This morning is the kickoff of TWS2009, an event organized by Israeli financial newspaper Globes, and leading Israeli startup blog, the.co.ils with its founder Yaron Orenstein. TechCrunch, in its continued support of Israeli startups, is proud to be a media partner.
The event is aimed at showcasing ten promising Israeli startups and to serve as a networking platform for the individuals and companies leading Israel’s startup scene. All ten companies were chosen by a world-class panel of judges, ranging from über-Angel investor Ron Conway, to legendary ICQ founder and current founder and CTO of Dotomi, Yair Goldfinger.
Below are the official company descriptions for the ten startups chosen by the judges to present their products on stage in front of over 700 private and institutional investors, executives and entrepreneurs:
Shidonni is a web based virtual world for young kids, based on the simple joy of drawing. In Shidonni, kids draw their virtual pets and play with them as they magically ‘come alive’. After creating their pets, children enjoy over 30 different activities and games featuring their own creations and can even share their creation with their friends.
Confidela provides businesses and individuals with hassle-free document control, tracking and protection services to facilitate the sharing of sensitive documents with customers, partners or suppliers. Confidela’s flagship SaaS product, WatchDox, is the easiest way for organizations to send documents securely, and control and track who views, edits, prints or forwards them.
Cmycasa is a first of its kind “Handshake service” between home owners and furniture retailers. With Cmycasa, users of real estate web sites and “do-it-yourself portals” will be able to visualize in stunning photo-realistic 3D how their new home will look once furnished to their taste.
Cellerium is the maker of MobileCanvas, a mobile application platform that delivers rich, mobile tailored web experiences across leading mobile platforms. Cellerium AppOnce approach resolves device and operating system fragmentation and combines a rich UI experience that rivals client centered applications with the flexibility of web deployment.
ContextIn is a semantic media-buying platform for display-advertising. Using semantic algorithms for automatic extraction of the discussed topics in web pages, ContextIn addresses the display advertising market problems of absence of visibility and control over the media-buying and poor performance, especially over user-generated-content sites. ContextIn offers a new and innovative solution, which proved to show significant increase in the online campaigns returns, using automatic ads targeting, real-time bidding, unique BI data and dynamic ad-creative creation according to the web-site content.
Tweegee is a pioneering destination site designed exclusively for kids. The site empowers children and pre-teens, ages 7 to 12, to express themselves creatively and safely in an innovative and customized online environment. Tweegee integrates social networking, digital content, and interactive tools to offer a complete web platform for kids. Tweegee’s platform has been released with great success in Russia and soon in Turkey and many other countries. (Tweegee debuted at TechCrunch50 2008).
KIDO’Z is a web operating environment intended for children between the ages of 3-8yrs. KIDO’Z creates a personal protected Internet space with a collection of special tools that enable the children, for the first time, to carry out everything that adults do on the Internet; but simply and intuitively, and without needing to know how to read or write.
CamSpace is a ground breaking computer vision platform that connects the virtual and the real world through motion games, experiences, activities and navigation of application and websites through your browser and using any standard webcam. The platform can detect human gestures and turns everyday products (like cans, bottles, boxes, etc) or objects into exciting computer controllers that can operate new or existing games and applications. The company is active in the advertising space (creating games and experiences based on products), in the educational space and in the social/fun gaming space. (Disclosure: I advised the company in the past).
Virtual Web provides innovative social network marketing solutions. Its SociaLAVA™ platform enables online publishers of any scale to instantly deploy a fully-functional social network as a transparent layer over their existing websites, powered by a unique social network interaction analysis engine™. Publishers can offer users personalized content to keep them on the site for longer visits, enhance conversion rates, monetize their sites through segmented ads, increase site ‘stickiness’ and link a consistently growing number of online communities to their domains using a unique community-clustering mechanism.
Reimage is a fast growing company that offers a web-based service that automates all PC repairs (due to software problems), and makes PC’s run better than new using unique boosting technologies. To date, Reimage has repaired tens of thousands of Windows based computers.
Congrats to the TWS2009 startups. Looks like there are some really good ones in the list. Will be keeping an eye for them in the future.
- Darren at AdExcel dot Com
Big congrats to all presenting startups on TWS2009
Funny that the Israeli startup which won the pan-European Startup2.0 competition didn’t make it to the list
Meant to include http://bit.ly/s6UqT as well…
just like Darren said, some of these startups are quite interesting. Looking forward to see more of the israeli startups – these guys are quite smart
Lots of them are designed for the kids!
BORING!!!
The camspace was the only interesting thing out there… and it should be packed as a hardware and not a software, so I advise that company to make a hardware piece with a camera built in and make it so it can be plug&play.
KIDS Startups on the high..
How about flyscreen????
Greatest mobile app to grace symbian. And it’s Israeli!
Good luck to all the start-ups! It is nice to see some innovation coming from Israel.
Great conference, I’m having a blast. Kudos to Yaron.
Few tools are quite useful, thanks for sharing!
If TC must support a country, it should be India for its secular government, the loans it continues to give to the US government, and whose IT industry supports many of the US and European companies stay afloat during these hard times.
What has Israel and its startups done for US during the current recession?
An Israeli guy organized an Israeli competition for Israeli startups and it seems interesting enough to be published on TechCrunch. It’s quite likely that if such interesting competitions would be held in other countries, they’d also be covered by TC.
It was a great event! Thanks everyone for selecting us – CONTEXTin (http://www.contextin.com – semantic media buying platform) for the people’s award!
CamSpace looks promising. Israel has always been in strong in Computer Vision, Visualization and Image Processing research, owing to obvious reasons. I have worked with some brilliant people in these fields and they were alumni of Hebrew Univ, Weizmann Inst., Ben-Gurion Univ.
Cellerium, the maker of MobileCanvas, is another startup to keep an eye on.
I look forward to seeing more innovation coming from that country.
This is a most impressive lineup.
Really Liked CamSpace and ReImage.
Alot of the CEO’s listed on TWS2009 have Facebook profiles, which you can request them as a friend.
I place great confidence in TechCrunch so since you’re a media partner I feel compelled to let you know that reimages site has been hacked and continues to be so. All pages has been injected with this exploit:
http://blog.unm...till-prevalent/
For a service that itselfs claims to clean viruses from peoples computer I find unacceptable that their own level of security let’s them get hacked and continue to be so for days …
So if you’re on a windows computer don’t visit reimage since you risk getting the exploit.
And TechCrunch, please stop linking to reimage until the clean up their site.
I’ve notified reimage of the issue.