Mashable is holding its first International MashMeet and it’s in Tel Aviv! Attending MashBash Tel Aviv will be startups, VC’s, Entrepreneurs, high profile CEO’s and Mashable’s Adam Hirsch.

The event will take place on Wednesday June 11th, 7-10pm, at the Galina Beach Club, Hangar 19, Tel Aviv Port, Israel.

In addition to Mashbash, Mashable will also be covering at least 10 Israeli startups (and perhaps a few other surprises) through its Israel Media Tour Series. For startups interested in getting involved:

*To apply to be considered for inclusion in the Israel Media Tour, please send an e-mail to events [at] mashable [dot] come with the following information: Company Name, 20 word description, Web site, 50 word description on why you should be covered in the Israel Media Tour.

As a media partner of MashBash and the Israel Media Tour, I would like to invite you all to register at the following link asap. There’s a 500 person limit so if you’d like to attend, I suggest you register quickly.

The MashBash Tel Aviv and the Israel Media Tour is sponsored by Yedda. Apart from Yedda, other Mashbash exhibitors are: Copenda, HooQs, and outbrain.

Hope to see you there. This will be a tech gathering to be remembered!

Technorati tags: mashbash tel aviv, israel media tour, mashable, tel aviv, event, social networking, adam hirsch, israel, startups, yedda, copenda, hooqs, outbrain, tech

Last week I had a chance to meet one of the most accomplished women in the tech industry, Susan Mernit. In her past, Susan had been a VP at Netscape & AOL and a Senior Director of Product Development at Yahoo!. Currently she works as a social media and web strategy consultant. Susan is amazingly knowledgeable about social media and Web 2.0 products and it was a real pleasure talking to her about these topics.

During The Marker’s COM. Vention, Susan interviewed me for her blog. We spoke about women in the Web 2.0 space, how I started my blog, rules that I abide by, and much more. You can check out the interview here.  

Thanks Susan, for your very positive post. Coming from you, it’s a real honor!

So this morning I get on Facebook and guess what I find? Facebook Chat. Yes it was expected, but it was also a nice suprise.

Since I have I almost 900 friends on Facebook, you can imagine the number of IM’s I’ve been receiving. I find myself spending even MORE hours on Facebook today (if that’s even possible).

This feature will definitely add to the stickiness of the site and also make Facebook a more cohesive community I believe. With chat, its much easier to keep in touch with a larger number of contacts than through private messaging.

The feature is also advantageous for marketers who are looking for constant interaction with individuals in their communities. However marketers should be cautious not to turn chat into yet another spamming tool (like what happened with Super Wall) because this will definitely cause everyone to list themselves as “unavailable”.

I would also advise you to be careful of approaching bloggers in this manner. IM can be quite intrusive to one’s privacy and approaching bloggers through chat, is not a good idea. These approaches should be made by private messaging.

It’s a known fact that many of us already use FaceBook as our main email platform (even though there are many improvements to be made here as well). Now that we have Facebook Chat, seems like Gmail with its chat is becoming even more dispensible.

Anyways, I’d be happy to hear what you guys think about Facebook chat. Love it? Hate it?

In celebration of Earth Day, Zlango has created some fun cards that you can send to your friends. So go ahead, spread some Earth love.

Zlango is a universal icon language for the web and mobile. Zlango connects people from around the world, transcending borders and building bridges between cultures. At the core of Zlango lies a comprehensive, universal iconic language, designed for mobile messaging, web-based exchanges, greeting cards, children’s books, videos, and lots more. You can even read Genesis in Zlango, send a Passover e-card to a friend, or watch a Zlango music video. In addition to fun stuff, Zlango has a variety of products for web and mobile usage such as a mobile application that allows you to send Zlango messages via SMS, IM and email plugins, and the ability to post your own creative messages on the Zlango site and embed them on your social networking profiles or blog. See my message below. Zlango lets you communicate with people from around the world without having to worry about a language barrier. The site has over 1 million users each month from 12 different countries.

Last week I met the lovely Cathy Brooks, Executive Producer of Seesmic. Cathy has generously given me a limited number of invites for Seesmic and I am giving them out to you guys. The first few people who comment “seesmic me” will receive them.

For anyone who hasn’t yet heard of Seesmic, the service can best be described as the Twitter of video, however, Seesmic hopes to become much more than that in the future. The service aims to allow for constant user interaction around video content in an open environment. 

Users can record videos directly from a webcam and publish them to their profile page. Alternatively users can also add a URL from YouTube, and post it to their stream. Each user “follows” and has “followers”, much the same as relationships on Twitter. By the way, Seesmic can already be found on friendfeed. In the future Seesmic is said to integrate with sites such as Skype, Facebook, and delicious.

Recently the Company had acquired Twhirl. According to TechCrunch:

“Seesmic says they will continue development of the application and eventually integrate their own service into Twhirl, making it the official Seemsic desktop client.”

Seesmic is currently in alpha stage. The Company was founded in 2007 by the well known European entrepreneur and LeWeb conference organizer, Loic Le Meur.

Monday’s dinner was a great success. I want to thank everyone who came. Especially our guests of honor from the US:

Robert Scoble
Craig Newmark
JD Lasica
Susan Mernit
Renee Blodgett
Cathy Brooks
Deb Schultz
Sarah Lacy
Brad Reddersen
Jeff Saperstein

Let me also take this opportunity to thank Flixwagon and Meemix for sponsoring the event.

Here are some pics from the event. You can find tons more pics on Facebook.

Technorati tags: Blonde 2.0 Dinner, Israel Innovation dinner, flixwagon, meemix, robert scoble, sarah lacy, craig newmark, jd lasica, susan mernit, renee blodgett, cathy brooks, deb schultz. brad reddersen, jeff saperstein

Today I am hosting a dinner for our guests of honor this week in Israel:

Robert Scoble
Craig Newmark
JD Lasica
Susan Mernit
Renee Blodgett
Cathy Brooks
Deb Schultz
Sarah Lacy
Brad Reddersen
Jeff Saperstein

The goal of this dinner is to introduce our guests to the people leading some of Israel’s most interesting startups, entrepreneurs, and bloggers.

I would like to thank MeeMix and Flixwagon for generously sponsoring our dinner. We will be broadcasting to you live from the event using Flixwagon’s player. The event begins tonight at 7:30pm Israel time. Stay tuned…

Technorati tags: israel innovation dinner, israel, robert scoble, craig newmark, jd lasica, susan mernit, renee blodgett, cathy brooks, deb schultz, sarah lacy, brad reddersen, jeff saperstein, startups, flixwagon, meemix

Yesterday I attended The Marker Com.vention which I really enjoyed. Amongst some of the interesting workshops I attended: Yosi Taguri from Nuconomy enthusiastically explained to us about Nuconomy’s added value to Website owners,  Yaniv Golan from Yedda gave an amazing lecture on “Incentives in Social Networks”.
After the Com.Vention many of us headed to the Garage Geeks event where we enjoyed a nice BBQ with people from the Israeli tech industry and honored guests from abroad who will be with us all week:

Robert Scoble
Craig Newmark
JD Lasica
Susan Mernit
Renee Blodgett
Cathy Brooks
Deb Schultz
Sarah Lacy
Brad Reddersen
Jeff Saperstein

By the way, while traveling, these incredible guys have created a group blog to record all their interesting doings, aggregate posts, and share photos. Check it out.

In this month’s Marker Magazine you’ll find an article entitled “The Startups Dream Team” - this is a list of the top 40 industry experts you want in your startup to ensure its success. In this list you will find yours truly as the top expert in social networks and marketing within social platforms. Others included in the list: Ofer Adler from Incredimail, Alex Sirota from Foxytunes, and Yaniv Golan from Yedda. Here’s the link to the online abbreviated version of the article in Hebrew.

Also in the same magazine, you’ll find me featured in another article entitled “The Entrepreneurs Talk”. This was a great initiative organized by The Marker Magazine. About a month ago they had invited 6 of us to a “round the table discussion” about entrepreneurship and the Web. The 6 invited entrepreneurs were: Ofer Adler, Haggai Shachar from Nuconomy, Ariel Napchi from Hiro, Hagit Halperin from Sequr. Alon Maimoni from Viral Gurus, and myself. We spoke about the differences between angels and VC’s, how the political situation in Israel affects our industry, tips for newbie entrepreneurs, proudest moments in our careers, revenue models, and much more. I really enjoyed this gathering and applaud The Marker for this wonderful initiative.

Technorati tags: blonde20, blonde 2.0, the marker, startups, experts, social marketing, social networks, ofer adler, alex sirota, yaniv golan, entreprenuers, entrepreneurship, web, haggai shachar, ariel napchi, hagit halperin, alon maimoni

Since MySpace recently launched its MySpace Developer Platform (MDP), I was looking for some statistics on the virality of MySpace apps.

According to Fred Wilson, Zynga, which has launched a couple of Apps on MDP, has done some interesting research and found the following:

1) Myspace apps are not taking off in the same speed that Facebook apps did (see below). This is probably because MySpace is currently not promoting these apps nor linking to them in any way. There is no newsfeed to promote the apps and apps are only visible on profiles. You cannot invite friends to an app and apps cannot message users in any way. For now, apps are being installed only by those users who are aware that there is such a thing as apps.myspace.com. As Wilson writes, this may be a deliberate move on MySpace’s behalf: “This may well be an attempt by MySpace to avoid the “app spam” that became a problem with the Facebook platform and has been largely eliminated with the new rules that Facebook has implemented.”

2) There are major differences between the top twenty apps on MySpace as opposed to the top twenty on Facebook (see below).  It is not yet clear why these differences exist, however, I believe that it’s just too early to tell which apps will be most popular on Facebook as all this is still in development plus many of the apps on Facebook are not yet available on MySpace.

I also understand from a friend who’s working on a MySpace app that even though apps created for MySpace should supposedly work on all other OpenSocial networks, several changes are still required in order to upload the app on each of the platforms.

In spite of all this, I still believe that developing a MySpace app now has enormous potential and at some point soon, the virality of these apps will take off in full speed.  I do think that players who get in on the action early will enjoy dominant positions later on. In addition, in order to stay competitive, MySpace has allowed platform developers to run ads and keep 100% of the revenue.