Israel Innovation 2.0

Inside Israeli Technology

During the week of May 23, 2010, Soluto, an “anti-frustration” software for making PCs more efficient, won the first TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Soluto is the latest Israeli startup to find success at a TechCrunch conference. Israeli and Taiwanese experts met in Taipei to discuss water technology and Israel’s highways are to go green, including wind-powered lighting. For these stories and more, see this week’s headlines below.

Cleantech
Taiwanese, Israeli water technology experts meet in Taipei

Wind-powered lighting for the highway

Sahara joins hands with Israeli co for solar plant

Investment
Netanyahu Says Israel in OECD Will Bring Investment (Update1)

Information Technology
Soluto Utility Shrinks PC Boot Times, Fixes Problems

Related: Israel’s Soluto Wins TechCrunch Disrupt

GoMidjets is Awarded IBM’s 2010 Beacon Award

Miscellaneous
Fox buys Israeli sitcom ‘Ramzor’

Why People Don’t Like Virtual Conferences

Chemi-Peres-Pitango

Last week the international MBA program at Tel Aviv University (TAU) hosted an all-star panel of VCs and Google Israel’s Director featuring Chemi Peres, Tal Keinan, David Furst, Meir Brand, and Orna Berry with Saul Singer as the moderator. The panel was part of an overall event highlighting Singer’s book, Start-up Nation, which he wrote with Dan Senor, and was focused on “What’s Next for the Start-up Nation?”

The first question the panel discussed was “What’s next for Israel in a global context?”

In addition to the usual answers of biotech, cleantech and nanotech, and also mentioning expanding the success of the hitech industry to other sectors of the economy, the panelists connected these to the importance of human capital, education and the pace of innovation.

As Peres put it,

“The next 10 or 20 years are going to be dramatic, in terms of innovation. It will be a decade of breakthroughs and a pace of change we never knew before… Innovation is going to be the play in the world. The level of innovation that we will see in the next ten years will be bigger and more fascinating than the entire level of innovation that we’ve seen until now. To continue to be a startup nation we need to continue and intensify the human capital. Israel is a small country and needs to make sure the per capita advantage is kept all along, in terms of education and inclusiveness of large group of minorities.”

Peres also mentioned the need to focus on generating income in Israel that can be reinvested in technology and new areas that will be explored and innovated.

While the inclusion of minorities is often mentioned as being vital to the future economic success of Israel, education is usually just mentioned in terms of the brain drain. The discussion of education on the basic level being one of the next frontiers of innovation is long overdue and gives one a lot to think about. What role Israel will have and if it will take the lead will be interesting to see.

The panel discussion along with the rest of the event can be viewed on the TAU website.

Pythagoras-Solar-Curtain-Wall

Pythagoras Solar’s new photovoltaic glass unit can lower the cost of energy in commercial buildings and find strong markets in China and India.

Israel’s Pythagoras Solar recently unveiled its new photovoltaic glass unit. The clear glass panes that can be used as windows, curtain walls or skylights double as solar panels and are intended to change the way commercial buildings are built.
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During the week of May 16, 2010, BrightSource Energy announced that it raised $150 million to explore solar thermal. Israel’s stocks were upgraded to ‘Developed’ and Israel’s economy was ranked the 17th most competitive and number one for resilience and R&D. For these stories and more, see this week’s headlines below.

Cleantech
1. BrightSource raises $150m to back solar thermal ambitions

2. Pythagoras Solar Introduces Photovoltaic Glass Unit

Investment and Economy
3. Israel ranked 17th-most competitive economy

4. Israeli Stocks Upgraded from ‘Emerging’ to ‘Developed’

5. Dalton McGuinty goes to Israel to boost trade

6. NDS to augment investments in China in 2010; relocate part R&D resource from India and Israel

Information Technology
7. Tawkon Releases BlackBerry Radiation App, Visits Apple To Discuss Rejection

8. BluePhoenix to Expend Its Software Offering, Will Add COBOL Software to the Company Portfolio

Miscellaneous
9. ISRAEL: Nanotech institute launched

10. Asus to launch netbook with plug-in mobile phone?

Since Modu was founded in 2007, it has been interesting to watch it rise, as it attracted media attention and raised $85 million, and fall, with postponed and cancelled cell carrier launch plans and massive layoffs.

A victim of the poor economy and the rise in popularity of smartphones, led by Apple’s iPhone, Modu seemed to be breathing its last breaths last November when it announced its largest round of layoffs (110 employees).

Though it seemed that the end was near for Modu, which was founded by serial entrepreneur Dov Moran, in the past week the company has resurfaced, not as a deadpool topic, but as a partner of netbook developer, Asus.

Rumors abound that Asus is working on a new netbook that will enable interconnectivity between smartphones and its netbooks. The benefit will be that netbook users can access the Internet anywhere using the 3G network of their smartphones instead of relying on WiFi.

If Asus, which has its own line of phones, really is working with Modu on this, this could be huge for Modu. Either way, considering its recent partnerships and launches, there still might be a bright future for Modu after all.

Modu-Jackets

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.

During the week of May 8, 2010, Israel was invited to join the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development along with Slovenia and Estonia. Israel’s membership in the international organization is expected to increase outside investments in the country. Multi-touch innovator N-Trig demoed new advanced multi-touch gestures that will be included in laptops later this year and it was leaked that Microsoft will release Project Natal also later this year. For these stories and more, see this week’s 12 Israel-related headlines below.

Cleantech
1. Israel’s Erdan Sees China Market in Clean Technology (Update1)

2. China’s Suntech, Israel Electric May Team Up on Solar Power

3. Multimatrix Invests Millions In Israel’s Small Wind Market

Investments and Economy
4. Better Place Closes Massive $350M Round

5. Emefcy Raises $5 million For Commercial “Green” Sewage Treatment Pilot Plant

6. AudioCodes to acquire Natural Speech Communication

7. Israel unanimously invited to OECD

Information Technology
8. N-trig demos advanced N-act multitouch gestures, coming to laptops and tablets later this year

9. What Silicon Valley could learn from these 14 Israeli companies

10. Clarizen Selected as a Winner of 2010 CODiE Awards in Project Management

Miscellaneous
11. Beating the copycats

12. Microsoft Plans Worldwide Launch Of Project Natal In October

Israel-Conference-Speaker-Itzik-Cohen

Itzik Cohen, Founder and CEO of ClipSync speaking at The Israel Conference in 2009. Image courtesy of The Israel Conference.

Yossi Vardi was recently interviewed about the upcoming second annual Israel Conference in LA that he is co-chairing. The conference will include speakers from Israeli companies in the cleantech, enterprise and mobile sectors among others.

Asked about what the business connection is between Israel and Southern California, he responded,

“I’ve come to visit Southern California and a number of startups, and always find I have to prolong my visit, because of the interest and very strong links. There’s lots of potential between the new media community in Los Angeles, the telecom industry in San Diego, all across this corridor between Los Angeles and San Diego, and Israel. There are 10’s and 10’s and 10’s of companies interested in Israel, mainly because new media and telecom, which are two of the major components of Israel’s high tech industry. Qualcomm has a huge development center in Israel, as do other companies. There’s a very high level of affinity.”

The goal of the one-day event is to take advantage of this by helping Israeli startups to expand business and investment opportunities between Israel and California. Over $10 billion of investable capital will be represented by some of the largest venture capital firms that invest in Israel, including Sequoia Capital, Shamrock Holdings and Giza Venture Capital.

Some facts about Israel and its ties to California include:

  • More than 3,000 start-ups have been launched in Israel, second only to the United States.
  • Significant Israeli companies have corporate offices in California with job creation in the hundreds of thousands worldwide.  A number of these are Fortune 500 companies such as Check Point, SanDisk, Magic Software, VocalTec Communications, AudioCodes, and Amdocs.
  • In 2009, foreign direct investment in Israel reached $3.8 billion.
  • Israeli high-tech capital raising in 2009 reached $1.12 billion across 447 Israeli high-tech companies, with 124 companies raising $275 million in the fourth quarter.  Sixty-seven companies attracted more than $1 million each.

Returning to the conference this year will be Bob Rosenschein, the CEO and Founder of Answers.com, one of the twenty most-visited sites on the web.

Emefcy-Lagoon-Wastewater-TreatmentEmefcy technology uses bacteria that can produce electricity from wastewater, such as this lagoon. Photo courtesy of Emefcy

Globes is reporting that Israeli sewage technology company Emefcy has raised $5 million for a commercial pilot. Founded in 2007 Eytan Levy and Ronen Shechter, Emefcy‘s main product, the MEGAWATTER system aids the management of wastewater by reducing energy consumption by applying microbial fuel cells. The cells feed on the wastewater and can produce electricity or hydrogen. continue reading…

During the week of May 2, 2010, it was revealed that Gemini invested in the fashion social network Sense of Fashion for an undisclosed amount.  The industry was busy with conferences including Techonomy, SeedCamp and TheMarker’s COM.vention. During Techonomy, last year’s winner, Face.com presented about what it’s been up to the past year, which has included expanding its technology beyond Facebook. Meanwhile, Israel Innovation 2.0 got a long-awaited redesign and added the Facebook Like button! What do you think?

Cleantech

1. Can drip irrigation break Africa’s hunger cycles?

2. SolarEdge Launches Its Solar Power Harvesting System in Italy, in Partnership with Albatech

3. C.E.S. Thinks Inside the Box to Save Energy

Investment
4. Exclusive: Gemini Invests in Sense of Fashion

5. Li Ka-shing May Tap Israel for Oil-Sands Technology (Update1)

Information Technology
6. Face.com takes its face-recognition technology beyond Facebook

7. How healthy is your online brand? (Peer39)

8. Interlude.fm: The future of entertainment and savior of MySpace?

Miscellaneous
9. Imagine a world where technology helps solve tough problems

10. ‘Chutzpah contributes to innovation’

11. Interview with Yossi Vardi

12. How To Do Business With A Large American Company