Today, Wix announced that it raised a $3.5 million series B round From Mangrove Capital Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. The Israeli startup offers a Web-based Flash editor for making artful widgets and Websites, but without losing any SEO juice. (I’ve embedded two examples below).

The service has been showing some healthy growth since it launched in public beta last June. Co-CEO Allon Bloch tells me that Wix just crossed the 200,000-user mark, and is adding between 2,000 and 3,000 a day. These users are creating 2,000 new Web pages and widgets every day (the split is about 75/25 in favor of full-blown Web pages on MySpace and elsewhere).

In September, says Bloch, Wix content across the Web generated 20 million pageviews, up from 13 million in August. (Only a small fraction of that was on Wix.com itself). The U.S. makes up 50 percent of traffic. After that, the biggest countries for Wix are France, the UK, Brazil, and Canada.

Boch has a simple business plan: charge $5 to $10 a month for premium features that appeal to businesses and designers such as removing the Wix logo and letting them connect the Web pages to their domains.

Free MySpace Comments – Wix.com

Flash Widgets – Wix.com

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Here is a round-up of the 6 Israeli companies that presented on stage:

Registered Investment Advisors (RIA’s) typically provide advice to individuals with assets of $500K and above on average. The alternative to individuals with less assets are mutual funds which lack in transparencies (what your money is invested in) and individual attention (you get to talk to customer service reps, not the fund manager). Personalria wants to change all this by bringing the same high-end advice and investment transparency “rich folks” get to “ordinary folks” with much fewer assets to invest, say $10K.

The Personalria platform requires buy-in from both users and RIA’s. Users are required to open a brokerage trading account at Ameritrade or eTrade, for example, in order to use the Personalria service. RIA’s will need to create profiles describing their education, experience, etc.

The big question is whether the company can pull off the chicken-and-the-egg challenge, meaning, getting a critical mass of users and RIA’s that make it worthwhile for each group to join. The judges on the panel also noted the challenges the company will face in customer acquisition and the density of competition, both offline and online such as Cake Financial (a company that launched at last year’s TC40).

AlfaBetic has developed a propriety language translation engine based on statistical machine translation and human QA to translate English to Spanish, French, German and Portuguese.

The service is initially being targeted at bloggers which can provide AlfaBetic an RSS feed that will then be translated and consequently monetized globally. Their engine will do most of the work, but human intervention is used to edit and proof every piece of content. The engine employs domain language templates such as technology, sports and finance. These are improved over time through machine learning and as a result of the human QA.

The company’s planned business model requires it to provide the translated content to portals and then the selling of ads against it. This will be “non-intelligent” targeting, i.e. basic demographics, sponsorship, etc.

Panel judges Om Malik & Tim O’Riley were asked whether they would use the service and indicated they would not use a translation model. Instead they would opt for a full-blown localized operation such as fr.techcrunch.com.

The story of Tweegee begins in Israel where the company is active as Tipo.co.il, a kids community site with 800K monthly uniques (out of a total population of 1.2M kids aged 8-14).

TechCrunch50 marks the company’s launch of its American play—Tweegee.com—a social network aimed at being MySpace for kids aged 8-14. Positioned as a destination site, TweeGee is intended to offer tweens a safe environment to express themselves and interact with others in their age group.

The site offers email with a feature called WordUp, a patent pending application which works in a very similar manner to T9, but attuned to the 8-14 age group with relevant blacklisted words and such. Kids can also use a calendar app, build avatars, play multiplayer games and create their Zones which are websites built on Flash and HTML.

One of the big challenges the company will face is an issue panel judge Ron Conway raised and that is how to get gain a share of the time kids are already spending online in places such as ClubPenguin. Curiously, the company is adamant about not widgetizing its offering.

Next week the company will launch a Russian version called Tvidi.ru , the result of a partnership with Russian Media company RBC which paid $6M for 50% of the license. A Turkish version is in the works.

MytTopia wants to reduce the headaches and costs associated with developing games for mobile phones by allowing developers to write code once and have it immediately ported to all available smartphones and mobile operating systems.

The company’s solution—similar to that of Mo’Minis—is a Rich Content Authoring Environment called RUGS which utilizes a customized Eclipse-based IDE. Developers can use this environment to develop any number of mobile game applications without any platform-specific knowledge such as Symbian, PlamOS, or iPhone SDK. The application designer works independently of the programmer to design the app skin & layout—the code remains the same.

MyTopia claims that a single cross-platform game developed on RUGS required one developer four weeks at a cost of $50K, while it would cost $1M using current development methods.

MyTopia is also running a game destination site called MyTopia Online which was considered a distraction by the panel of judges.

Think of devunity’s collaborative coding platform as Google Docs for code. The key pain point it is trying to solve is providing developers the ability to interact with fellow developers in real time, thereby creating a “healthier” development process which would theoretically reduce dev costs.

devunity’s fully functioning code editor currently supports Python, PHP, ASP, Javascripts, CSS, and HTML. It also sports built-in integrated APIs such as BOSS, Google Apps Engine, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, etc. The code is completely exportable, meaning, devunity does not lock you in to having them host the app.

There’s also no need to worry about versioning issues such as waiting for other developers to check-in code—devunity does all of this in real time. It also allows the developers to create discussions right on top of the code and gain additional visibility by way of a mini feed which is automatically created for each project.

The company is aiming for a two pronged business model approach. The first is a service play where developers would pay for usage based on a subscription model. The second is a white label approach where companies can form their own devunity environment. An interesting example for the latter would be to allow an outside development firm to use devunity in order to work and interact along side an in-house dev team.

plaYce believes there’s a gap between high-end and casual games, where the former is expensive and might not give you the bang for your buck you expect, and the latter being free but flat in game graphic quality.

plaYce is attempting to bridge this gap through a propriety graphics rendering technology that requires no-download yet still delivers high graphics quality and fast frame rate, right within the browser. While still restricted to IE—it requires a DirectX plugin—the company claims the technology will be applicable on other browsers and is optimized for low-end computers. It is also able to recreate dense scenarios streamed over slow web connections.

The company has no intent to develop the games itself, rather it sees itself as both platform and publisher. It intends to lure independent game developers by offering them what it calls “Game Infrastructure as a Service” which would include everything from the game infrastructure to user acquisition.

The major challenge for plaYce will be to find 2-3 killer games that will bring the critical mass of users necessary to attract game developers to the platform.

For more information on plaYce, see John Biggs’ post, here.

DemoPit Companies:

Founded by Nir Ofir, a co-founder at BlogTV, iamnews is taking a crowed-sourced approach to the newsroom. Once news tasks are created, reporters from around can contribute into them. This can include pure textual content, photos and videos. The platform handles the entire process, from task creation to management of the contributions. With the newspaper business continuing to struggle, a solution such as iamnews can help them deliver quicker news more cheaply. (Iamnews was voted the best DemoPit company, and became the last TC50 finalist to present onstage).

ConTrust provides a real-time UGC moderation platform able to identify content threats including profanity, pornography, racism and brand abuse. It is then able to block these threats according to a set of pre-defined customized levels. The company also claims their platform protects against traditional security threats such as spam, phishing, and malware.

Joongel considers itself a platform for the creation of web-based toolbars. These are toolbar “strips” in the header area of a web page that require neither download nor installation. Site publishers can use Joongel to offer a search engine aggregator or a vertical search engine for travel, video, cooking, etc. The motivation for publishers is mainly through monetization via affiliation and ad rev-share.

Update: A prominent angel investor walking the TC50 DemoPit has expressed interest in investing in the company.

Exhibitor Companies:

2Pad is a web service that integrates with your email service—currently limited to Windows Live, AOL, Gmail, MobileME and IMAP service providers—in order to mine it for pictures and videos. 2Pad then automatically tags them with the email’s subject, sender, recipient—all of which are then available as filters. The service is very similar to xoopit with the major difference being that 2Pad does not require an installation.

Delver has developed a search engine designed to uncover knowledge and information that exists in users’ social graphs. Delver is packaging themselves as both a destination site and a white label solution for intra social network search.

Payoneer provides a payment solution for web-business that utilizes MasterCard debit cards to facilitate the actual payment at the end point. While similar in concept to PayPal, Payoneer sees itself more of a complement than competition in the sense that it can bring its expertise in international payments into the PayPal ecosystem—an area PayPal is generally considered as lacking.

The company recently closed an $8M Series B round from Greylock and Carmel Ventures.

Wix offers a webtop publishing platform for the creation of Flash-based websites, social network profiles, comments and more. (Disclosure: I advised the company in the past).

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Wix, the browser-based designer that lets users create Flash-based widgets and full-scale webpages, has launched in public beta. The site specializes in creating colorful Flash pages without requiring any coding, and seems to appeal most to “MySpacers” looking to add some flair to their sites (Wix does have some more professional templates for businesses). You can see our original review of the site here.

One of the common concerns about Flash websites is that they don’t play nice with search engines, leading to lower page traffic. Wix says it can get around this by generating an XML map for each of their sites that is SEO friendly. Since the launch of its private beta, the company says that they’ve seen a surprisingly high number of users using the designer to create full-fledged sites rather than basic widgets, which makes this search optimization especially important.

Wix sees general competition from a number of other browser-based website designers, which include Weebly and Synthasite, but is most similar to Sprout, another Flash-based widget designer.

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When I reviewed Wix last week, I called it cluttered and candy-coated. The promotional video below shows a tamer, yet still very colorful, side of the service.

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Cluttered and candy-coated are two ways to describe Wix, a new Flash-based website and widget creation tool that we’ve been anticipating for months. It’s also feature-rich, very well-designed, and – sorry – still in private beta.

Wix joins a multitude of browser-based website creators such as Weebly, Synthasite, and Google Pages. But it reminds me the most of Sprout, a widget-creation tool that can also be used to make websites, since both provide fluid Flash interfaces that appeal to your inner designer.

Both of these companies are blurring the line between content that’s meant to stand alone as distinct websites, and content that’s meant for syndication over blogs, social networks, and other destinations. It’s because of this obfuscation that they’ve opted to use the unspecific, yet self-referential, names “sprout” and “wix” when referring to their creations.

Whereas Sprout is mainly marketed as a tool for spreading media content, Wix most certainly appeals to a younger population that’s obsessed with expressing themselves online (call them MySpacers, if you will). Wix does have a collection of tasteful business themes, but the vast majority of its templates are for fun and fall into categories like “street art”, “emo”, “playground”, and “sexy”.

Once you pick a theme for your new website (or widget, just depending on your dimensions), you are taken to a popup Wix Editor that provides you with an overwhelming number of ways to spice up your creation. You can add shapes, clipart, photos, videos, songs and animations; you can tweak colors and set visual effects for user behavior; and you can add text paragraphs and headlines. Photos can be uploaded manually or pulled in from either Flickr or a royalty-free stock collection; videos can be embedded from YouTube; and there’s also a collection of free song clips that can be used in a range of skinnable music players.

Each wix supports multiple pages with links between them. When you want to edit a particular object on a page, you click on it and options for rotating, resizing, and positioning are revealed. A Mac OS-looking doc at the bottom of the screen also provides icons for setting effects, behaviors, animations, and more. You really need to play around with Wix to fully appreciate how much flair and how many customization options it affords.

As you work on your wix, you can hit a preview button to see what it will look like. And once you’re done with it, you can publish it either as a website hosted on the wix.com domain or as a widget to be embedded or sent to friends via email.

One of the major complaints many have about Flash is that it doesn’t allow for indexing by search engines. Wix gets around this by producing content that’s a hybrid of HTML and Flash, despite the fact that it’s editor is entirely Flash-based. This will be a huge benefit to anyone who uses Wix to set up a serious website, but it probably won’t make any difference to widget creators.

Update: Wix is giving out a couple hundred private beta invites to readers who email info@wix.com with requests.

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It reminds me a lot of Geocities back in the day (remember?), perhaps because of the colorful backgrounds and chaotic mess that results when you create a page. Lots of people created Geocities pages, added a picture, a little text, a guest book and a website counter, and that was their home page. No one visited more than once, though, since the page lacked fresh content.

And that was waaaaay before the days of social networking and the explosion of blogs. Today people have a lot more to do on the web except read news, buy stuff at Amazon and send a few emails. Glogster either needs to find a way to widgetize this in a way that gets MySpacers and Facebookers excited (see Slide, RockYou, etc.), or they will likely stay a ghost town. Strike that, even with a reasonable widget strategy, I doubt Glogster has a very bright future. Frankly, it isn’t as good as Scrapblog, which targets the same niche and launched nearly a year ago.

People remain enamored with Flash as an environment to create websites, though. Wix, an Israeli startup in private beta that is doing something in this area, is getting good reviews from people who’ve seen it (we still haven’t). We’ll see if they have a business model that breaks out of the Geocities ghetto.

Glogster is giving away some iPods and gift certificates to new users who create posters and satisfy a set of too-complicated-for-me-to-read rules. So if you’ve got some time and lack an iPod, there you go. See Download Squad and Go2Web2 for their take on Glogster.

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Israel-based Wix.com is a new entrant that is entering into private beta now. It claims to allow users to create Flash-based websites without any programing skills, and publish those sites anywhere on the web. The output can also be widgetized and published on social networks.

We have not been able to test the service directly yet. But a source that did see it called it “awesome.” And if it helps people build flexible, useful Flash applications without any programming skills, someone here in California just may pick them up sooner or later.

Sign up on their home page for the private beta.

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