Although Techonomy is only in its 2nd year, it’s shaping up to be THE technology/entrepreneur event in Israel, giving 6 (7 this year) start-ups a prominent stage to present their product/service, before a panel of distinguished judges and a loving crowd. Techonomy is organized and produced by Orli Yakuel and Eddie Resnick.
Interlude.fm took 1st place, after a brilliant demo by founder, Israeli musician Yoni Bloch. Interlude developed an interactive platform for video, that allows users to interact with the video, choosing various paths, thus altering the original timeline of the clip. Each selection impacts both audio and video, but Yoni explained that you can put restrictions, such as pre-defined opening and closing scenes, director’s cut, and more. According to Robert Scoble, interlude could save MySpace and is a really cool tech for musicians. In a recent project featuring a 3min video, interlude technology tripled the average time on site, to 9min (!) with 1m unique visitors. Yoni’s demo (video below) at Techonomy was shot at his house in Tel Aviv and offers 256 options, complied of 38 different scenes shot on-location.
Fiddme
In 2nd place, very close to interlude.fm, came Fiddme, a social network for foodies, from founders Yosi Taguri, Eran Kampf, Naor Suki, and Udi Milo. Fiddme allows foodies to share their food, by taking a picture and uploading it to fiddme community, using iPhone app or the web. I’ve known Yosi and Eran for some time now, and their passion for the product (started capturing food roughly 2 years ago), along with a beautiful user experience, and the location-based buzz (@foursquare integration coming very-very soon), will make Fiddme one of the best viral apps out there.
Posted On October 31, 2008 at 20:32 in Uncategorized
With twitter gaining momentum, I’m starting to see more Israelies followers – GO Israel! Although the enterprise adoption of twitter in Israel not as the US or European one, there are plenty of people out there twitting, who are working for Israeli companies, ranging from Hi-Tech, Advertising, Consumer Products, Retail and others.
Lev Cinema is one of the veteran chains of cinemas in Israel (25 years), doing its best to succeed in todays world, with broadband internet aceess, DVD, LCDs and video streaming. It recently opened it twitter account, @lev_cinema, and its first action of business was to gather as many followers as possible – # of users is the key indicator when it comes to any web 2.0business.
I was very happy to see they opted for a unique marketing activity, that has a high cost vs. benefit value – free screening of CoenBrothers‘ latest film, Burn After Reading. It was also an opportunity to meet almost 70 Israeli twitters, most of whom I haven’t met in person. The screening was super, movie was funny – too bad I arrived late (I was counting on commercials to make it on time, which surprisingly enough, there were none) and missed the gathering.. Fortunately, Israel was there to take some pictures, so there’s a proof I was there. As I (and others) commented in the post (Hebrew), I kind of hoped there would be a more formal gathering, before the movie started. People seating at the cinema, lights on, 15-20min discussion on social media in Israel, ROIs, best practices, ideas and feedback, something like that. I mean, you already have 70 twitters at one place – why not make the most of it? Nevertheless, it was an excellent activity, leveraging the use of social media, specifically social media in businesses.
Went to my first Jeff Pulver’s Breakfast clubs, at Tel Aviv harbor. I met Jeff last month, lecturing at KM Summit – he was at the hotel, doing back-to-back meetings (I think it was something like 30..). The concept of these breakfasts is very cool, and Jeff really got this down to a form of art. Upon arrival you get a little welcome package, with stickers to write your name and tagline, and another blank sticker that serves as your personal ‘tag cloud’ – so people you meet can tag you. Jeff explains it better in this video.
The most interesting thing for me was meeting couple of 12 year old kids, who came with one’s mom, to see and learn what social networking is all about. The kids are familiar with blogs (although they don’t write any), know what facebook is (but use Ning instead) – but social gatherings are not IN yet. If you think about it, that sounds strange, since the first groups are formed in pre-school and high-school, so the transition to social networks should be quite natural. That’s not the case here. The kids were quite the attraction – Jeff also spoke with them, and interviewed them, so did Kfir Pravda.
Fortunately, 
