A newly launched SEO platform called ‘Drive’ by Jerusalem-based RankAbove wants to assist large websites—ones that range from 1000 pages to as far as several million—to get the most out of their SEO juice. In many ways, RankAbove is the flipside of hotshot Kenshoo, which aims at the same target market but with an SEM solution.

Launched into beta, Drive provides a complete SEO management interface, handling everything from keyword research and on-page analysis, to link building and acquisition. The product begins by downloading and parsing the entire website on its servers, generating a complete analysis which is repeated upon site updates. Artificial intelligence and predictive modeling are used to determine how SEO changes will affect site pages—remember these can be in the millions—and keywords, which can reach up to the tens of thousands.

The site which is automatically divided into sections by Drive, can now be inspected for all SEO issues, with granularity reaching all the way down to single pages and individual page elements. Drive also analyzes competitor sites in order to determine the difficulty of ranking for each keyword. There is no limit on the amount of keywords and Drive will even perform automated tail keyword discovery. Testing the impact of new keywords and other SEO tweaks and fixes on the site takes minutes—an obvious plus compared to pushing it out to production and waiting for the ‘Google Dance’.

I’ve asked RankAbove to run an analysis on TechCrunch.com. Here are a few SEO basic issues it identified:

• TechCrunch rarely uses the <h1> tag. This affects proper keyword insertion in the page header tags that lets the search engines know the more relevant keywords for a particular page.
• Company Index pages all have the same title. Duplicate title issues prevent search engines from understanding which is the main page.
• Images could use better <alt> tagging. This impedes screenshots, pictures, and company logos to come up in image search results and will cause them to rank poorly for relevant searches.

Unlike most startups that begin their business from scratch, RankAbove been running an SEO consultancy business for several years. This has had multiple benefits: First, the team was able to gain product/market-fit insights from real customers. Second, the company is in a position where it can now leverage existing relationships with agencies and online retailers to establish design and beta customers, one of which is 1-800-Flowers. Finally, a major upside is that the SEO consultancy business has allowed RankAbove to self-fund development, placing it in a better negotiation position with investors. I’m told by CEO Mayer Reich, that the company is in negotiation with several investors to complete a Round A in the neighborhood of $1.5M.

I’ve been following RankAbove’s progress from the initial days of development and it’s one of the Israeli startups I’m most bullish about. Who knows, it might just be the next Kenshoo.

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Here’s a quirky story: Israeli iPhone app dev house ApParty released an app back in December 2008 called iFog (iTunes link).

The premise being that the user selects a photo which then has a steam effect superimposed upon it. The steam can be wiped away by running a finger over the screen surface. Blowing on the iPhone microphone fogs the screen back up.

Cute. Simple. And lucrative—it was bought 200,000 times for $0.99 a pop.

As soon as it was released, iFog climbed the iPhone app charts, reaching the number one download spot in most European counties and even made it into the top 20 in the US version of the App Store. Since then—unsurprisingly—sales have flattened to a steady pace of about 250 per week. Until two weeks ago, where out of the blue iFog’s sales surged again and more than doubled.

The two developers behind the app had no clue what the reason for this revitalization could possibly be.

A couple of days ago, the mystery began to finally unravel. A friend of one of the developers who happens to live in Miami asked whether it was possible that she saw iFog on TV. Fat chance seeing as ‘Television Ads’ isn’t on any line in the company’s P&L. The friend was able to recall though that she saw the app in a new T-Mobile myTouch commercial (embedded below). Lo and behold, none other than Dana Carvey is seen with the same exact app, except it actually happens to be a knock-off made for Android.

The ApParty guys added two and two together and realized that there was a spillover effect from the commercial, where iPhone owners that saw it rushed over to the App Store and found iFog.

Go figure, huh?

The T-Mobile commercial featuring Dana Carvey:

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Here are some hints: It’s listed on the NASDAQ. It was founded in Israel and its R&D center is located in Jerusalem. It has raised funding from high-profile angel investors Dr. Yossi Vardi and Ron Conway. Can you name the company?

The answer is—Answers.com.

Exemplifying that startups are long hauls, Answers.com, née GuruNet, has been plugging away since its founding in 1999. Ten years later, comScore’s September 2009 data places the reference and Q&A site as the 13th most popular site in the United States, pulling in 56.4M unique users. This is a whopping 25% increase on Answers.com’s August numbers.

I had a chance to speak to CEO Bob Rosenschein this morning, who attributes the increase to a few factors. First, there’s seasonality. Answers.com is familiar with a traffic surge that typically comes this time of year as a result of students getting back to school.

Second, Answers.com has chosen to integrate with comScore using Hybrid Measurement, a combination of server side and census measurement. This may have a real impact because sites that have chosen not to integrate in a similar manner may actually be detrimentally affected by comScore’s ability to gain better metric data from sites that have gone ahead with the integration. This means that comScore’s numbers can be off, but there’s nothing new under the sun here.

The third reason is a bit more interesting as it sheds light on a little known fact. Answers.com consolidated WikiAnswers—its user generated Q&A—site into the Answers.com domain, thereby capitalizing on the aggregated traffic. What’s interesting through is that WikiAnswers is on a tear, with 5.6M answers submitted by some 3.6M registered members. While attention to Q&A products/sites of late has focused on the likes of Vark and Hunch, WikiAnswers has just surpassed the 400-pound Q&A gorilla known as Yahoo! Answers, becoming the leading Q&A site on the web. Bet you didn’t know that.

In 2010 Answers.com will be placing particular emphasis on extending its products into the mobile and social networking arenas. We’ll have to wait and see if these catapult the company’s traffic up even further.

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Through the analysis TodaCell can go back to advertisers and recommend which campaigns will better perform on any of the inventory in its publisher network.

The technology doesn’t offer a ‘hit-the-ground-running’ proposition as it may take a month or two for TodaCell to analyze a publisher’s inventory in order to make ‘intelligent’ recommendations. Sure, a bit of downside, but I’m not aware of machine-learning technologies that offer instant results.

Another benefit TodaCell presents advertisers is that it’s not a blind network in which it’s unknown where ads will actually be served. Campaigns run using TodaCell do offer this type of transparency in advance, which is an important factor for most advertisers and their agencies.

The first I heard of TodaCell was in mid-2007 when it began pitching the local VC’s and angels, subsequently raising a seed round of $350K. Since then deals with companies such as Taptu, Fring, MobiLuck, MocoSpace and TuneWiki have extended TodaCell’s reach from literally zero to 26M unique mobile users per month (by its own account), split 60% US and 40% Europe.

Assuming this number is true, it situates TodaCell as a top 10 mobile ad network.

This traction may not actually be a complete surprise, considering the company’s founder and CEO is Moshe Vaknin, who was also the co-founder and CEO of ad-server company Checkm8. Vaknin was also a co-founder of AdWise, an online ad targeting company which back in 2001 was gearing for an IPO but imploded when its main customer went bankrupt—ah, the good ol’ Bubble 1.0 days. But clearly, ad-serving is something Vankin knows a lot about, and TodaCell is his first venture into the mobile realm of the business.

The $1M investment comes from AfterDox, an investment group comprised exclusively of angel investors who are all current or ex-Amdocs executives. This is an important point as collectively the group has a rolodex chock full of contacts spanning mobile operators and telecom players worldwide—an obvious benefit for TodaCell.

Update: Looks like VC Cafe broke the funding news back in June.

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Israeli startup Come2Play, which we’ve described as the Ning of social gaming networks, has provided this part of the equation since its founding in mid-2007. It’s now keeping up with the zeitgeist by adding a virtual economy in a box that could prove compelling to community sites.

Is there actual money being made? Indeed there is. Come2Play’s CEO, Alon Barzilay tells me that every 1000 users who visit Come2Play’s token store (via any of its games) generates $45 in revenue, split 50%/50% between publishers and Come2Play, and that is after developers get their 30% share off the top. This mind you is beyond the ad-rev share that extends across the same entities.

On the face of it this sounds very much like HeyZap’s recently launched payment platform. There are some key differences however, beginning with the fact that HeyZap focuses on single player games and only a fraction of its 12,000+ games are payment-enabled.

Come2Play’s game catalog is only 35 games deep, but all are multi-player and payment-enabled. The games can be embedded individually or as a channel/portal that includes social features such as game rooms, chat and leaderboards—features that are not available in HeyZap’s single player games.

The games encourage users to buy tokens ($1=1000 tokens)—via Paypal, Social Gold, Zong, credit cards or CPA offers—by allowing users to challenge one another with the winner taking the token bounty. Players can also use tokens to redeem rewards, such as game badges. Come2Play maintains a wallet-like account for the user which can be used in any game on its network, at any publisher site.

Come2Play built its virtual economy platform themselves and has gone ahead and integrated it into its open source multi-player API it released a year ago. Developers wishing to distribute their games through Come2Play’s network will need to integrate with this API, and the token monetization will come included. Since the monetization comes as a sort of wrapper around the game, developers won’t need to make any in-game code changes.

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At this very moment, at this very villa in the Israeli city of Hertzeliya Pituach, the final preparations are being made for what can be best described as ‘TwitterSense’—a way to automatically filter your Twitter stream so that the most relevant Tweets come out on top. The location in question is the home of my6sense, which currently offers a powerful way to filter news feeds. It is applying its filtering technology to Twitter and by the looks of it you’ll soon be able to follow as many Twitter users as you want and still never miss out on the most important tweets.

It took insistent prodding on my part to get my6sense to spill some of the beans and give me a sneak peak. The good news is that TwitterSense (my term, not theirs) is real and it works. The bad news is that it’ll take a couple of more months to be deployed. And yes, it could greatly improve the way we consume Twitter streams.

The advent of a TwitterSense offering could not be timelier as the onslaught of noise on Twitter has increased dramatically and its manageability has become a real pain point. Even Robert “The Stream Prince” Scoble has had to take dramatic measures, namely, slashing the number of users he follows on Twitter and befriends on Facebook. I, on the other hand, keep the number of people I follow on Twitter in the neighborhood of 150. This number works well for me, but I keep wondering whether I’m missing out on users who could provide insights relevant to my personal and professional interests. That is exactly where TwitterSense would come into play.

First, a quick recap on my6sense: The company has been building out what it calls ‘digital intuition,’ a content ranking technology that to date has been applied to RSS feeds to separate the signal from the noise. My6sense’s technology translates user actions such as Web navigation within and across various streams of content, and actions taken with various pieces of information in different contexts, into semantically-sensible implicit user feedback. The real beauty is that it requires zero intervention other than using the app itself. Here’s how I described my experience with the alpha release:

The “A-ha moment” took a couple of days of interacting with the product, but it came. Suddenly, very relevant info was floated to the top of the main “TOP MESSAGES” pane. By relevant, I mean posts I would absolutely have clicked on through my Reader, but would have had to sift through hundreds of posts before doing so.

A couple of weeks ago my6sense announced its new native iPhone app (iTunes link), which along with a few new features, presented a major user experience improvement over the original iPhone web app version. So far there is nothing seemingly compelling beyond our previous in-depth look into the company’s technology. But looks can be deceiving. Underneath the surface lies what could transform the way my6sense users consume Twitter.

TwitterSense in an extension of my6sense’s ranking technology and in this respect treats a user’s Twitter stream like an ordinary content source, much like an RSS feed. To begin with, my6sense has to differentiate between simple status updates/personal tweets and tweets which link to content. The differentiation is a must because its ranking algorithms require further optimization to be able to correctly float important simple/status tweets. In the short-term they have no plans to solve this particular challenge. Instead, the company is focusing on ranking tweets with links—and we all get quite a few of those. From my6sense’s perspective, your friends provide the first level of filtering. It then provides the second level by taking it upon itself to re-rank these Tweets so a users’ focus is directed to the information that is most important to them.

If you tend to click on links from specific friends on Twitter, those will get a boost in the rankings. But my6sense also looks at the underlying pages behind the links and figures out what topics those pages are about using its semantic engine. If those topics match your interests, as determined by your past reading and clicking behavior on the app, then those links rise to the top as well.

So the obvious question to ask is, why then if it rests upon my6sense’s existing technology isn’t it deployed already? First, there are challenges in ranking the content behind the link. A typical web page includes not only the post/article itself, but additional data and content as well. my6sense wants to make sure it ranks the intended content and this isn’t always trivial.

Second, there are scalability challenges. On average, a Twitter stream encompasses a greater mass of content than an average RSS feed. This means that my6sense has to go out and parse every piece of content behind every link in a user’s steam so it can analyze it based on the user’s ranking model. This requires extra processing power in order to avoid significant delays in ranking. My6sense did close a round of funding recently, but it can’t just throw money at the problem and solve it via brute force (i.e. just buy more machines).

I asked Barak Hachamov, the company’s founder and president, whether they’ll be offering TwitterSense integration for Twitter clients. His answer was that they do have such plans but it’s far too early to talk about them now.

My6sense plans to make TwitterSense publicly available in a couple of months or so. In the meantime, if you want to experience what it will behave like I suggest downloading my6sense’s native iPhone app to see how it works on RSS feeds. You won’t have to spend very long waiting to see the ranking magic since some backend improvements were made that get users to achieve the ‘A-ha moment’ I mentioned above much quicker, even within one or two brief sessions. There’s also a new digital intuition meter that provides users with feedback regarding the status of their preference model and indicates how strong their digital intuition is at that point in time.

We’ll be keeping a close tab on the upcoming release of this so called TwitterSense and reexamine it when it’s made publicly available in a couple of months.

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If you do much traveling this is one iPhone app you may actually be delighted to pay that $20. Also, there’s also a free version (iTunes link), although that version does not have push, the compelling feature of the app. If you’re quick though, you can grab one of the 40 free copies of the Gold version WorldMate is giving away to TechCrunch readers. Simply email techcrunch@worldmate.com and they’ll contact you if you’ve won.

WorldMate begins winning you over in the itinerary building stage. It offers a couple of ways to automatically build it for you. One way is to enter the info directly on WorldMate.com. The second is by email—manually, or using an Outlook toolbar. WorldMate is able to parse confirmation emails from over a hundred travel agencies, airlines, hotel chains, and car rental agencies. Once it has automatically pieced together all of your trip details and stored key data such as confirmation numbers, phone numbers and seat numbers, the itinerary is synced over-the-air to the iPhone app.

This is the point where the app’s killer-feature begins to shine. Having integrated with various data sources such as GDS, airline systems (including low-cost airlines that are not on GDS), the FAA and airports, WorldMate is able to monitor flight statuses for over 350 airlines worldwide. This allows them to send out immediate push notifications when flights are delayed, canceled, diverted, and even when there’s a gate change.

Now it’s certainly of value to know that changes to your flight have occurred, but it’s even better to be able to react to them, and the WorldMate app lets you do just that. For example, say your flight has been canceled, the app will help you find alternate flights to the destination. It will also assist you to book a hotel room. Here’s something pretty cool: WorldMate uses heuristics to sort the results so if it’s after 10pm, they’ll recommend a hotel near the airport, otherwise they’ll recommend a hotel near a choice of city landmarks.

The rest of the hotel hotel booking features available in both the free and premium versions are pretty useful as well. There are three ways to search for a hotel: Itinerary Location, for example, ‘Find hotel near my meeting with TechCrunch HQ’, Current Location, which utilizes the iPhones embedded GPS, and finally Standard Search, by specifying city, times, etc. Hotels are ranked according to the user’s preferences which are saved for future re-use. These include budget, brand, and amenities, which are all rated by importance to the user.

There are also some basic features that round off WorldMate as the Swiss army knife of apps for the business traveler. These include a self-updating exchange rate calculator for over a hundred currencies, worldwide weather info, home and travel destination clocks and a tip calculator.

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Here’s what I find strange about all this: I speak to VC’s and private investors regularly, and have never EVER heard anyone comment negatively on deal-flow based on the entrepreneur’s gender. Startups—at least this has been my experience—are weighted on the merits of the product, market and the team, but never on gender. Frankly, I can’t explain why female entrepreneurs are a rare commodity in our industry. (Feel free to enlighten me about the gender bias underpinning the tech industry in comments).

The situation in Israel is not much different. But it should only be the quality that counts… To that end, here are three Israeli female entrepreneurs worth keeping tabs on:

Amit Knaani is best known in the Israeli startup industry as the former Senior Product Manager of Wix.com. She quit the hot startup to join forces with Yami Glick, another well-known figure in the local startup scene. Together the two founded Vikido, a video messaging service designed to allow kids (3-9) and their parents to send and receive video messages using an an interface with no reading prerequisites.

A mother of two girls (hence her familiarity with the need for such a product), Amit has been in our little industry for 10 years now, starting as a photo editor at Israel’s largest news site Ynet. She then moved on to manage the biggest medical site in Israel doctors.co.il, doing everything from spec’ing to selling media to business development. It was there that she started thinking about the idea for Vikido, mostly due to gaps of communication experienced by sick kids (information, connection with friends and parents).

By then it was clear to her that she wanted to be involved in consumer products with strong community reach and the ability to make an impact on people and what they do on the web. That’s when the Wix gig came about.

Team Vikido is planning to launch its product in September. In the mean time they are hustling to get funding, writing code, and chronicling the trials and tribulations of startup life in a weekly article series on Ynet called ‘The Transparent Startup’.

Beta Access: Register here.

Twitter: Amit Knaani (@amitos), Team Vikido (@vikidoteam)

Orit Hashay has also been active in in Israeli startups for over 10 years, having taken on software and business development posts with public companies such as Emblaze and Comverse, as well as consulting for various Israeli startups.

Orit is also somewhat of a local serial entrepreneur. She’s founded a Yelp-ish review site called Ramkol.co.il and mit4mit.co.il, the second most popular wedding review site in Israel. Most recently Orit held the Entrepreneur in Residence role at Decima Ventures, where she was responsible for technical and market analysis. Decima is also where her newest venture, Vetrinas was born.

Vetrinas is a virtual shopping window to hundreds of stores from across the fashion Meccas of the world, be it London, New York, Paris or Milan. Vetrinas is targeting three segments: Consumers with an interest in high-fashion. Retailers that want to expose potential on/offline shoppers to specific products or brand advertising. And finally, shop window designers that can display their work (art) in order to attain job offers.

Orit coded all of Vetrina’s herself and intends to generate revenue by way of affiliation through the site and rev-share through widgets that will syndicate content to blogs and websites. Vetrinas is currently in Alpha.

Twitter: Orit Hashay (@orithashay), Vetrinas (@vetrinas)

Gali Ross is one those people you (or at least I) hated in school because she made you (me) look so lazy and unfocused. She took physics, math and political science. Not having gone unnoticed, she went on to become an intelligence officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and then later an Information Systems Engineering graduate of the Technion (Israel’s MIT).

She then joined eWave where she kept busy with project management and, afterward, marketing, sales and business development. Two years later she joined Israeli dev house Clementina as COO. That’s where she worked with Israeli startups such as my6sense, Spikko, and Footbo. Temptation was in the air and Gali couldn’t resist so she recruited a partner and founded Razoss.

Gali is still very protective of her product so details and access are limited. In vague terms it can be described as a browser-based content promotion platform, where the idea is to enhance the browser beyond content display, to content management and distribution.

Initial funding was provided by Dr. Yossi Vardi a little over a year ago and a second investment is near closing. The product is in private alpha, with a wider release intended in a few months.

Beta Access: Register here.

Twitter: Gali Ross (@galiross), Razoss (@razoss)

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Face.com made a splash when it launched Photo Finder it’s first Facebook app back in March. The app employed some pretty impressive facial recognition that scanned Facebook photo albums to discover untagged photos of users and their friends. Even though it was labeled an ‘Alpha’ release the app worked remarkably well, identifying individuals in photos impaired by bad lighting, low resolution and obstructions such as sunglasses. Since its launch Photo Finder has scanned more than 1.5 billion photos, identifying more than 2.3 million faces—not too shabby at all.

Today Face.com goes a step further by launching another Facebook application called Photo Tagger, which harnesses the company’s core facial recognition technology and gives it a productivity spin: bulk name tagging made easy.

We have 300 invites to give away, but be warned, Photo Tagger falls squarely into the “time vampire” category—so don’t say we didn’t warn you. Get your invite here.

The purpose of Photo Tagger is a simple one, to speed-up tagging of faces in Facebook photo albums. While ideal for users that upload large amounts of photos, it’s also a perfect fit for plain users that are just too lazy to add the name tag meta-layer. You know who you are folks…

Luckily, no matter what category of user you fall under, Photo Tagger is a snap to use and much like Photo Finder, works really well. You begin by selecting an album which can either be your own or that of your friends’. You can both browse for an album, or search by username or for a keyword featured in an album title (i.e. birthday, vacation, bar, etc.). That’s when the facial recognition kicks in and the app will begin its attempt to recognize individual faces. All of this happens pretty fast and by my testing took no longer than 30 seconds, even on albums with over a hundred photos.

Once scanning is complete, Photo Tagger presents a results page with a summary header that displays stats regarding the tagging progress, and a “Save to Facebook” button (more on this in a moment). The Faces view below the summary displays faces grouped by similarity—both ones the app was able to recognize and those it could not. There’s also an “Ungrouped” section on the bottom with faces that the app could not match to others.

Now it’s time for the productivity aspect to kick-in. There are a couple of ways to accept or change the photo tags: The first, in a sweeping manner that applies to the entire group, performed by selecting the Approve or Change All buttons. The second, by dealing with each photo individually using buttons overlaid upon each thumbnail.

Back to the “Save to Facebook” button. All approved Photo Tagger tags can be turned into official Facebook tags. The condition however is that it must be accepted by the album owner. If the current user isn’t the owner, a request is sent asking the owner approve the tag. This by the way is standard stuff enabled through Facebook’s APIs.

When a tag is accepted through Photo Tagger its thumbnail’s frame will go green. If and when it’s accepted as an official Facebook tag, a small Facebook logo will appear in the corner of the thumbnail. All of this is pretty clear when used in the app.

Face.com’s CEO Gil Hirsch explains that Photo Tagger is a result of his team’s ability to add new face-clustering technology on top of their core facial recognition. He went on to tell me that with each album scanned, Photo Tagger will get better at identifying faces already tagged.

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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.

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The one thing you have to keep in mind about DoNanza is that it keeps clear of offline gigs, so if you’re looking for an office job, DoNanza isn’t for you. It does however have 70,000 projects available right now, with 30,000 new projects added each week, or about 4,000 a day. There are 12 main categories with more than 400 sub-categories. The most active in terms of user-interest are (in the following order): Writing, Web Development, Graphic Design, Virtual Admin. Support, Translation, Marketing, SEO, and Programming.

DoNanza currently aggregates its freelance and crowd-source projects from 300 websites, with another 300 sites to be added in the coming months. Amazingly (or maybe not, really), 99% of the projects are indexed via scraping, with only a handful added manually.

There are a couple of main features I really like about DoNanza. First, its filtering tools are very clear and effective—nothing innovative, but often common-sense discovery tools are misguidedly cut from a public launch for some reason. On DoNanza, searches can be fine-tuned wit sliders on several levels, from Budget/Reward (Fixed/Hourly/Revenue-Share), to Project Type (Contest/Bidding/Other), to Time Left and Date Posted. The second useful feature is that each project’s details are displayed in an easy to skim form (see screenshot below). Again, not rocket science, but it makes the sometimes cumbersome chore of going through a myriad of search results a breeze.

DoNanza is also jumping on the ever-growing Twitter bandwagon by tweeting out new project notifications. Handles include: @dnzSEOfor SEO, @dnzWriting for Writing, @dnzPHP for PHP, @dnzDataEntry for Data Entry and more.

Demonstrating that it believes in freelancers, the DoNanza team outsourced much of its site development, including the UI, search engine, crawlers, as well as the indexing and data evaluation mechanisms. The company has yet to start making money but is planning on introducing sponsored links and projects in a couple of months. In the meantime, it’s pretty much a traffic and retention game.

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“Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You’ve GOT to be kidding,” thought Cowan. “No-brainer pass.”

Good news David, lightening may in fact strike twice for you because here’s your chance to invest in Colnect, a community site for collectors of coins, banknotes, stamps, phone cards and bottle caps. And no, I’m NOT kidding at all.

Colnect (Collect+Connect) is a collector’s community site that assists its users to organize, share, trade and sell their collectables. There are no fancy algorithms, the UI is modest—old school some may argue—and it’s literally a one-man show having been founded, coded and operated by 29-year-old Amir Wald. He’s still the only employee(!)

The core of Colnect is a community driven wiki where Contributors add content (collectibles), Editors make changes to existing items, and Coordinators supervise content contributions and provide permissions to Editors. Wald also employed crowd-sourcing to translate the site to 35 languages.

Colnect’s catalogs currently encompass 158K phone cards, 68K stamps, 15K coins, 15K banknotes and 5k bottle caps. Users have marked 11M items so far: 6.6M collectibles in wish lists, 4M in collections, and another 800K in swap lists. Wald tells me that in the last month alone over 650,000 items were marked in the system. He plans on continuously adding categories, with upcoming candidates being PEZ dispensers, Kinder Surprise toys, baseball cards, and waif for it—barf bags. Different strokes for different folks I guess.

Part of Colnect’s charm is that it really doesn’t try to impress you, it just aims to provide basic but critical utilities for collectors of mass-produced collectibles. Collectors can easily manage their inventory with personal collection, swap list and wish list management tools. There’s also auto-matching between collectors’ inventory and wish/swap lists (huge time saver I’m told). Then of course there are the run of the mill social features such as personal profiles, ratings, friends and private messages. These are all on top of the actual catalogs which are continuously updated and therefore a godsend to collectors.

All trades on Colnect are currently free of charge for now. There is however a premium membership option starting at just over $6 per month with the purchase of a one year subscription. Benefits include Custom Personal Lists, Premium Member Highlighting which helps member profiles and their items stand out, and the removal of ads across the site (AdSense and eBay ads are plastered everywhere).

So there you have it Mr. Cowan, your second opportunity to invest in stamps, coins and barf bags.

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I see new startups in this category almost weekly. We’re bearish on add-on plays because the “get them to download, install and use” parts are tricky – and monetizing those users is nearly impossible. In recent months, though, SimilarWeb’s name keeps popping-up and the reason may be the technology it’s spent two years building out. Sequoia Capital Israel, we’ve heard, is spending extra time looking into it and your typical add-on play doesn’t normally make their cut. So what is it about this little company?

On the surface SimilarWeb is everything you’d expect from a discovery Firefox/IE add-on. Once installed it docks to either side of the browser and displays similar sites, displayed as thumbnails or as a list. Users can rate each result with a thumbs up or down, the latter removing the result all together. Users can also suggest a site by pasting-in a URL. This not only customizes the user’s own results, it also impacts global results for all users. If you don’t want to install the add-on but still want to see it in action, try SimilarSites which pretty much mimics the experience in a web app.

Or Offer, CEO, was visibly uncomfortable every time I tried prying details about their technology, but finally relented with some general explanations: The backbone of SimilarWeb’s technology is based on multiphase analysis, which in plain English means that there are several engines running in the background, analyzing websites based on different mechanics, metrics and workflows. These include: user browsing trends, user ratings, tag analysis, ecosphere analysis, semantic breakdowns, and automated background research.

The company claims to have mapped millions of sites, and adding tens of thousands daily. This means that it will always suggest other sites, regardless of whether the site the user is currently on is a popular one, or one much further down the tail.

Nothing of the above stands out particularly or sheds light as to what’s so interesting about this company. A technical due diligence may be what’s necessary to truly understand SimilarWeb’s edge. No matter how you look at it though, the company is doing what it needs to be taken seriously… It has amassed thousands of users in the three months since its launch. Dr. Yossi Vardi is an investor and they seem to have Sequoia’s attention. Must be satisfying after two year’s worth of coding under the radar.

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In my initial review I tested my6sense’s technology which they chose to apply on an iPhone web app that basically acted like an RSS reader with, well, a sixth sense. The magical part was not only that it worked, it required me to do nothing but consume the content (in my case, blog posts). I didn’t have to rate content-to-interest relevance or assist the application in any way. It took a couple of days to achieve what I described as my “A-Ha Moment”

Suddenly, very relevant info was floated to the top of the main “TOP MESSAGES” pane. By relevant, I mean posts I would absolutely have clicked on through my Reader, but would have had to sift through hundreds of posts before doing so.

my6Sense will use the additional funding to advance R&D and its marketing efforts. It will also continue to focus on applying its technology in mobile applications. To this end, the company plans to release a native iPhone app in the very near future which we will be sure to cover.

Photo Credit: alles-schlumpf

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Since taking an in-depth look at Peer39 nearly a year ago, the company has shifted its focus from developing its own ad network to leveraging its semantic ad platform to transform publishers’ remnant ad inventory into a premium one. The company claims that 70-80% of publisher impressions are sold today as remnant inventory, and that its technology is perfectly suited to analyze these pages so they can instead be used to serve top-tier advertising inventory.

Take news sites as an example: These will often categorize themselves as “News” in ad server profiles but in reality they publish content that varies in categories—finance, health, travel, etc. Peer39’s SemanticMatch technology analyzes these pages in real time to determine what they’re really about. Amiad Solomon (CEO) tells me that they are able to shift up to 70% of news content into more sellable categories. Peer39 also offers SemanticProtect, a collection of ‘brand-protecting’ algorithms that can identify whether pages possess content that can be classified as objectionable or sensitive to advertisers (i.e. crime, terror, politics).

Integrating with Peer39 requires publishers to add a small piece of JavaScript on their site. On page-load, a request is made to Peer39’s servers, which analyzes the data semantically and assigns the most relevant and profitable advertising channel for the given page. This is where much of the company’s semantic and data mining algorithms come into play. Results are sent back instantly to the publisher and integrated within its ad serving systems allowing the most profitable semantic ad (display or text) to be displayed.

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Tickets for our Star Trek screening in Tel-Aviv are now available, get em’ while they’re hot right here.

This Thursday the 21st at 7pm we’re taking over the main screen in the Globus Movie Theater in Azrieli Center for a screening of the new Star Trek flick. There are 320 seats to fill and hopefully you can be one of those joining us.

We’re taking care of the ticket cost, but there will be a $2 charge just to minimize no-shows.

Thanks again to the sponsors that helped make this screening possible:

Kenshoo is an innovator in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) technology and applications with offices in Tel Aviv, London and San Francisco. MetaCafe, an independent online video site, makes it easy to find videos from top content creators – and help discover new ones. Conduit offers an on-demand Marketing Platform that helps more than 180,000 web publishers put their content and applications on a branded community toolbar to increase their site traffic, revenue and brand loyalty. And Eventbrite for helping with the cost of the tickets.

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Seventeen years later I am able not only to reach out to Her Majesty Queen Rania of Jordan, I am also one of the 46 users followed by Duff McKagen (@duff64), Gn’R’s former bass player. What made these things possible was Twitter (of course). The piping for 140-character thought bursts is what today connects an everyday, common Israeli, with the Queen of Jordan and a rock star.

In a recent post we wrote about Her Majesty joining twitter (follow her handle @QueenRania). We followed up with an interview request to find out how she is using Twitter both personally and to help change the world, and she graciously accepted. “Of course, I tweet,” she says. But unlike most of us, she tweets about taking her family to meet the Pope and working to give every child an education.

If you are unfamiliar with Queen Rania’s work, here’s what she’s been up to lately: Among her many activities in Jordan, Queen Rania focuses on promoting excellence and innovation in education. As UNICEF’s Eminent Advocate for Children, she is a staunch defender of children’s welfare. Queen Rania has also been vocal about the importance of cross cultural dialogue in fostering greater understanding, tolerance and acceptance across the world. Her YouTube initiative exemplifies this.

Below is the email interview I conducted with her:

TechCrunch: Could you tell us how you came to know of Twitter? Is it really you tweeting? And why do you prefer using Twibble and TweetDeck over other applications?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: I guess I first heard about it following the US election campaigns; there was quite a buzz around the creative use of social media in mobilizing people behind a common cause.

Since then, I’ve seen Twitter evolve into a dynamic and diverse medium for action as well as communication. Whether it’s raising money for malaria nets or promoting your company brand, Twitter answers much more than just “what are you doing?” It’s expanded to “what is the world doing, and what can the world do?”

Of course, I tweet. Tweeting is a very personal form of expression. Who else could talk about my son refusing to wear a suit to meet the Pope, my husband flying a helicopter, or take a twitpic from our home?

Tweetdeck was recommended by a friend, and that’s what I’m used to. And the same with Twibble; it works for when I’m on the go.

TC: My wife is still (grudgingly) coming to terms with my tweeting about our family… I’m curious as to how your husband, King Abdullah II, accepts Twitter now being fused with the everyday life of your family? Is your daughter, Princess Salma, aware of it?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: Well, my husband is supportive of my work, like advocating for dialogue between cultures on YouTube. Last summer he was really proud of the millions of views my YouTube channel was receiving. He’s a bit of a techie himself with his gadgets and gizmos, so he’s very intrigued about all my twittering. Like me, he knows we’re just like any other family and so opening a window into our world shows people that, regardless of titles, we’re human, too. Ever since YouTube, my children aren’t surprised by me joining Twitter and Facebook. Really, as part of the digital generation, they’re probably wondering what took me so long!

TC: Do you view Twitter solely as yet another social medium to use for spreading your message, or will it replace an existing tool? Who do you have in mind when you’re tweeting? Jordanians, or an international audience?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: Twitter’s a great way to tell people across the world what I care about and, hopefully, motivate them to join me in furthering my causes. It’s also a fantastic medium to hear the ideas and opinions of people I might not otherwise get to meet.

I want to tell people more about Jordan, about my life and work, but also to campaign for quality, global education. Not many people know that there are 75 million children out of school in the world…and two thirds are girls. And there’s just no excuse for that. We know what to do, we know how to make it happen, but we lack momentum from the masses to push politicians into action. It’s only when we have a critical mass of supporters behind this issue that we will put every child behind a school desk.

Twitter’s one way we can do that. It’s about using social media for social change: creating a community of advocates who can use their voices on behalf of the voiceless, or leverage their talents, skills, knowledge, and resources to put more children into classrooms, or pressure their elected representatives to get global education top of the agenda.

Who am I tweeting? Anyone who wants to learn more and help make a difference.

TC: You have a very progressive approach, even by Western standards, to transparent communication. How do you view restrictions imposed on the Internet in Middle Eastern countries?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: Just to clarify, not all Middle Eastern countries have restrictions on the internet. Some do, but I’m not in a position to comment on policies in other countries. I can tell you that in Jordan we don’t impose restrictions on the Internet.

TC: Do you foresee the use of the Internet in education to become as pivotal as it is in Western countries?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: Absolutely. Jordan is committed to ensuring that every child in our schools has access to, training, and proficiency in ICT. I believe that if we want our children to understand the world beyond their classroom, we must bring the world into their classroom. And teachers are also part of this equation. We’re using the internet in schools to upgrade their skills, mobilize resources, and encourage joint learning through online communities.

With a youthful population, we know the importance of a strong and innovative education sector, one that prepares our young people for the 21st century’s global marketplace and equips them with a 21st century skills’ set. By inspiring, engaging, and igniting their imaginations, we’re encouraging our children to be life-long learners.

TC: Do you see technology as key to the advancement of women’s rights? Is there a conscious effort on your part to become a role model in this sense?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: Social media are a catalyst for the advancement of everyone’s rights. It’s where we’re reminded that we’re all human and all equal. It’s where people can find and fight for a cause, global or local, popular or specialized, even when there are hundreds of miles between them.

It’s not about me being a role model, but about empowering people and making them believe that they can be role models and leaders for change.

TC: Have any of your tweets gotten a particularly large or surprising response?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: Well, I’ve only been tweeting for a week or so, but the Pope’s visit got quite a large response. I noticed people were quite interested in this one: @QueenRania: Hoping he cn get both sides 2 recognize their common humanity, then we cn start building frm there.

TC: Did your son end-up watching “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past” or was he spared the agony of the “chickflick”? (your husband’s words, not mine )

Her Majesty Queen Rania: No, his father got to him before I did!

TC: Has anyone from the Twitter team contacted you after joining? Do you know of any other royals that use Twitter (perhaps privately)? Does anyone else in your family use Twitter besides you? Will we ever see the King tweet?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: I follow Biz Stone, but he has yet to DM me! As for other royals, I don’t know of any, not even His Majesty… If His Majesty ever decides to tweet, I’ll let you know on Twitter!

TC: What is your position on Holocaust denial groups on social networks specifically, and what should be done about hate speech in general?

Her Majesty Queen Rania: I think that, as is the case offline, we should not be tolerant of hate speech, racist comments, or groups that promote hatred or intolerance in any shape or form.

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Tickets now available.

With our Silicon Valley screening a success, we’re looking ahead to where else we can spread our geekiness. TechCrunch Screenings is heading to Tel Aviv.

This Thursday the 21st at 7pm we’re taking over the main screen in the Globus Movie Theater in Azrieli Center for a screening of the new Star Trek flick. There are 320 seats to fill and hopefully you can be one of those joining us.

We’re taking care of the ticket cost, but there will be a $2 charge just to minimize no-shows. Keep an eye for a follow-up post tomorrow evening Israel time for the sign-up link. Thanks to Jay Yun from Trapster, we’ve got photos of the Screening and Meetup in Silicon Valley after the jump.

Thanks to the sponsors that helped make this screening possible:

Kenshoo is an innovator in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) technology and applications with offices in Tel Aviv, London and San Francisco. MetaCafe, an independent online video site, makes it easy to find videos from top content creators – and help discover new ones. Conduit offers an on-demand Marketing Platform that helps more than 180,000 web publishers put their content and applications on a branded community toolbar to increase their site traffic, revenue and brand loyalty. And Eventbrite for helping with the cost of the tickets.

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Fixya’s site content now spans a staggering one million products, covering everything from electronics to baby strollers. The site is seeing 15M unique users (mostly English speaking) that generate 60M monthly page views. (ComScore shows half that, with 7.7M uniques visitors a month—see chart below). 250,000 questions are asked and answered per month—75% of the answers are rated as ‘good’ or ‘excellent,’ with 50% answered within 5-6 hours of posting. Interestingly, most questions are about usability issues rather than technical ones.

With its new Product Recommendations Fixya is leveraging the large amount of consumer feedback users are providing about products they already own in order to help other users considering buying the same ones. Recommendations are indicated with an overall thumbs-up/down, along with the number of users whose recommendation was rated as a thumbs-up (Fixya weights the user’s vote on product reliability, ease of use and overall value). There are also written recommendations that help users with deeper insights. The information is all there, but they could do a better job displaying it by taking a cue from Amazon.

The end game, explains CEO Yaniv Bensadon, is to establish a type of Net Promoter Score (which is a measure of customer loyalty) for products and their manufacturers. Assuming it can pull it off and traffic comes flooding in, Fixya can turn on an additional revenue stream by allowing its community of 250,000 experts to offer pre-sale support for a premium—this shouldn’t be too difficult seeing as it already does this with post-sale support. Theoretically should Fixya be able to establish the critical mass necessary, it could form a social commerce network, where consumers collaborate with each other on product-specific issues.

Back to why the VC’s are hot for Fixya. What’s admirable about the company and what keeps it glued to VC’s radars is its revenue potential. Here are a few fun Fixya facts:

• SEO – Due to its spanning across so many products it’s managed to institute some extraordinary SEO juice for itself. I Googled four electronic devices that sat on my desk using their name and the keyword ’support’ (i.e. ‘hp l1706 support’, ’seagate freeagent support’) and Fixya came-up in the top 5 results for all.
• Advertising – 50% of Fixya’s revenue comes from a variety of ad formats (ppc, sponsorship and display). Here’s something that blew me away… Again, thanks to its broad product catalog, Google AdSense actually generates real revenue for Fixya. Just how real? They’re generating eCPM’s of $2-3—that’s eCPM, not CPM and on AdSense no less. No one else I know is pulling these numbers off AdSense.
• Premium Support – Fixya facilitates live support between its experts and users. Incidents are priced between $10 and $20 and Fixya cuts a commission for the facilitation.
• Lead Gen – Fixya generates leads for local providers of support, warranties and parts. Commissions is the name of the game here as well.
• Future Directions – In the works are a self-serve ad platform which will allow targeting based on products, categories, brands, and geo-location. Fixya is also planning on white-labeling portions of its services. Doing so will allow it to approach the likes of Sony and offer to reduce costly outsourced tech support by instilling crowd-sourced features (and even generate additional revenue along the way).

So there you have it… A company that is able to transform user-generated content into a money making machine. It’s no wonder that Bensadon smiled and said ‘much higher’ when I mentioned to him that I keep hearing $60M as the company’s expected exit mark. You would be smiling too, wouldn’t you?

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Over the past year and a half, innerActive has been busy carving out a name for itself as a company aggressively pushing its monetization offering to mobile carriers and portals in Europe. The company’s core technology is the ability to dynamically inject advertising into mobile games, applications and video—content which has strong user engagement, but has yet to live up to its revenue generating potential (at least in the amounts players in the mobile industry hope for). The company has strategically chosen to stay clear of any attempt to monetize the mobile Web and focuses specifically on the monetization of content.

innerActive describes its solution as an “Ad-funded AppStore,” a sort of agnostic platform for mobile operators that provides everything from the hosting and delivery of the content, to the campaign management and media planning, to the actual ad serving. The company also works directly with content publishers to create an ad-funded catalog. Co-CEO Offer Yehudai explained to me that it was this end-to-end solution that was key in having ICQ select its solution over alternatives. Under the terms of the deal, both innerActive and ICQ can sell ad space and there’s a flexible rev-share model to support such an arrangement.

The content requires a certain amount of prep work in order to be “innerActive ready”. An SDK is available to publishers, allowing them to tag areas inside their content for ad injection (view the video embedded below to see a typical end result—billboards in a game with real, clickable ads). The SDK supports all mobile OS’s and does not require any porting—”hundreds of handsets” are supported. Ads can be configured for click-to-WAP, calling, coupons, polling and the download of content

ICQ will make all this free content available to its community from its mobile client, from a soon to be launched ‘ICQ Mobile Portal’, and through the desktop application. The latter will require the entering of a mobile number and then receiving a free SMS with a link to download the content. No client will be required to be installed on the handset.

All-in-all this sounds like good news for ICQ’s users. The big question of course is whether offering ad-supported mobile content is a financially viable model. I guess we’ll find out soon enough because if innerActive can deliver CTR’s of up to 15% (as they claim), advertisers will be knocking on their door in droves and users will benefit from a growing selection of free content.

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To appreciate my gushing enthusiasm over VidPay you must understand that one of the occupational hazards of writing for TechCrunch requires the deciphering of what startups actually do. Increasingly rare are startups like VidPay that offer straightforward value for its customers and have a CEO that knows how to intelligently communicate what the product actually does without overselling it or using tiring hyperbole. So let’s dive in:

The problem VidPay set out to solve is allowing small/mid-sized advertisers to promote their videos on sites such as Metacafe, Dailymotion and Vimeo. These sites usually don’t have dedicated sales teams to support such advertisers because they focus on larger, more budget-laden campaigns.

MetaCafe is VidPay’s pilot customer and through this partnership alone VidPay is serving ~50M sponsored video impressions per day, or ~1.4 billion per month. Current click-through rates are between 0.1% and 1%, depending on how many video ads are displayed in the sponsored video sections, and whether campaigns are targeted for specific keywords or not.

VidPay’s solution is a self-serve advertising platform for sponsored videos. It is similar in concept to YouTube’s “Promoted Videos” offering, differences being: 1) It allows campaigns to be built for multiple publishers (video sites), and 2) Its interface can be integrated right within the publisher site. The second point is important because it means that any video site can integrate a fully branded self-serve sponsored ad platform with zero investment, and begin reaping revenue it was previously unable to bring in.

For video sites, integrating VidPay functionality is a two step process. First, the video publishing site needs to send VidPay information such as visitor IP addresses, the category being visited, current item tags and the maximum number of sponsored videos to display. Second, the publisher site needs to receive a list of sponsored videos from VidPay and then display them of course. Completing these two steps should take no more than a few hours. Integrating the interface is optional and would require the use of an iFrame.

On each page view, the publisher site sends an HTTP request for sponsored videos to be displayed in pre-defined locations. VidPay returns the best-matching sponsored videos to display by taking into consideration the maximum cost-per-click, click-through rate and targeting parameters such as geo-location and language. The sponsored videos are all located within the publisher’s inventory so all traffic remains under its umbrella. Advertisers can choose the videos they want to promote manually, search for them through VidPay’s interface, or upload them to the publisher site right from the VidPay interface.

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Nissenbaum, considered by Israel’s startup community as “one of the good guys” is known for two startup successes:product lifecycle management company SmarTeam which was acquired by Dassault Systemes back in 1999, and most recently, Q&A site Yedda which was acquired by AOL in 2007.

In his new role as Country Manager Nissenbaum will focus on establishing tighter connections with the local hi-tech scene by promoting AOL’s developer network and the services that power such known brands as AIM, ICQ, Bebo, Winamp and Mapquest. His attention will also be placed on identifying local technologies and products of value to AOL for M&A consideration—AOL currently has over 200 employees in Israel across several companies it has acquired over the years, namely: ICQ, Relegance, Quigo and Yedda.

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If there is one feature on Facebook which delivers “social utility” magic even to the most average of users, it’s Photos. In fact the feature is so popular that by Facebook’s own account 1 billion photos are uploaded every month—a staggering number that makes it the largest photo site on the Web. However, as with all good things, there are also drawbacks, and in this case discovery is high on the list. While Facebook makes it super easy to discover photos in which you were tagged, there is no chance that every one of those billion photos are tagged each month. And that leaves a big opportunity.

Let me put it another way: How many photos of you are there on Facebook that you’re completely unaware of? Israeli-based Face.com will help you find them with ‘Photo Finder,’ a Facebook app that uses facial recognition to help members locate untagged photos of themselves and their friends. We have 200 special access invites available to TechCrunch readers who will be granted first access to the app, as well as preference on the waiting list. Get your invite here.

Once installed, the app will begin scanning you and your friends’ photo albums, a process that requires a bit of time to complete, but the welcome screen will immediately display photos that were ‘Auto Tagged’. Users can either accept, decline or identify the correct individual themselves. The only users that have veto power to alter or decline a tag are the person who uploaded the photo and the person tagged.

Facial recognition technology is taking off. Competing technology can be found in both Apple’s iPhoto and Google’s Picasa, but those are limited to searching only your personal collection of photos (although iPhoto lets you upload them with the tags to Facebook). With Photo Finder, you are not limited to your own photo collection. Users can search manually for photos of friends or browse for recently tagged ones. Users can also track specific users by flagging them for the “Watch List”. Photo Finder will prompt hits via Facebook’s ‘Notification’ window.

The facial recognition technology was developed from scratch by the Face.com team over a year and half. It was designed from the ground up as a low-cost platform to meet two specific requirements: The first is recognition of “Faces in the Wild”. This applies to everyday photos that suffer from such issues as low resolution or bad lighting, or where faces are obscured with sunglasses, for example. The second requirement is to have the technology be scalable. In this respect Face.com claims to be able to perform facial recognition on all one billion photos currently uploaded into Facebook every single month using only a few machines.

Photo Finder scans the photos of users and all their friends, along with “other albums in your wider network where there’s a high likelihood of your (or friends’) appearances.” To understand the sheer volume of backend work required, consider the following statistics: The first 150 users in Face.com’s system required 20 million photos to be scanned, resulting in 30,000 identified faces. My personal installation of the app required it to scan 79,449 photos which resulted in 11,933 tags of myself and my friends. Photo Finder will then go back and re-scan the albums after its initial scan to identify newly added photos.

The social tagging feature within Facebook Photos gives Face.com a major boost because it can use those tags to train its system. It is important to note that Photo Finder does not add or alter Facebook’s own photo tags. Tagging that occurs through the app is stored in metadata accessible through the Photo Finder app alone. Also noteworthy is the fact that from a privacy perspective Photo Finder piggy-backs on the users’ Facebook settings and does not alter them in any way. Also, none of the photos are stored on Face.com’s servers. These only perform the heavy lifting required for the facial recognition and the storing of tags added through the app.

Even though this is an Alpha version of the app and there are occasional bugs, it works remarkably well. I was quite surprised that it was able to correctly identify individuals in side shots, backgrounds, or in extremely poorly lit photos. It all depends on the amount of photos available, but as a rule of thumb the Face.com team aims for 90% accuracy. It seems that they have some real technology on their hands as evidenced by their scoring first place in the “Labeled Faces in the Wild” experiment conducted by the University of Massachusetts’ Computer Vision Laboratory (Face.com are identified as ‘Hybrid descriptor-based’ in the linked paper).

It’s clear that Photo Finder was designed for mainstream viral appeal and I must admit that I found the app to be VERY addictive, spending at least ten minutes tagging people every time I played with the app over the course of the past two weeks. I have a hunch that once made publicly available the app is going to be incredibly popular on Facebook.

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The project consists of seven music tracks/videos that are made exclusively from video material found on YouTube. Kutiman spent 3 months in his bedroom splicing and dicing over one hundred videos for samples of singers and instruments—from guitars, pianos, drums and harps, to synthesizers, a bouzouki and even a cash register.

The resulting seven tracks which range in genres—from R&B, Funk and Reggae, to Jungle, Afro and Jazz—are quite impressive. The project as a whole is reminiscent of DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….., a brilliant and seminal album created completely by the sampling of other albums (hear it here).

Apart from the revolutionary music creation aspect, this story also has an interesting social media angle. The entire snowball effect that resulted in over a million views, a crashed website and a fair bit of buzz, was initiated by three people associated with the project. They emailed twenty people in total and it took a life of its own from there. From zero views to over a million in less than 7 days with no marketing dollars, blackhatting or SEO’ing involved. The team around Kutiman attribute much of this to word traveling across Twitter. If this is true, Kutiman may in fact be the first music star to be born on Twitter. There’s no question that we are sure to see other up and coming musicians harness it as well in the future.

Here are a couple of Kutiman’s tracks:

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The biggest obstacle in providing In-Game Advertising (IGA) typically involves getting the actual ad into the game. Games, which are typically in Flash SWF format, require distribution by a publisher, which can be anything from an Oberon, to a HeyZap, to an online edition of a newspaper. Each publisher has its own quirks and demands when it comes to monetization—one wants to advertise pre-game, the other post, and the third between levels. And this is where the crux of the problem lies—all of these quirks require alternate versions of the game source for the various publishers and advertisers.

TicTacTi realizes that requiring developers to integrate with multiple SDK’s to facilitate the embedding of ads is not scalable, so it developed a semi-manual method that at least takes the SDK integration out of the equation.

Each game has to be set up by TicTacTi, a process the company estimates at about one to two hours per game. The actual game source code is not required which means that games can by encrypted—an important point for game developers. It’s here that TicTacTi “marks” events in games where ads could be placed. For example, a game could be marked in such a way that when the “Loading” prompt is visible, it would initiate a pre-roll ad marker, and when the “Game Over” prompt is visible, it would initiate a post-roll marker.

TicTacTi’s image recognition engine seeks these visual events in order to trigger the ad insertion. If the game source already includes TicTacTi’s IGA logo marker (see right), the game preparation stage can be skipped altogether because the image recognition engine will identify it automatically.

The image recognition is performed entirely client-side with ActionScript. The patent-pending technology involves a mechanism that combines image recognition throttling and emulation. This means that it is activated for small segments of time so as not to impose a cost on the user’s CPU. TicTacTi’s own testing revealed CPU usage remains the same for the entire game duration.

In order to embed the game, the publisher would call TicTacTi’s wrapper, which would in return load the game, along with additional elements. These include the ones that drive the image recognition, the ad insertion component and the reporting to the backend.

Standard ad units and tags are supported so ads inserted into the Flash games can originate from ad exchanges such as Right Media, Double Click, or the publisher’s own ad server. TicTacTi will charge a varied commission for the service.

Embedded below are a widget utilizing TicTacTi’s technology and a video demo of the service.





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