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 September 16, 2009 at 09:23 in Uncategorized
The TechCrunch50 Conference just wrapped up in SF and 3 Israeli (ok, not full Israeli: 1 is semi-Israeli and 1 is third-Israeli) Start-Ups took center stage! I tried following the action as it unfolded, paying special attention to the updates of tweeple friends at SF: Yael Beeri, Yaron Orenstein, Orli Yakuel,Ayelet Noff and Sharel Omer. Also created a ‘TC50 Israel‘ search in my tweetdeck, but there was just too much content to follow…
RedBeaconwon Best SU at TC50, receiving 50,000 US$ and most important world recognition. Trollim won Best International SU and AnyClip won Audience Favorite. About the winners (from TC50 site):
RedBeacon is a new service making its public debut today at TechCrunch50 that further streamlines this process by bringing the OpenTable model of online transactions to much broader spectrum of services. During their presentation on stage yesterday at TC50, RedBeacon showed an end-to-end demo, from deciding what you want (cakes) to delivering them, in person, to the audience at TC50 – very cool!!
Trollim lets coders battle for programming superiority, by createing a competition platform and social network for programmers that assesses their coding skills through coding battles. Users are identified as “trolls” on the platform and once a user signs up, he or she fills out a profile that includes their age, location and coding language skills (C++, Ruby, PHP etc.). Trollim then gives the user 3 to 6 pieces of code, or a “test,” to fix to asses their baseline level of skill and based on the results of this test, the user is given a skill level of 1 though 5.
AnyClip is a Search Engine for Movie Clips. People reference scenes all the time in their daily lives, and on the web it’s not uncommon for a blogger to accentuate their post with a particularly relevant clip. But for their popularity, there still isn’t an established site that’s known as the place to find a movie clip. AnyClip wants to be that place.
Only yesterday have I realized the potential of Israel as a hi-tech greenhouse, when attending Techonomy, an event focused on local innovation, produced by Orli Yakuel and sponsored by Sun Microsystems. Techonomy was the highlight of a socially packed week, which started last week with GarageGeeks (Wed), followed by Kinnernet (Thu-Sat), then TheMarker Com.Vention (Sun) and Jeff Pulver’s Breakfast (Tue), an hour before Techonomy. Until now I had little business interaction with the SU scene here, although I try to keep myself updated. I am aware we’re the #2 SU country in the world (after the US, with some 3,000 SU companies), but the solutions I sell are aimed at ‘older’ companies, so I rarely meet SU founders.
Personally I was psyched about face.com and their Photo Finder facebook application- face recognition has been around for some time now, but their technology brings it to every consumer, using our natural ‘sharing’ feeling, in a killer speed. They handed out some 50 invitations to techonomy attendees, which run out very fast. Do hope I’ll get approved to their alpha soon.
Another SU that got me interested is Vetrinas (Orit Hashay), which evolves around fashion. Living with a fashion-savvy girlfriend I can totally see this site kicking off, ’cause there are plenty of girls out there who would love to window-shop from their living room. Too bad the panel was male-only – there were a lot of ladies in the audience who could fit the panel, including TC‘s Sarah Lacy (super guest speaker).
Yoav Segal presented Hoody, a social site for your neighborhood, showing you at the heart of the circle, seeing what friends, business and news are happening around you.
Some of the online discussion was around the lack of a solid business model. In the current climate, you must have a business model before running to raise additional funds, or moving to beta, BUT, at an event like this – I’m willing to wait a few more weeks. Hoody and Vetrinas can do wonders with the right business model, face.com is already there I think – and someone (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon) will definitely put some $$$M for it.
Final word to the producers, Sun Startup Essentials and Orli Yakuel. I came to know the work Sun is doing via facebook, which is quite similar to IBM’s Global Technology Unit – reaching out to local hi-tech companies, and supporting through various initiatives. Kudos to Eddy Resnick for managing to allocate the budget for such an event, in such times, including catering (very good) and the venue itself (ZOA House). And last round of applause to Orli, for bringing Techonomy to life with some 300 participants (and 100 more in stand-by), to show some respect to the Israeli innovation that we knew existed here all along, regardless of what people might think.
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