Often time when I am traveling abroad, people ask me: “Why does Israel have so many startups? What is it about Israel that makes it so innovative and strong in the hi-tech industry?” Saul Singer together with Dan Senor have researched that question and have written a whole book about it. They believe the Israeli model can be copied elsewhere in less innovative regions and that other nations have much to learn from Start-Up Nation.

Here’s my interview with Saul at JVP’s Medialectica 2010 event:

This is a re-post from Techcrunch Europe.

I met Qype last week at the Seedcamp Speed Dating event as part of the Traveling Geeks tour.  Here’s a quick heads-up if you’re new to it: Qype is a way to discover new places (restaurants, events, nightlife, sports, etc.) with a focus on European cities, by going through other users’ reviews and feedback. There are many categories for each vertical, along with a simple to use search engine and Google maps. The site currently enjoys a traffic of 11m visitors per month and has over 350,000 registered users from 9 European countries (UK, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Ireland and Brazil).

In the video below, Andrew Hunter (UK General Manager) explains how the service is differentiated from competitors like the well-known – at least in the US – Yelp. For instance, the site shows each review in 6 different languages, thereby allowing people to read a review about a restaurant in London in German, French, English, Spanish, Polish or Portuguese.

I just came back from Internet Week NYC and I will be posting various interesting videos I took there in the next couple of days. While there, I had the pleasure of meeting the fabulous Jolie O’Dell from Read Write Web. We discussed the value of using social media marketing for brands and the extraordinary viral effects of a simple tweet or Facebook post. We talked about the ease of measuring social media campaigns plus the sheer cost efficiency of using available, online tools, in order to market a product. I also point out that many companies don’t have a true understanding of the niche and up to date channels and tools that are so imperative in making an online campaign a true success because they do not live online and use the tools themselves. Check out the video below:

Apropo, did you see that Blonde 2.0 was also mentioned on CNN Money this week?

AOL sure is in an interesting place these days. They have a brand new CEO (ex Google VP – Tim Armstrong), a legacy dial-up access business (that more than twenty years after it was launched) still makes billions of dollars a year and the rest of AOL split up into three different groups; 1) Platform A which is one of largest advertising networks 2) Media Glow which includes AOL.com and mega blogs like TMZ and Engadget plus 3) The group which most interests me; People Networks which includes AIM, ICQ, Bebo, Yedda, Goowy and the newly acquired SocialThing.

People Networks are now planning an extensive synergy of all these properties (and also 3^rd party outside content) under the banner of “life streaming” where users will be able to syndicate all their online activity into one stream.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Ziv Navoth SVP for Marketing and Partnerships at AOL.  Ziv is an extremely interesting guy. While running marketing at Bebo, he grew the user base from 22 million to 45 million users and pioneered numerous innovations including a new business model for media companies to distribute and monetize their content and a new form of online entertainment, combining original productions with brand sponsorship. Since the Bebo acquisition his task at AOL has been to expand a network already 90+ million strong. See my full conversation with him below.