Written on February 4, 2008 – 11:01 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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More than fifty Israeli start-ups will travel to Barcelona next week to present their products on the upcoming Mobile World Congress. Ok, it’s an impressing number yet not spectacular news. Though what surprised me is the way they cooperate at the conference. 
The companies have invested a total of 600,000 euros to build an Israeli lounge. Our WebTipr in Israel Yaniv Solnik emailed me why the start-ups are doing this: “They want to utilize the power of the togetherness in the Israeli mobile scene”.
The Israeli-get-together is organized by the Israel Mobile and Communications Association (IMA). On their site, they invite us all to show up at the lounge where ‘one of the world’s most innovative countries’ presents ‘the most creative companies’.
They want to utilize the power of the togetherness in the Israeli mobile scene
Sounds like the Israeli mobile scene is not afraid to invest in the image of their country. Smart move, especially since the image of the Israeli start-up culture is likely to get hurt by the rumors about Knocka’s problems to find funding. Knocka is an Internet television network that was started by the legendary founders of ICQ, who hyped their product to extreme proportions. Last week an article about Knocka employees leaving the company was published on the Israeli news site The Marker. If Israel’s to-watch start-up of 2008 is really going into a quiet death, an image boost for the country wouldn’t hurt.
Aside from the remark that it probably compensates the bad publicity around Knocka, it still might be a good idea to promote your country’s start-up culture. Could European countries learn from this campaign? If you’re able to hype your homeland, investors and users are likely get a positive association with any start-up coming from your country. Just like start-ups from the Valley have some sort of instant credibility. Nationalism 2.0 might actually work.
[WebTipr: Yaniv Solnik, Israel]
Written on January 29, 2008 – 1:04 am
Ayelet Noff, Next Web WebTipr Israel
SeeToo which was founded in 2007, has just recently moved to public beta. SeeToo is a web-based application that allows people to invite others to watch home videos with them in real time. You can also chat while watching. In this manner, SeeToo allows you to share videos with people you want to share them with and not with the whole world. The video isn’t saved to any server and won’t be available on the Internet afterwards. Users can share video files of any size and don’t need to upload files anywhere.
Basically the process works like this: You download the SeeToo application to your PC. This application takes any video on your desktop, compresses it, and streams it right from your computer to the SeeToo Web page that is hosting the chat. You select a video file from your computer. You invite a friend by sending an automatically generated invitation over your preferred IM service or by sending the link in an email. When the invitee clicks on the link, the viewing experience begins. The great part is that the invitee does not need to install anything in order to start watching the video. The downside is that unlike in Meebo Rooms, where you can watch embeddable videos with a bunch of people, SeeToo only allows you to watch a video with one person at a time.
Though SeeToo provides a useful service, it faces fierce competition from Meebo as mentioned earlier and PalTalk which enables real time shared video viewing with a lot more people as well. I’d advise SeeToo to enable shared viewing with a a group of people as soon as possible if they want to offer a real challenge to their competitors and gain a larger share of the market.
The application is currently only available for Windows. A Mac version is scheduled for release next year.
Written on January 14, 2008 – 3:10 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
As you might know, this blog has WebTipr’s all over the world who tip us whenever something interesting happens in their country. Today, Yaniv Solnik from Israel emailed me that Yahoo is entering the Israeli market. They’re opening a new research and development office in the Matam high-tech park in Haifa, next to rivals Google and Microsoft.
In an attempt to break the dominant position of Google, Yahoo is partnering with Israeli’s leading portal Walla. Yahoo’s search engine will be embedded in the portal. The remarkable thing is that search engine’s name will remain the same: Walla Search. This implies that Yahoo is purely aiming for the search-advertising market and not so much for brand recognition.
This development in some ways supports Jimmy Wales’ statement about quality search he made in an interview I had with him recently, where he argued that quality search is becoming a commodity. Perhaps it’s no longer necessary to market a search engine on its own because every big engine out there has a certain quality by now. It’s just about getting a piece of the search-advertising pie.
And the pie is pretty good in Israel: the Israeli Internet advertising was estimated at $90 million in 2007, 10% of the total advertising. Of this figure, search engine advertising took about half, $40-50 million, the large majority of which went to Google. There’s also a lot of technical talent in Israel, with companies such as Incredimail and ICQ being spawned from that location.
So what’s next? Will Yahoo do the same in other countries?
[WebTipr: Yaniv Solnik, Israel]
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