Company Name: PredictAd
Founded in: 2007
Location: Raanana

PredictAd is an Israeli startup backed by Yossi Vardi that was launched in 2007. Based in Raanana, the company has created an autocomplete search box plug-in that refines the search query and helps site owners generate new search revenue by providing inline text and banner ads. PredictAd is not a search engine, but rather improves the search query.

The Company is led by Noam Fine, CEO, Yossi Marouani, CTO, and Tomer Molovinsky, VP of Business Development. The three met each other in the Israeli army and have remained close since, which has translated into a strong, cohesive leadership.

The concept of PredictAd was developed by Fine and Marouani as a way to monetize Joe’s Giveaway or Mehalek (“giving away” in Hebrew), a site they created that featured a counter where users were supposed to click until they reached a certain number of points that awarded them prizes. PredictAd decided to develop the concept further and offer the search plug-in as a service to Web publishers and site owners. See the one they created for me below:

PredictAd operated in closed beta until January 2008. During this phase the company partnered with major Israeli portals such as Walla, Ynet, Nana, and MSN Israel. Partnering with these portals gave PredictAd the opportunity to optimize and enhance the service’s capabilities before entering into its current open beta phase, which is available internationally.

Since PredictAd’s product went international, they have hit over 30 million searches monthly, largely because of recent partnerships with Bravenet, Perfspot, and most recently Lyrics.com. These companies are now using the PredictAd system in all of their site search fields. It is PredictAd’s goal to make its autocomplete menu as common as the search box itself, and to be recognized as an integral part of the search process.

This post was originally posted July 22nd on Mashable.com

Company: Outbrain
Founded: 2006
Located: Netanya

I had the opportunity to meet with John LoGioco, VP of Business Development at Outbrain, the free service that offers bloggers and publishers a ratings widget that can be used by visitors of their sites to rate their content. The service, which serves as a recommendation engine for readers allowing them to discover new content they might like based on the ratings they give, recently announced an analytics dashboard for bloggers and site publishers. Outbrain is signaling a trend towards offering higher quality, more personalized Web content based on reader response and giving readers more power over the content they are viewing.

In our interview below, I speak with John about Outbrain’s philosophy and goals.

This post was originally posted July 21st on Mashable.com

Company Name: Copenda
Founded in: 2007
Location: Tel Aviv

I had the chance to interview Gadi Reichman and Tal Cohen from Copenda, the Israeli startup that offers an online social people search that allows users to find new friends and dating partners across social networks and dating sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Match, Plentyoffish, and more. Gadi and Tal founded the company with David Kariv nearly a year ago when the trio noticed a trend that young people were searching social networks for dating partners rather than searching dating sites.

In our video interview below, I speak with Gadi and Tal about the birth of Copenda, the service’s features, and the various projects they have lined up for the future.

This post was originally posted July 18th on Mashable.com

Company Name: Lightspeed Venture Partners
Founded in Israel: 2006
Israel Location: Herzliya Pituach

I had the chance to interview Yoni Cheifetz, a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a global VC fund investing in Israeli startups. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Lightspeed has offices in China, India, Israel and the US. Recently Lightspeed raised an $800 million fund and introduced a new partner, David Gussarsky, to their team as a Managing director.

Two years ago Lightspeed partnered with Gemini to create the Internet Lab, a venture designed to give seed funding to early-stage Israeli startups. They have invested in six companies so far as part of the Lab. The first of these companies was Outbrain, creator of a content rating and recommendations widget. Through the Lab they have also backed StyleShake, a do-it-yourself fashion company headquartered in the UK that allows users to design their own clothing and have it sent to them; Vestopia, a resource for investors; and Bahu, a social network for people under 25.

In our interview below, Yoni and I discuss the Israeli startups Lightspeed has invested in as well as what he considers important for startups to be successful.

This post was originally posted July 16th on Mashable.com

Company Name: Sun Microsystems Israel
Founded in: 1994
Location: Hertzeliya Pituach, Israel

I had the chance to interview Edward Resnick, Sun Microsystems‘ Regional Segment Manager in Israel. Resnick was the second employee hired for the Israel office, which has now grown to over 180 employees. In my video interview below, Resnick and I discuss Sun’s history in the country as well as the company’s shift in strategy from Web 1.0 to 2.0.

This post was originally posted July 14th on Mashable.com

Company name: Sightix
Founded in: 2005
R & D Location: Netanya

Sightix, a B2B search service targeting social networks, has headquartered its research and development in Netanya. The company offers a unique search engine solution for social networking sites. While Google’s algorithm is based on page rank, Sightix gives users more personalized search results based on their own social graph.

Sightix’s VP of Business Development, Ari Gottesmann, explained that Israel was a natural choice for the company’s R&D effort. “The entrepreneurial spirit inbred into the culture means that in Israel EVERYONE has AT LEAST TWO opinions about how to do things better, said Gottesman. “This is both a huge asset as well as a management challenge. For startups the fact that people are given the creative freedom and flexibility in the process means they aren’t just working for the job, they are working to prove their inputs and opinions as being right…”

Gottesmann explained that when a person is searching for information within a social network, Google’s search algorithm is flawed. Sightix has developed an algorithm that takes a user’s friends and connections into account when providing him with search results. Sightix is suited for searching for things that you need help from friends to find. For instance, if you wanted to find a lawyer and did a Google search, your top results could include those lawyers who paid the most for advertising. However, when you search in Sightix you receive prioritized results based on lawyers in your network and your friends’ networks. In this manner, you can receive personal recommendations from your friends.

Sightix is currently targeting small social networks with under 5 million members. They have recently partnered up with Shin1, Israel’s most popular social network for kids, and are in the process of closing deals with seven smaller social networks in the United States, as well as South America. The company is focusing on smaller networks because the development process for smaller networks takes less time. Sightix hopes to show its value through these smaller social networking sites and expand to other areas of the world.

This post was originally posted July 10th on Mashable.com

Company Name: Qoof
Founded in: 2006
Location: Bet Shemesh

Qoof is a video commerce startup that offers a widget eTailors and publishers can use to publish product videos on their sites. Founded by Richard Kligman in 2006, Qoof’s operations and team of over 10 employees are based out of Bet Shemesh.

Kligman first came up with the idea after watching the home shopping channel. With TV, you never know who’s watching and what to offer them. However, with Internet, you can target your products to exactly the right audience. In essence, Qoof is a fusion of direct response TV and e-commerce.

The Qoof Widget offers eTailors a fully customizable video interface that focuses consumers’ attention on making a purchase. The widget turns videos into selling tools, incorporating product information, customer communications, and purchases. Customers can search products by category, make SKYPE, VOIP, and landline calls, chat, search top sellers and hot deals, and read product reviews.

Additionally, Qoof offers a Smart Widget that helps eTailors and publishers target niche audiences. The Smart Widget automatically downloads videos to a website based on the response that other videos on the site are getting. If a certain product is popular, videos of similar products are automatically downloaded. Qoof’s vision is to give eTailors the ability to target customers and to present the right product to the right customer on many channels.

It is important to note that Qoof is not a destination site. The Qoof Widget can be installed directly to eTailors’ product pages and publishers’ sites. eTailors can use the widget to distribute to affiliates as well, allowing affiliates to embed the video content and sales tools directly to their affiliate sites. The widget also enables publishers to create home shopping channels easily on their own sites. The Qoof widget is fully customizable with features that allow eTailors to post customer reviews, banners and more.

Qoof’s revenue model is based on monthly hosting and per video view fees. For the hosting fee, eTailors and publishers receive detailed analytics of the views and sales data of each of their videos on each site that the video appears. Qoof’s analytics allow eTailors and publishers to see what customers are responding to and make changes to their product offerings based on this customer response.

Qoof is currently working on a new widget with more functionality that will be released in December. Additionally, the company plans to begin connecting eTailors with publishers in the future.

This post was originally posted July 1st on Mashable.com

The TWS2008 Internet conference took place yesterday in Tel Aviv.  The conference is organized by the Israeli popular blog the.co.ils, each year, and aims to find and present the 10 most promising Internet startups in Israel. Blonde 2.0 was happy to be a media sponsor of the event.

10 startups were chosen out of 100 that applied. The startups were selected by an impressive list of judges. Amongst them: Guy Kawasaki, Pete Cashmore, Om Malik, Deborah Schultz, Brian Solis, Allen Stern, Chris Brogan, Yair Goldfinger and Emily Chang.

Here’s a list of the 10 startups that were able to convince the judges that they have a unique offering to the world:

Wix is an authoring platform that allows users to create striking and easy-to-build web content in flash (web sites, widgets, blogs etc), and publish it anywhere they want online. Users can create content without coding in flash/html or being constrained by templates. At the heart of the product is the drag & drop editor that allows users to pull in any content from the web or from their own media files (video, audio, animation, text etc) and create web content.

WorkLight develops and markets a line of server products that allow organizations to do more business securely using popular consumer Web 2.0 tools and technologies, like iGoogle, Windows Live, Netvibes, Facebook, and others. Through WorkLight, employees, channels, partners, and consumers connect to protected enterprise data (and to each other) using Web 2.0 services.

HiveSight helps marketers discover new facts about consumers. The technology sifts through and analyzes millions of social media profiles and blogs to construct consumer profiles. HiveSight’s customers use the online application to write simple queries that define consumer panels, and get instant reports on demographics, consumer interests, trends and more. It’s the fastest, easiest and most affordable way to explore consumer markets and discover new insights.

Qoof is the video commerce platform that bridges the world of Online Shopping, Internet Video, and Direct Response TV to create a distributed, targeted, and personalized video commerce network. Think QVC for the internet. The most powerful way to sell a product online is with video and as more merchants are looking for video solutions, the Qoof Platform is their answer.

WikiAnswers gives you useful answers about anything by harnessing people’s collective knowledge, but with a wiki-twist. The mission is to grow a collaborative answers resource; anyone can ask, answer or edit questions, building a global Q&A database covering all topics.

Dapper’s vision is to allow people to consume the web where, when and in whatever format they choose. Dapper users point and click on the content they want from a website, and Dapper turns this content into a live semantic feed that can be used in a variety of formats (RSS, widget, XML). Dapper is leveraging its core technology to create live content-based ads (MashupAds) that combine publisher and advertiser content within an interactive ad — creating the world’s first content ad network.

Mo’Minis is a revolutionary platform for the development and publishing of mobile games. The platform allows advanced as well as non-skilled developers to rapidly create original games from scratch and have them seamlessly supported on a wide range of handsets. Furthermore, developers can collaborate and share game assets on Mo’Minis developers’ community and enjoy distribution and monetization services through various on\off-deck channels.

Kaltura provides the first open-source video management platform, empowering any site with online video. With Kaltura, web publishers can seamlessly and cost-effectively integrate interactive and collaborative rich-media functionalities, including uploading, importing, editing, remixing, and sharing. Kaltura also offers its global network of publishers content hosting, transcoding, advertising, merchandising, and syndication.

MocoSpace is a mobile social network that allows anybody with a web-enabled phone to have a full social networking experience on their most trusted device, the mobile phone, whenever and wherever they want. Members Users enjoy expressing themselves and staying connected to friends by setting up a profile page, sharing photos and video, chatting, inboxing, instant messaging, blogging, debating in forums, sending mobile cards and playing games.

Nuconomy’s Studio is the world’s first “performance insight platform,” built from the ground up to provide completely new ways to measure today’s interactive Web. Go beyond the old page view model and start to measure the new metrics of the web – your users and site engagement and contribution metrics.

Overall I think the TWS event this year was a great success and I was proud to be a part of it. In 2009, the organizers plan to open the event to all European startups and make it the official European launch pad for Internet startups in the region.

Company Name: HooQs
Founded in: 2007
Location: Tel Aviv

HooQs, an Israeli startup launched in 2007, brings personalized mobile content to users with a unique mobile media recommendation system. Based in Tel Aviv, HooQs was co-founded by Aner Ravon and Itay Gissin. HooQs’ partners and distributors are spread globally and as a result the founders plan to open European and North American headquarters in 2009 in order to grow their business and become more easily accessible to partners. However for the creators, there was no better place to start than Israel.

HooQs’ concept came about when its creators noticed a lack of personalized mobile media and decided to make it easier for users to find music and videos that interest them by incorporating a prediction engine for recommendations into their site. When searching for video and music from a mobile device it can be difficult to find content that interests you quickly. There is so much content to choose from that you sometimes don’t even know what you’re looking for. HooQs created a way to make mobile content find you instead.

Once a user watches a video, HooQs gives him a personalized homepage with 5 to 30 recommended clips based on what other users with similar tastes are watching and listening to. Each time that the user watches, downloads or shares a video on HooQs, he is, in essence, creating recommendation statistics for users with similar interests. HooQs creates recommendations based purely on user behavior. Recommendations take into account how long a user views a clip, as well as whether he downloaded or shared the clip. Users are not required to answer any questions or give any information in order to receive recommendations. In fact, anyone can receive recommendations based on his behavior on the site without even registering.

According to Aner, the service picked up quickly, with over 300,000 mobile downloads a month in the beginning. The first version did not include the recommendation system and was intended purely for learning purposes to create a better model. The second version of HooQs, which was released a few weeks ago, has much more functionality, including the recommendation system which allows for collaborative media filtering, making it much easier for users to find desirable mobile content quickly and efficiently. This recommendation engine was developed by Nimrod Steinbock, CTO of the company.

The addition of this unique recommendation engine has aided in the growth of HooQs. The service currently has over 250,000 users that account for over 500,000 mobile downloads a month. HooQs distributes video content on virtually every subject—users are downloading niche content from pizza recipes to kite boarding lessons and everything in between.

HooQs channels cover a range of subject matter including music, animation, animals, TV, tech, sports, games, politics and “hotties.” The site even has a “whatever” category which features channels such as Best UFO Clips. “How to” videos are also popular, as well as videos about the iPhone and, of course, videos made by gorgeous women (surprise, surprise).

The improvement of mobile devices, with the introduction of mobile handsets such as the iPhone, has only served to raise the consumption of mobile media and HooQs’ mission is to serve this increased need. HooQs can be used on any mobile device that is media enabled and has an Internet connection. Additionally, the company is currently working on an iPhone application.

Itay tells me that unlike other mobile media distributors, HooQs has decided to remain an independent service, managing and developing everything on their own. Mobile operators may partner with them to incorporate the HooQs recommendation engine into their own portals. In fact, two operators already signed agreements with them for distribution and integration of their recommendation engine.

HooQs’ revenue model is based on the distribution of their mobile media and on partnerships with mobile operators that are incorporating their service. The company recently raised over $1 million from Zohar Gilon, Eilon Tirosh of GingerBit, Yigal Ahuvi of Partam, and Yaron Gissin on behalf of BEC. Hooqs is still on the lookout for further investments.

This post was originally posted June 30th on Mashable.com

Company Name: Footbo
Founded in: 2008
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel

Footbo is a social network for football fans, or as they are called in the U.S., soccer fans. The site, which launched this month to coincide with the EURO 2008 tournament, is the brainchild of Raphael Honigstein, a well known football journalist based in London, who writes for England’s The Guardian, amongst other publications. Raphael teamed up with his brother Mani, who has worked in the Israeli tech industry for many years, to get Footbo off the ground. As a result, the company’s headquarters are located in the UK while their operations are run from Israel.

According to Mani, having the startup’s operations in Israel has made it easy for Footbo to find multi-lingual employees who are also passionate football fans to serve the tri-lingual (English, German, Spanish) Footbo community. However, one of the biggest advantages of giving Footbo’s operations a home in Israel has been taking advantage of the tech industry and expertise here.

With an estimated one billion fans, football is the most popular sport in the world. Raphael noticed that there was no site that catered to the complete needs of these fans and decided that he would take matters into his own hands. Thus, he created Footbo—a “one-stop shop” for football fans to show pride for their teams and get excited together about the sport.

When a user joins the Footbo community they gain a customized football experience by identifying their favorite teams and players. A personalized homepage is then created for them. The user can then begin to take part in the community, blog, share photos and videos, create and join groups and fan clubs, plan events, grade player performances, and more. Footbo provides users with all of the latest updates about their favorite teams and gives them access to RSS news feeds. Footbo also allows users to make predictions about which teams will win in future games, a feature that has already become very popular. In essence, Footbo offers everything that other social networks do, but is catered specifically to football fans.

Footbo’s soft launch was strategically planned during the EURO 2008 tournament—a time of excitement for football fans all over the world. In the coming months Footbo plans to launch new features as well as start bringing in revenue streams. Footbo’s revenue model is based on targeted marketing which includes football-related sponsorships, merchandising and ticket sales. Given the size of this market and the passion of fans for the game, the company believes this should prove to be a very viable model.

This post was originally posted June 27th on Mashable.com