Posts Tagged 'orli yakuel'

Interlude.fm, Fiddme take Techonomy by storm

Techonomy 2010

Techonomy 2010

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.

7 companies presented yesterday at Techonomy 2010: AppsFire (video), Bulloonz (video), Fiddme (video), Interlude (video), Omek Interactive (video), SircleIt (video), and ZBang (video). Each presenter is allocated 10min, followed by a Q&A section from judges (and crowd). Voting is done by audience, text messaging their winner (SMS). Videos courtesy of Geek Media.

Interlude.fm

Interlude.fm

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

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.

Israeli Start-Ups ROCK @ TC50

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…

RedBeacon won 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.

TC50: The Video (video by animoto, music by Chamillionaire).

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Six Israeli Start Ups You Need to Know

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.

The event featured six alpha staged start-ups (hoody, face.com, GRAZEit, Vetrinas, tra.cx and sense of fashion), each had 7 minutes on stage, followed by questions from the panel and finally an American Idol style vote – text messaging (although some voices in the crowd called for twitter, which was heavily used through out the event – 600 twits in under 4 hours).

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.

Links:
Orli Yakuel – rising from the recession, six new Israeli start-ups
Flixwagon – videos of (some of) the start-ups (thanks to Niv Calderon)
BloGiza – Techonomy 2009
Hillel FuldTechonomy 2009: great start-ups, amazing event
Qwiji web show – Techonomy 2009
Techonomy website

My 5 Favorite Enterprise 2.0 tools

I’ve been talking recently about some of IBM’s social software solutions, and even shared some screenshots with you, but until now – no list. Why? Well, I’m not that of a list guy. Top 10, top 5, top 2 – there are too many lists, and often people are posting ‘my top xx list of..’ instead of writing something that has more meaning, but more time-consuming (to write).

Still, after reading Orli‘s post of My 15 Favorite Web 2.0 Sites (2008) at her Go 2 Web 2.0 site, I decided it’s time to post a list of my own. IBM is really a technology and innovation oriented company, and we have numerous enterprise 2.0 tools – some internal while others matured to IBM solutions. Three of my fav five started off as an internal project of some research dude, who then published his project internally, in our ‘technology greenhouse’, aka TAP – Technology Adoption Program‘. TAP is basically how IBM embraces innovation and technology, by encouraging its employees to develop and pilot new technologies, that might mature one day and become IBM solutions. If innovation and technology interests you (and it should), read the whitepaper IBM published about TAP.

Here goes, my fav five list of enterprise 2.0 tools:
Lotus Sametime (instant messaging)
I know, IM is not an enterprise 2.0 tool per se, but if we’re talking about connecting people with knowledge, IM is as good as it gets. Lotus Sametime celebrated earlier 2008 its 10th birthday, and with over 100 million corporate users, is the leading IM platform to date. At IBM, the daily usage of IM has surpassed that of emails, and personally I chat between 10-30 times a day, unique chats. The tool gathers its employee information from our employee directory (see fav #5), saves chat history (if I wish to), works with my IP phone, and with the public gateway I can chat with business partners and AOL/Gtalk/ICQ/Yahoo users.

Dogear (social bookmarking)
Ultimately one of my favorite ‘web 2.0 that made the enterprise 2.0 leap’ tools. Dogear actually started as a TAP project within IBM some 3 years ago. Since then The Dog attracted many (internal) early adopters, until 14 months ago – when Dogear was introduced to the market within Lotus Connections, IBM’s social software for the business solution. At IBM we have some 500,000 links, 800 of those are mine 🙂 There’s a Firefox extension (dogear this, search), private/public options and the ability to import del.icio.us bookmarks (among other features) – Super COOL!

Cattail (file sharing)
Again, another TAP graduate. Contrary to belief, you can’t find MP3s or Dexter Season 2 at Cattail – but you can find other kinds of knowledge: customer presentations, competitive analysis, reviews, analyst reports, whitepapers, screenshots, solutions overviews and much more. Yes, it’s basically a document repository, like a wiki (which is also available internally at IBM), but the social aspects that were added to Cattail makes it a hugh success internally. In fact, some Cattail features will be incorporated in a future release of Lotus Quickr… but you didn’t hear it from me.

IBM w3 (intranet)
Probably the best corporate intranet out there, and I’m not saying that because I used to editor-in-chief the local Israeli site. With some 400,000 employees worldwide, 30 something languages, thousands of roles and expertise, IBM On Demand Workplace (aka w3) is the one stop shop for every employee and manager working at Big Blue. The abundance of external articles and internal news pieces are obvious, but I’ll just mention the ability to download any software internally – without IT, manage your passwords, locate people and expertise, personalized and role-based homepage, track stocks, work with your opportunities, semantic tagging, experience new research projects, watch and download webcast and podcasts – should I say more?

Fringe (web 2.0 employee directory)
Again, TAP graduate. Fringe (source unknown) is an enhanced employee directory, aka BluePages, which hosts over 450,000 employee profiles (including task ids, assignee in/out, etc). Each profile contains some general information from our HR systems (timezone, organizational tree, dept., contact info, etc), but there are also fields for user generated content: skills, CV, customers, experience, teams and communities and photo. I know, a photo is very obvious in today’s web 2.0 arena, but IBM campaigned internally for profile photos some 6 years ago, when digital cameras had 2MP… Fringe also adds social software capabilities, such as adding friends and building a network (facebook anyone?), adding RSS links, showing your social presence (second life avatar, flickr, del.icio.us, twitter) and updating your status (which can be synced with your IM status – nice).

Meet my fav five
If you interested in some of these tools and technologies, there’s an excellent opportunity to watch (some of) them in action – in our KM and Collaboration User Forum, Monday Sep. 8th. Register now, seating is limited.




Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.