Eyecon’s media companion software gives consumers control over content across media units

More and more consumer electronics products now include features which leverage internet connectivity – current generation gaming devices, entertainment systems, and of course smart handsets are a few examples that demonstrate this trend. Despite the powerful new features that are made possible internet connectivity in consumer electronics products, however, consumers have difficulty obtaining unified access to content and playback across devices. Enter Eyecon, an Israeli startup that enables consumers to improve their overall home media experience by providing a central media control point via mobile devices. The solution aggregates a user’s media from multiple libraries across devices – music, videos and pictures stored across devices, in addition to the internet and TV – and makes this content searchable and controllable via the application interface.

Users are able to explore their content using a simple search feature, and can preview the content they are looking for in the application. After the user selects a piece of content for viewing, the content can be played back on any of the networked devices, or added to a pick list for viewing at a later time.

One of the more interesting features is the ability to use the application while programs are playing on the networked devices. For example, the user could be viewing a sports game on cable TV and, without interrupting the game on the primary screen (and without disturbing the other people viewing the primary screen), conduct a search on their mobile device. It is also possible to preview search results within the application before cueing playback. At any point the user can interject and play the content on the primary screen.

There is clear value in this solution from a consumer standpoint – it puts the control of the entire media device ecosystem in your home into the hands of the consumer.

Consumers are also able to tap into content that does not reside on their devices, including YouTube videos and internet radio. Eyecon removes the need to conduct separate content searches for separate devices, irrespective of the where content is stored.

The winning insight is that mobile devices – currently, the solution is limited to iPhone, though Android is on its way – can be used to augment and improve the experience of home entertainment. This is in line with a future where we have devices that are increasingly inter-operable. It will be interesting to see how the company adapts its solution to capitalize on the opportunity afforded by Apple’s new iPad device.

Eyecon provides an innovative software solution to a problem that has arisen due to the growth of networked devices in the modern home. The company is based in Palo Alto and is headed-up by Meir Friedlander, President & CEO, and Ari Birger, Founder & CTO.

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Invest in Israel Newsletter: January 2010 Edition

As usual, VC Cafe is re-posting the “Invest in Israel” Newsletter, published by the investment promotion center of Israel’s Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, which offers many helpful tools for prospecting investors.  For previous editions of the newsletter, click here.

ISRAEL RAISES GROWTH FORECAST TO 3.5% FOR 2010

Israel’s central bank has raised its economic forecast for 2010, citing an improved outlook for global growth and world trade.

The Bank of Israel now expects the economy to grow 3.5% this year, compared with its previous forecast last September of 2.5%. Earlier, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch and Bank Leumi, one of Israel’s largest banks, also raised Israel’s economic growth forecast for 2010 to 3.5%.

Based on data through November, Israel’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009 increased 0.5% from a year earlier, compared to an OECD average of negative 3.5%, the Central Bureau of Statistics said. In the third quarter, the economy expanded at an annualized rate of 3%, while from April to June it grew by 1.1%.

GDP growth per capita in Israel fell 1.3% in 2009 (compared with a 4% drop in OECD countries), while unemployment in Israel stood at 7.7% in 2009 (compared with an average of 8.2% in the OECD).

Israel’s budget deficit was 5.2% in 2009, and is expected to be 5.5% in 2010. Israel’s debt-to-GDP ratio increased by a very low 3%, ending the year at 78% as other countries struggled amid the international economic crisis.

For the most part, Israel weathered the world financial crisis thanks to, among other factors, a relatively conservative banking system that had little exposure to mortgage-backed assets or risky loans.

The Bank of Israel raised Israel’s key lending rate to 1% in late December, after having cut borrowing costs to a record low of 0.5% in early 2009. The Bank of Israel was among the first in the developed world to raise interest rates after the global economic crisis.

BDI COFACE RAISES ISRAEL RISK RATING

International risk rating agency BDI Coface raised Israel’s country risk rating by one grade to A3 from A4. Israel now has the same risk rating as the U.K., Italy and China. Read more…

First Bitesize of 2010

Information overload! That’s the only way to explain the “January Effect” of tech and VC news since the new decade began a week ago.

Here’s a few links worth clicking on:

Microsoft’s research and development center in Israel is set to hire dozens of new employees

SAPIR extends the power of web searches beyond centralized text and metadata searches to include distributed audio-visual content

Why Do VCs Blog (and Tweet)?

A directory of the top angel and seed investors in Silicon Valley. And how to reach them.

Boxee, Waze and RedBeacon in Robert Scoble’s list of start ups to watch in 2010

- and Waze really likes it

888.com Co-Founder Aharon Shaked Dies Aged 58

Read this: the start up pyramid, the optimal startup go to market approach

Sequoia Capital China, Highland Capital and Qihoo 360 plan to jointly invest 1 billion into China’s free software industry in the coming years

Boxee Beta Goes Public, Download Now

Eye-Fi’s new generation includes self-erasing photo memory cards

20 Tips to Help You Suck Less At PowerPoint

Only 11 Israeli companies exhibit at CES 2010

CES , the largest consumer electronics show in the world, is taking place in Las Vegas this week from today to January 10th. Despite the huge publicity opportunity, only 11 Israeli companies have rented a booth this year. Perhaps it is the distance from the consumer electronics market, or the difficulty achieving economies of scale when manufacturing and selling remotely, but the fact is that most of Israel’s high-tech companies are focused on services and infrastructure, rather than packaged goods. Let’s take a look at the Israeli companies that will be exhibiting in this year’s CES show.

The Israeli representatives of CES 2010

Celeno –  provider of high performance Wi-Fi chips for HD multimedia and entertainment home networking applications:
- Internet Video streaming
- Wireless HDMI use cases
- Over the top HD video IP streaming
- IPTV over Wi-Fi
- Multi-room DVR

Compulab - making highly-integrated wireless mobile devices and miniature low power PCs. Since 1992, CompuLab is a leader in making miniature System-on-Module cards that are used in thousands of OEM products ranging from consumer electronics to airborne systems.

Cool product?Compulab’s leading product is fit-PC is a miniature, low power PC the size of a paperback and absolutely silent, yet fit enough to run Windows XP or Linux. fit-PC is the greenest PC on the market today, consuming only 3-5W.

Jungo - provider of connectivity solutions to silicon manufacturers and OEMs. Its products include USBwareTM, an advanced embedded USB stack, and DriverCore™ PC drivers, which extend device communication interfaces to a wide range of OSs and platforms.

Cool product? Jungo’s flagship product USBware™, offers a complete, high quality and small footprint embedded USB software protocol stack, allowing device manufactures to easily incorporate standard USB connectivity in their designs.
Morel - manufactures a wide range of award-winning speakers and raw drivers for the car and home, delivering high sound quality at competitive prices.

Cool product? Morel’s speakers won several awards, including its high-end “fat lady” loudspeaker, which received the 2009 CES Design and Innovation Award in the high-end performance category.

Who is going to be there?

Prime Sense – the company that needs the least introduction due to its part in Microsoft’s project NATAL, Prime Sense evolutionizes the way digital devices see the world. By giving digital devices a 3D perception of reality, Prime Senses breakthrough technology enables inexpensive, accurate, 3D sensing and understanding capabilities for virtually any digital device.

Cool product? The Prime Sensor, a System on Chip (SoC) and a complete reference design for a three dimensional sensing and understanding device. The Prime Sensor reference design utilizes a standard image sensor, a light source, optical components and the Prime Sense IC which is the digital brain of the system. The Prime Sensor can be connected to a variety of host devices using a standard USB interface. It is plug and play and USB powered. Read more…

VC Cafe Turns Four

VC Cafe was born four years ago, in December of 2005. Back then, under goisrael.blogspot.com, my goal was ambitious but simple. VC Cafe was to be a source of positive news about Israel, beyond what one sees on CNN or BBC by providing a spotlight on early stage Israeli start ups, which often conceive brilliant ideas and technology but sometimes lack the visibility of potential clients and investors outside of Israel. I learned this on my own after co-founding a tech start up in Israel. Covering the Israeli start up scene was a lonely niche, shared by maybe one more blog and minor coverage by traditional Israeli newspapers at the time.

600 posts and over 8 million (!) hits later, I’m very proud to see what we have accomplished, and I say WE because I couldn’t have done it without the unwavering support of many of you and the exceptional work of VC Café’s contributing writers. Together we have covered hundreds of product launches and funding rounds, interviewed dozens of CEOs and highlighted Israeli start up achievements wherever and whenever they have occurred.

I’m happy to say that despite a worldwide economic meltdown in 2009, the Israeli start up industry is thriving more now than ever. Israeli start ups receive the full backing from top tier international VCs and are sought after M&A targets by major global corporations. There are numerous blogs, meetups and conferences dedicated to start ups in or from the holy land specifically. Heck, there’s now even a book about the secret sauce that makes Israel the Start up Nation.

After five years of living abroad (New York, San Francisco and London) and working for multi-national companies, I have decided that 2010 is the time for me to leave the corporate world, take all the learnings and do something meaningful on my own. As such, next year I will be taking the entrepreneurship plunge myself and am already fast at work researching ideas and forming a founders dream team.

So, I’ll take the opportunity to wish you all a happy new year and shana tova from the VC Cafe team. Here’s a toast for a successful 2010 with lots of new beginnings.

5min Wins Top Spot in TechAviv’s Peer Awards

TechAviv, the members-only meetup group for Israeli start ups, has concluded its starup competition the “TechAviv Peer Awards“. The top spot was awarded to Israel’s 5min.com, the leading online platform for how-to, instructional and knowledge videos, which was crowned as the most promising Israeli web start up in 2009. Colnect was a close runner up.

The finalists were chosen in a three week process which included 100 applicants and 6,000 public votes. The ten finalists with the highest number of votes were narrowed down to five through a members only survey. Finally, tonight’s winner was crowned by the highest number of text messages following a 10 minute presentation in an invite-only event for Israeli start up founders and investors.

The TechAviv Peer Awards finalists were:

face.com – a smart face recognition engine . The company launched a Photo Finder application for Facebook, which enables users to detect themselves in pictures uploaded by their friends even if they were not ‘tagged’. The app also facilitates automatic tagging of friends in pictures. The company has approximately 630,000 monthly unique users according to Comscore (Nov 2009). Face.com was founded in 2007 by CEO Gil Hirsch. Follow FaceDotCom on Twitter.

my6sense.com – a personalized information feed for the iPhone. The company developed what it calls ‘digital intuition’ technology, which learns what is most important to you based on the user’s consumption habits without the need to set preferences. Founded in 2007 by Barak Hachamov, who now serves as chairman. (See previous coverage on VC Cafe). Follow my6sense on Twitter.

colnect.com – the collectors marketplace and community. Colnect is a comprehensive online solution for collectors of mass produced collectibles (stamps, notes, coins, baseball cards and so many more) revolutionizing their collecting experience by allowing them to manage their personal collection online and be a part of a designated community.Colnect is the ‘little start up who could’ – it won the 2009 edition of Startup 2.0 after being completely bootstrapped by its founder. Colnect was founded in 2007 by Amir Wald. Follow Colnect on Twitter.

6rounds.com – a video chat live meeting point. 6rounds users meet their friends and friends to be, by inviting each other to 1 on 1 interactive video sessions or “Rounds” where they are matched with other interesting new people based on common interests and share experiences together. The product was one of the 6 pre-approved Google Wave gadgets (see post on VC Cafe). Founded in 2008 by CEO Dany Fishel. Follow 6rounds on Twitter.

5min.com – the one stop shop for DIY and howto videos. 5min offers a one-stop solution for online video: providing segmented offering of tens of thousands of videos; empowering websites to integrate videos throughout their sites with just hours of work; and creating incremental revenue, traffic and engagement. The winner of the 2009 TechAviv competition, 5min has it all: ad hoc content creation, monetization vehicles, distribution mechanisms, a proprietary video player and perhaps most importantly, an audience of 2.3 million unique users a month (according to Comscore, Nov 2009).5min was founded in 2007 by CEO Ran Harnevo.  See previous coverage on VC Cafe and follow them on Twitter at @5min.

Congratulations to Yaron Samid and the TechAviv team for the impressive lineup and the tremendous execution throughout the year. We should also take the opportunity to wish the best of luck to all Israeli start ups in 2010 – kick ass!

$8.6 million in B Round for Desktop Virtualization Viewfinity

Not often will you hear a VC say that the decision to invest millions of dollars in a start up was ‘easy’, but Viewfinity seems to break the rule. Desktop virtualization start-up Viewfinity Ltd. has raised $8.6 million in a second round led by current investors Giza Venture Capital and JK&B Capital as well as new investor Longworth Venture Capital. The round brings the company to a total of $15.3 million raised to date.

Viewfinity offers a SaaS-enabled solution for managing, supporting and controlling desktops, laptops and Windows servers, regardless of worker location. The system enables remote desktop control and system management control, a big pain relief for IT administrators who can now easily roll back user settings, centralize software versions, block applications and enforce the company’s IT policy.

The founders of Viewfinity, Leonid Shtilman (CEO), Gil Rapaport (president), and Dmitry Barboi (CTO) were the entrepreneurs behind XOsoft, a virtualization company sold to CA in 2006 for approximately $100 million. They started working on the product while at CA and decided to launch their own company.

Viewfinity was incorporated in 2007 and is based in Waltham, Massachusetts with development centers in Israel and Ukraine, employing about 32 people. The company is currently recruiting across the board according to its website. No wonder then, that Zvi Schechter said that the decision to invest in Viewfinity was easy. “This is a group with a proven track record. They know what they’re doing.”

Skybox Security Raises $2 Million

Israeli start up Skybox Security raised $2 million in round C, reports Calcalist. All of the  company’s existing investors participated in the round, including: Benchmark Capital (Arad Naveh), Carmel Ventures, Glynn Capital Management (John Glynn), Gold Hill Capital Management, Lightspeed Venture Partners (John Luongo, Ravi Mhatre), Mofet Technology Fund Management, Rembrandt Venture Partners (Richard Ling) and Valley Venture Capital.

Skybox Security was founded in 2002 by Eran Reshef and Gidi Cohen and was formerly known as Seclucid. The company provides automated risk and compliance management software solutions for organizations and government agencies offering a line of products based on its propietary platform (Skybox View). Skybox’s product offering includes:

• a Firewall Compliance Auditor that collects information from multiple firewalls and analyzes configuration compliance with industry practices or custom policies
• Network Compliance Auditor that collects network and security device configurations and develops a network model.
• Risk Exposure Analyzer, which quantifies risk exposure and prioritizes vulnerabilities taking into account business logic, network and security device configuration, threats, and vulnerability data
• Simulate Attack Scenarios and use the information to modify those areas that are most vulnerable to a security breach.

The company is headquartered in San Jose, California with a sales office in the United Kingdom. It has a research and development facility in Israel which employs around 50 people.

Skybox has around 150 customers in 20 countries including Credit Suisse, Barclays, Teva, Best Buy and more. It is said to be close to break even according to sources close to the company.

VC Cafe’s take: Skybox seems to be an impressive enterprise security toolbox with lots of useful features. That said, companies that have been around for less time have shown profitability much quicker, which makes me wonder if the problem is with the product or with sales. On a positive note, the market is growing rapidly and this round of capital may provide the necessary lifeline for growth. One to watch in 2010.

Global From Day One: Innovid Approaches Product/Market Fit with iRoll™

Some of the best posts that I’ve read on entrepreneurship were written by Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, Opsware, Ning and most recently venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. While his blog is no longer available at its original location, his posts can be found here. My favorite from the Guide to Startups series, titled ‘The Only Thing That Matters’, discusses the concept of Product/Market fit – the stage that a startup has reached when it is “in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market”.

Innovid, a New York-Headquartered company which maintains an R&D Center in Tel Aviv, has developed a “clickable canvas” technology which enables advertisers to add interactive capabilities to new and existing video content. The solution includes an ad server for ad placement as well as an analytics dashboard for mapping user engagement.

Tal Chalozin, Co-founder and CTO of Innovid, recently shed some light on the company’s journey to date. Particularly interesting, and related to the concept of Product/Market fit, is that the company first went to market with a focus on providing the technology for product placements in online video. This offering failed to garner sufficient traction in the marketplace, despite accolades from the technology press.

The main problem was that, despite the widespread interest from potential advertisers, the actual application was not narrow enough in scope – overlay video ad technology is too broad a concept, and Innovid’s willingness to fully customize it according to client needs was (perhaps surprisingly) a shortcoming. Further, the video advertising value chain was not easily penetrable due to the need for publisher adoption – a classic chicken an egg problem.

The company, which is headed up by Co-founder and CEO Zvika Netter, was quick to realize that it needed to adapt in order to find success in the marketplace. This renewed focus led to the development of their iRoll product. iRoll offers advertisers an interactive pre-roll video ad solution, which allows advertisers to repurpose their existing video content to provide interactive advertising experiences immediately before the screening of featured content.

The iRoll product has demonstrated that it is highly engaging for consumers, particularly relative to standard pre-roll ad solutions. Innovid’s metrics suggest that standard pre-roll ads have not performed well, with click through rates (CTR) of just 0.4%. In contrast, deployments of iRoll have achieved a CTR of 5-8%. Chalozin suggests that this performance gap exists due to the interactive nature of these ads – they “reward attention rather than demanding it”.

To solve the distribution problem, the company has a sales force which caters to both agencies and publishers. In order for the system to work, publishers need to be Innovid certified – this requires a simple 3 step integration process. Innovid has recently certified some major US media companies, which provides a foundation for catering to advertiser demand.

Innovid has a global operation and a total of 16 staff – 4 located in New York and 12 located in Israel. NY-based Chalozin indicated that their US presence has been essential for liaising with prospective clients and publishers. Further, Innovid has been very actively involved with the Interactive Advertising Bureau in developing and applying standards for online video ad formats – this involvement would not have been possible to manage remotely from Israel.

Innovid represents a breakthrough in interactive video solutions for advertisers. The company received praise from the World Economic Forum by being selected as a Technology Pioneer for 2010 (past Technology Pioneers have included the likes of Playfish and Admob). No award can substitute for market traction but, judging by the management team’s market responsiveness to date, Innovid will continue to navigate towards the most promising opportunities in the rapidly growing online video advertising market.

WiseStamp Signatures Win Best Social Gadget in OWA 2009

WiseStamp , a Firefox plugin developed in Israel, won the ‘best social media gadget’ award in Mashable’s third Open Web Awards. The 2009 edition was focused on Social Media and received 70,000 nominees and over 780,000 final votes in 50 categories.

Did you notice how crappy email signatures look on POP3 accounts compared to Outlook?

The WiseStamp Firefox extension tries to solve that problem by applying a rich HTML editor on email clients such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL mail. The signature is easily customized by adding links/icons to social media profiles (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc), IM and Skype accounts as well as automatically sharing recent blog posts, latest tweets,  and more.

See and example and many more in the signature gallery:

WiseStamp was founded about a year ago by Josh (Tzvika) Avneri, Sasha Gimelshtein, Orly Izhaky and Tom Piamenta. The WiseStamp add-on has been downloaded over 300,000 times a was featured as a recommended add-on by Mozilla. The company is now in the process of raising funding. Learn more on WiseStamp’s FAQ and download through this link.

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• About VC Cafe

      VC Café covers early stage startups, innovative technologies and venture capital news with a spotlight on Israel. Started in 2005 by Eze Vidra, VC Café has been featured on the Wall Street Journal and ranked as one of the top 100 VC blogs.