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March 1, 2006

Lunch In Israel: six startups, a VC and a blogger

Michael Arrington

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Last Sunday I attended an ad hoc tech lunch in Tel Aviv, Israel to meet six great web 2.0 startups there. Attending were founders from I4giveu, Maxthon, Raw Sugar, Spotback, Triplay and Yedda. Daniel Cohen from Gemini Israel Funds, Ouriel Ohayon (TechCrunch France author) and other tech enthusiasts were there as well.

We had a great meal and a great discussion. My pictures from the event are up on flickr here.

The six startups that were represented include:

I4giveu

Founder Alon Carmel is a gifted designer and developer and is getting ready to launch his stealth project I4giveu. Very few details on the service were revealed, but as always I love the email collecting landing page with promises of amazement in a very short time. Sign up here. One thing Alon did say was this: “Each user will earn his reputation from angel to devil according to his post ranked by other community users.” Sounds like fun!

Maxthon Browser

Netanel Jacobsson represented Maxthon Browser, the controversial but popular IE based browser that has surpassed 50 million downloads. Ouriel Ohayon writes about Maxthon here.

Raw Sugar

The executive team of Raw Sugar is based in Silicon Valley, the development effort is led by Frank Smadja out of Haifa, Israel. I’ve written about Raw Sugar on TechCrunch previously, and they are moving toward launch of a new feature which will automatically import tag and category information from blogs to create a single browsable and searchable directory. Great stuff.

Spotback

Spotback founders Micha Kaufman and Amit Kaufman gave me an early look at credential-protected Spotback, which is going to be a winner. Look for a full profile soon, but Spotback is a personalized news and rating/sharing site that has very strong features and will give front runners like Newsvine a real run for their money. Design and functionality is top notch. Sign up for the beta here. I would not be surprised if Spotback received joint Israel-US VC funding in the very near future.

Triplay

Yaron Orenstein spoke to me briefly about Triplay, a very young company that is looking to create a cross-platform mul­ti­me­dia platform (computer-mobile-television). There are very few details on the site, but Triplay looks interesting. “Think People NOT technology…TriPlay’s Super Messaging service will enable people to easily communicate all types of media and content across their PC, TV, and Mobile devices.” Look for a full review on MobileCrunch soon.

Yedda

I’ve been talking to Yaniv Golan and Avichay Nissenbaum, the founders of Yedda, since last December. See my teaser post on them from January. Yedda should be taking the wrapper off their service within the next few weeks, and I’ll be dong a full profile.

All of these entrepreneurs are humble and flat out brilliant. I’m excited to see good stuff coming out of Israel, and look forward to watching these six new companies grow.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Nachum Kligman

    March 1st, 2006 at 10:40 pm

    I wish I knew you were here, we could have made it 7 start-ups and a VC. If you are still in town I would love to take you out to dinner and have a shmooz.

  2. Michael Arrington

    March 1st, 2006 at 10:51 pm

    Nachum, Tell me all about qoof! Please put in a profile - top left sidebar.

  3. Noam Lovinsky

    March 1st, 2006 at 11:00 pm

    Israel? Michael you are all over the place. I love the domain names that sound like mixed up Hebrew words.

  4. Jack Thorogood

    March 1st, 2006 at 11:06 pm

    It’s a healthy state of affairs that Isreal has events like this, where a group of similar stage, similar sector startups can get together.

    I’m guessing this sort of network effect must be pretty beneficial for those involved.

  5. Saul Weiner

    March 1st, 2006 at 11:52 pm

    I wonder about the long term viability of Maxthon. As MSFT start to wake up (and they’ve shown signs, my gut says they’ll follow a path similar to Mozilla) w.r.t.; extensions; so that alternatives and heavy add-ons lose their appeal. Tested IE7 extensively and I figure their tab browsing functionality will remove much of the pure IE-Maxthon gap. But that may just be me.

  6. unspammable

    March 2nd, 2006 at 12:12 am

    ‘Yedda’ is Hebrew for ‘knowledge’, for those interested..

  7. Melvyn

    March 2nd, 2006 at 12:50 am

    Why is Maxthon considered “controversial”?
    BTW, nice blog. I’ve only recently started looking here and wish I’d known about this as I’d have come along too.

  8. israelist

    March 2nd, 2006 at 2:03 am

    it’s about time more Israeli start-ups devote themselves to internet ventures. maybe Google’s new R&D center in Israel could give it another push forward.

  9. Yosef

    March 2nd, 2006 at 6:30 am

    Baruch Hashem, great to see Israeli start ups. I didn’t know Maxthon was Israeli, from the other post it seemed like they were based out of China.

    I’m sure there are many more start ups in Israel. It’s great that they are being recognized, as Israel is one of the centers of technological advancements.

  10. Yos

    March 2nd, 2006 at 7:00 am

    Google in Israel? There´s an uproar over China but when this is a place that uses torture, assasination, exile as a matter of course (against both its own citizens and Palestinians).

    The biggest national startup is the Berlinesque wall to seal off apartheid-style bantustans that stain our humanity.

    Let´s not push this from our minds.

  11. Daniel

    March 2nd, 2006 at 8:18 am

    you know, its probably the compression,
    but that photo looks like the peeps were all shopped in.
    You probably never went to Israel and those people were never together! ;)

  12. T

    March 2nd, 2006 at 9:21 am

    So, uhh, why haven’t you blogged anything about the details of the conversation? Pictures and bios are cool but what about the guts!

  13. Nir

    March 2nd, 2006 at 9:47 am

    Yos, check your facts. Both about Israel and about Google in China.

  14. Ted

    March 2nd, 2006 at 10:33 am

    There will always be controversey about Israel until they define their borders and create a fair constitution for all their citizens.

    However, my experience in the tech sector there has been that people are proud of their country but non nationalistic (perhaps this is true of geeks everywhere), and generally stay out of political issues. We should cut them a break and not judge them for the problems the country faces.

  15. Ghibertii

    March 2nd, 2006 at 10:57 am

    Are there any Palestinian start-ups you are going to visit Michael? or maybe the guys you ate with could speak to what is happening in Palestine with regards to technology.

    I am asking this as I am truly interested on how technology is playing a role in Palestine? or is there any technology? I would assume there is nothing going on? Could technology be a bridge to building relationships? As you said could “tech guys/gals” break down some barriers?

    Ted–politics for me plays an important role in the companies I do business with in my every day life. (who I buy my food from, gas, clothing…I care) And there [companies above] “politics” would most certainly play into whether I did business with them.

  16. Nas

    March 2nd, 2006 at 1:50 pm

    I am sorry but I will never confess or share or forgive on a site with this error

    http://www.i4giveu.com/email.php?action=send

    they are really in beta

  17. stuart

    March 2nd, 2006 at 2:42 pm

    Maxthon is considered controversial because it always sparks heated arguments as some people consider it to be an alternative to IE - but in actual fact it is just the IE engine with a different wrapper.

    To be honest, I’m not sure how Maxthon is relevant to “Web 2.0″ and to the TechCrunch website.

  18. Ventue Capital Cafe

    March 2nd, 2006 at 3:40 pm

    Michael,

    I was delighted to read about your trip to Israel. I’ll be happy to discuss with you other interesting Israeli start ups (my own ‘baby’ included :) )

  19. Tal

    March 2nd, 2006 at 4:06 pm

    Wow, it is so cool they are so new and promising. They are going to use tags and social networking. It is so Web 2.0! Of course, all we have now is an e-mail collection landing page but you will see, we are soon going to build a major mash up with Google maps. Did we miss any Buzz word? Forgive my cynicism, but I must say that I can not find so many differences between these startups and regular developers who build sites. The only difference I find is the hubris.

  20. Rikelme

    March 3rd, 2006 at 3:57 pm

    Ghibertii - Check out this link for a peek into the Palestinian startup scene.
    And regarding politics and business - you might find the following discussion interesting. I do suggest that if you decide on mixing them, make sure you know all the facts before taking a decision. Usually it takes a visit to the region in question, and talking to the people on both ends of the political debate. Or, you could just believe those guys on TV, they have a reputation for getting their facts right :-)

  21. Melvyn

    March 5th, 2006 at 5:10 am

    Had to happen. Mention the ‘I’ country and someone always comes out with some ill-researched, rant that masquerades as fact. So many want the Jews to just lay down and die quietly.
    “The biggest national startup is the Berlinesque wall to seal off apartheid-style bantustans that stain our humanity.”
    Where to begin….? I’ll let the Israeli Defence Forces answer this rubbish.
    http://snipurl.com/n78h (2mb ppt presentation)
    Plenty more information is available here: http://snipurl.com/n78j

  22. Orli Yakuel

    March 6th, 2006 at 11:56 am

    http://net.nana.co.il/Article/.....amp;sid=10

  23. moshe

    March 6th, 2006 at 1:30 pm

    Another web 2.0 application from Israel is Myhommy.com , personal home page using ajax and other web 2.0 tech.

    soon version beta 3.0 will be released.

  24. Michael

    March 7th, 2006 at 10:38 am

    I know that these guys are Israeli too: http://www.makidi.com

    No doubt the scene is flourishing there

  25. m

    June 14th, 2006 at 11:23 am

    where are the women?

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