alarm:clock

Web 2.0 - Monday, June 4, 2007

Israel Alert: Top 10 Web 2.0 Wonders

The a:c has investigated the Israeli Web market and startups and hereby announce our Ten Israeli Startups Waking Up the Web from alarm:clock, with runners-up.

BTW - This is the third installment in our series of national Web 2.0 leaders. Previously we broke down Canada and France.

Some of the criteria for our choices: 1) Privately held 2) great founders 3) consistent execution on business plans 3) innovation, and 4) user uptake (based on sources like Comscore, Statbrain, Alexa ranking, and blog buzz).

Helping us again with the list is TechCrunch.fr publisher and Israeli VC Ouriel Ohayon. Ouriel is also the gracious host behind the Israeli Internet mixer iDrink which is convening next in Tel Aviv in beginning of July (wear your shorts, should be warm).

Ouriel describes the Israeli Web scene like this:

"These recent years Israeli has turned out to be a central place in the global internet industry with a blossoming ecosystem of entrepreneurs, investors, bloggers, providers and technical expertise . The challenge for Israeli company is to immediately manage to succeed in a foreign market since the local market is very small. Companies like Shopping.com proved it can be done and there are promising young companies as well as intensive deal flow that are doing a great job."

A survey by the Israel Venture Capital Research Center finds that Israeli Internet companies raised $64M in the first quarter of 2007 - highest in 5 years. $64M represents 16% of all capital raised in Q1 in Israel.


Jajah
HQ: Founded in Ra'anana, with development there, but new HQ in Mountain View.
Funding: Intel and TMobile recently invested in a $20M round. Sequoia has also invested.
Business type: Free/cut-rate international mobile calls via VoIP.
Made the cut: Jajah says it currently has about 2.5M customers. Jajah has named a new CFO who has IPO experience. Intel and Tmobile deals might make it the space leader behind only Skype.
Competitors: Skype, Rebtel, OQO, Truephone, Fring and others.
Read - a:c post

Aniboom
HQ: Tel-Aviv
Funding: Evergreen invests $4.5M.
Business type: Animation portal. aniBOOM allows animators to upload their original animations (YouTube for animations). Recently the site had a competition with over 1,500 movies and top prize of $25K.
Made the cut: Sure video is bigger than animation, but it's nice to have a secondary niche to yourself. We are hard pressed to find many serious competitors here. Sure you can find animations on YouTube but there is no community around the art like you find with aniBOOM.
Competitors: Mytoons.
Read - NewTeeVee profile

Metacafe
HQ: Tel-Aviv and Palo Alto
Funding: $15M from Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital, plus $5M in a prior round.
Business type: Online video site. Calling card is fewer videos, higher quality than YouTube. Advertising business model.
Made the cut: Newish CEO Erick Hachenburg recently came over from EA. Its hard to be a runner up in a space where number one, YouTube, is so dominant and is hurting most of the competition. The company may have hired Lehman Brothers to shop them to Yahoo and Microsoft, and were asking for $200-$300M, but TechCrunch reports talks stalled due to traffic dip. Metacafe is very strong internationally.
Competitors: Blip.tv, VideoEgg, Dailymotion, YouTube, Veoh, Guba, Revver, Google Video. Grouper, Jumpcut, AOL, Eyespot.
Read - Techcrunch post

Speedbit
HQ: Haifa
Funding: Yossi Vardi is an investor in the company and founding investor of ICQ (acquired by AOL) along with STI Ventures.
Business type: Its download accelerator is integrated into the browser and
may speed up downloads by up to 300% . Its compatible with any Internet connection (Dial-up, Cable, DSL, etc.)
Made the cut: Speedbit recently crossed the 100M registered users and 1B files transfered mark.
Competitors: Bittorrent, Steam.
Read - BusinessWeek profile

Foxytunes
HQ: Haifa
Funding: Seeking investors.
Business type: Control more than 30 media players (iTunes, WinAmp, Windows Media Player, etc.) from your browser window. More recently it launched a sort of wikipedia for musicians with a Pageflakes type interface.
Made the cut: Everybody loves FoxyTunes. Plus, with LastFM getting a big buyout from CBS, online music startups are again validated.
Competitors: Hard to peg as they do several things and integrate with potential competitors.
Read - Mashable profile

MySupermarket
HQ:
Funding: Just raised $6M from Greylock and Pitango.
Business type: Grocery shop price comparison
Made the cut: There are any number of eCommerce comparison sites but for grocery store visits there is a void. The company currently operates in the UK but we expect them to expand to the US and elsewhere with this model and to become a hit.
Competitors: Impossible to find strong competitive service.
Read - Searchengineland profile

Zlango
HQ: Ramat Hasharon
Funding: Zlango raised $12M from Benchmark and Accel
Business type: Emoticon language for Web and mobile messaging to augment your :), LOLs and FTWs and ZOMG!
Made the cut: Part of us says this might be Israel's Pets.com. We don't use emoticons, but on the chance that kids go with it, Zlango would own a generations vernacular and there have got to be ways to squeeze money from owning a global language.
Competitors: It's unique.
Read - a:c profile

MyHeritage
HQ: Bnei Atarot
Funding: One of the major investors in the online gambling site Empire Online, Aviv Reis, has invested $3M with a partner.
Business type: The site allows users to share family photos, showcase their family tree online, and organize family events. Through the site's face recognition technology, users are also able to organize and auto-tag their digital photos. In addition, they can find their own photos or those of their ancestors submitted by other users, as well as discover ancestors and relatives based on facial similarity. It also has viral features like Find My Celebrity Look Alike.
Made the cut: Competitor Geni.com has some of the strongest mo of any startup and we think MyHeritage is cooler. Older giant The Generations Networks does $150M in business here through subscriptions.
Competitors: Geni, Zoof, OneGreatFamily, The Generations Networks (Genealogy.com, Ancestry.com)
Read - Haaretz profile

WeFi
HQ: Founded in Israel with current HQ in Mountain View.
Funding: Lightspeed and Pitango have invested.
Business type: Combines social/Web with wireless and with location-based services with a goal of helping us to find hotspots.
Made the cut: Finding WiFi hotspots and good signal strength continues to be a pain and there are no reliable answers. WeFi, if it gets some adoption, will power ahead of older services like JiWire.
Competitors: RadiusIM and Skyhook.
Read - a:c profile

eSnips
HQ: Herzliya
Funding: eSnips has received investments from Greylock Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds.
Business type: Social content-sharing site where users can publish and share any media type - pictures, music, videos. Launched a marketplace for users to sell creations.
Made the cut: 2M registered users and over 10M unique visitors a month. Tough management: Yael Elish, former VP of Strategic Development at Commtouch (NASDAQ: CTCH), is the founder and CEI. The company was initially funded by Nahum Sharfman, formerly the founder of both shopping.com (NASDAQ IPO in 2004, later acquired by eBay) and Commtouch.
Competitors: Plum
Read - Read/write profile