solaria, a subsidiary of the Arison Group’s Shikun & Binui Renewable Energies, will build a 6.7 MW solar PV (photovoltaic) field in southern Israel in collaboration with the Spanish multinational Soltec Renewable Energies. According to the agreement announced this week, the solar power facility will be built at the site of the Timna copper mines, not far from Kibbutz Ketura, where Arava Power is building Israel’s first land-based PV array following a landmark power purchase agreement (PPA) signed in November…”

Investment and Economy
2. Europe’s Top VC On “Covering The Ground Between San Francisco And Tel Aviv”
“Saul Klein is generally thought of as the top VC in Europe. He’s a partner at Index Ventures, which invested in companies like MySQL, Skype, Last.fm and BetFair.”

3. Economy expands 7.8% in 4Q
“The economy grew at the fastest pace in four years in the fourth quarter of 2010, driven mainly by private consumption and investments, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported Wednesday.”

4. Has Silicon Valley Relocated To Tel Aviv?
“Tech oracle George Gilder is not a fan of investing in alternative energy – he sees it as a worthless side pursuit that is diluting the power of Silicon Valley. So the chip guru is looking elsewhere for investment opportunities, namely Israel. “Israel has become a new Silicon Valley just as our own Silicon Valley gets paled over by green goo,” he puts it bluntly.”

5. Content Recommendation Engine Outbrain Nabs $11M in New Funding
“Internet startup Outbrain just grabbed $11 million in a third round of funding, bringing the company’s total financing to $29 million. Previous investors Gemini Israel Funds, Carmel Ventures, GlenRock Israel, Rhodium and Lightspeed Venture Partners all participated in the latest round…”

Information Technology
6. My6Sense Brings Digital Intuition To Twitter On Chrome
“My6Sense offers a content curating service based on the company’s trademark, ‘Digital Intuition’ which relies on an analysis of user online preferences . The company’s product has so far been offered as a content curating solution for the entire spectrum of digital venues, the new Chrome extension breaks away from this. The Chrome extension takes My6Sense proven abilities, and applies them just to a person’s Twitter stream. Once installed, the extension adds a new ‘My6Sense’ column to Twitter’s on-site GUI…”

7. 55 Israeli start-ups at Mobile World Congress
“The Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute brought together 55 start-up companies to present at the booth it is renting at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year…”

Miscellaneous
8. Coming soon: Wave your hand to control your phone
“Here’s another reason besides video chat that you might want a front-facing camera on your next mobile phone: controlling it by waving your arm or moving your hand…”

9. The 72,000-to-1 ratio
“Here’s a secret: I really have an easy job, writing about Israeli startups and technology; there is so much innovation and creativity in this country, there’s always something to write about. If I were doing this kind of column in, for example, South Korea, Japan, Canada or even Germany, I’d have a much harder time of it…”

During the week of January 10, 2010, CA acquired Israel-based Service Level Management (SLM) software company Oblicore and mobile TV chip maker Siano announced that it raised $24M. Israeli researchers announced that they cracked the encryption of 3G GSM networks. Find out more about these headlines and the rest of this week’s 11 headlines below.

Cleantech
1. Arad Technologies wins lucrative water metering deal in India

2. Climate Change and Clean Tech in Israel

3. Israeli businesses seek Texas partners in green technology

Investments
4. CA Confirms Oblicore Acquisition

5. Mobile TV chip maker Siano raises $24M

6. Amobee to buy UK’s RingRing Media

Information Technology
7. Will cable and satellite TV soon be outdated?

8. Researchers use PC to crack encryption for next-gen GSM networks

Miscellaneous
9. Israel rushes to Haiti’s aid

10. The First ELSE: A Mobile Phone from The Future (Videos)

11. The Tel Aviv Cluster

Last week Crescendo Networks announced that it raised $5 million in funding. The company, which provides software that enhances the Web application delivery process, will use the money to “further fuel sales expansion” and to move its corporate headquarters to Menlo Park in California, though engineering and some operations will remain in Tel Aviv.

Since 2002, when the company was founded, it has raised $45 million and attracted customers ranging from Forbes.com to Aeropostale to Fujitsu. As more business processes become based online and virtualization, SaaS and cloud computing matures, Crscendo Networks’s line of AppBeat products will continue to offer any size business with the necessary solutions to accelerate application delivery, cut data center costs and boost capacity for business growth.

As Peter van Oppen of Trilogy Equity Partners, one of the investors in the round, stated,

“As the IT world experiences a paradigm shift in the way applications are delivered, data centers are incorporating cloud computing, SaaS and virtualization as part of modern web application infrastructures. We believe Crescendo Networks’ application delivery solutions are perfectly poised to capitalize on these expanding market opportunities.”

Crescendo’s products include, AppBeat DC, AppBeat SC and Maestro Platform.

The 12th annual Israel Journey took place yesterday in Tel Aviv. Organized by Ernst & Young and Globes, the conference provided VCs, investors, entrepreneurs and others in the industry with an update on the current economy and what is likely still to come during the different sessions.

Pessimism and optimism were discouraged throughout the event and realism was preached – a reality that the keynote speaker, Harry S. Dent explained would be grim not for 2009, but for the time period after that. Dent, a renowned economist and writer, illustrated through his trademark heavy use of charts how the best indicators for what will happen to the economy in the next few years and over a much longer period of time comes from lifecycle spending charts and the birth index, among others. While it provides some comfort to understand why there is a slowdown and that things will eventually pick up, the time frame that Dent gave, 2020-2020, extends the period longer than expected and marks 2010-2012 as likely to resemble a depression.

After the darkness of a depression and the 2010s in general though, Dent showed charts on innovation predictions and predicted that if Israel, which has been an innovation hotbed in recent years and has a positive population growth chart, plays its cards right, it can come out of a worldwide economic downturn ahead of the other developing countries. While A LOT needs to happen and not to happen for that to be a
reality, Israel’s innovation and leadership in such areas as robotics,
nanotech and cleantech, makes it a relatively strong possibility.

Whether or not Dent’s forecasts turn out to be true, it’s almost certain that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel for many of Israel’s innovative companies, even if Israel won’t come out on top.

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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.