We’re a week a away from Under the Radar Social Media. Among the 32 startups in the entertainment and social media space presenting in the one-day conference on June 3rd, there are two Israeli startups that you might not have heard of. Let’s give them a quick introduction.
Content Creation Category: Aviary
A.viary : Have you ever gotten a chain mail with lots of pictures that look completely amazing? there’s a big chance that those viral images were created by Worth1000, the parent company of Aviary. Aviary offers a suite of web-based image editors that can be used directly from the browser or as downloadable Adobe Air applications.
As opposed to most of the image editors (photoshop, fireworks, etc), Aviary is a SaaS product built for web artists who want to share and ‘open source’ their works with other web art enthusiasts. The company is wokring on a platform that includes 18 different types of advanced layer-based image editors (including pattern editing, 3D modeling, and vector editing), each named after a bird.
Aviary not only helps with the creation of the content, but also with the management of it. The system tracks all rights, royalties and attributions in a project forever, and across collaborations in addition to all sources that are used in a project. The platform is built to enable artists to eventually sell their online creations.
Led by CEO Avi Muchnick, Aviary has a team of 12 and is based in New York. The company is still in stealth, offering access by invitation only.
Gaming Category: Mytopia
Mytopia is a social gaming community that is doing surprisingly well in a very crowded market (see previous coverage on VC Cafe). Two months ago, Mytopia launched its public beta phase and symultaneously enabled millions of social network users to play casual games together in real time, finally enabling a real chess match between Facebook and Myspace. Mytopia was founded by brother and sister Guy and Galia Ben-Artzi, who previously funded Real Dice, a startup developing mobile games for smart phones.
The company is trying to end social network segragation through games, said Guy Ben Artzi in an interview, through the release of Mytopia casual gaming world. The ‘world’ consists of 8 games, an ecommerce store and chat forums. 6 more games are currently being worked on. There no download required to play the games, which can easily be run in a browser using Adobe’s Flash player.
Angel funded Mytopia is currently based in Israel and Palo Alto and has a headcount of 28.
There are many other interesting startups in the line up. Here were a few that drew my attention:
- Jygy – Mobile social networking with SMS
- Overlay.tv – video commerce platform that overlays contextual information directly onto online video content
- Jacked – Browser-based second screen for TV viewers, which provides synchronized content and a real-time interactive experience that complements what they’re watching on TV
It’s not to late to register. I hope to see you there.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
