Remember ICQ? The poster-child of Israeli startups which was sold to AOL in 1998 for $287 million (ancient link!) and later on to DST for $187 million in 2010, Yuri Milner's holding corp, is now operating under Mail.ru, Russia's primary email provider. ICQ is making a slight change in tac, as the company announced it will allocate $150 million to invest and acquire Israeli startups.
Felda Hardymon is a highly successful venture capitalist and popular Harvard Business School professor, where he teaches “Venture Capital and Private Equity”. Sharing research and examples from the 2012 edition of his textbook, Hardymon spoke at last week’s Journey conference in Tel Aviv about “Venture Investment- Trends, Cycles and Opportunities”.
Want to get better at presenting your idea and/or your startup pitch? Wish to gain some real world feedback from experts? Wish you could be 'famous' in 5min? If you had one 'Yes!' then please fill up this form and you might be part of a new episode of Google Developer Live IL, taking place this Monday.
Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon, oversees technology strategy for Amazon Web Services- the world’s largest provider of web-delivered infrastructure services to developers. In Tel Aviv for this week’s AWS Summit (http://aws.amazon.com/aws-summit-2012/Telaviv), Werner shares his approach to innovation, biggest strategic mistake and how AWS strives to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company”.
I came across a very useful free Executive Summary Template, and I thought I’d share it with you. It gives entrepreneurs a pre-formatted template and step-by-step guide to writing an clear Executive Summary in English. The template was created by Israeli startup ebrain, a new online English editing service.
In a world of increasingly growing choice, consumers face a continuous need to make decisions. With limited resources (time, money, attention span), the decision to register/buy/vote/comment on your online store/website or blog, takes seconds at best. That is why, I suppose, creating differentiation for your product can make the difference between failure and success.
“Samsung semiconductor is not fighting against Apple”, says Dr. Stephen Woo, President of Samsung Electronics Device Solutions. “We innovate by maintaining the start-up spirit”. Dr. Woo discussed Samsung’s approach to innovation last week at the HTIA Conference in Jerusalem and will make a similar keynote at CES
As every month, 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 the Invest in Israel archive, click here. Large US tech companies continue to open innovation and R&D centers in Israel - Apple with the acquisition of Anobit, eBay with the acquisition of the Gifts Project, Yahoo who bought Dapper and so on... See the headlines below.
SingTel is the world’s second largest wireless group, owning all or part of 8 APAC wireless carriers and 462 million subscribers. In April, the company restructured into three business units- Consumer, ICT and Digital- naming Allen Lew to transform SingTel into a multimedia market leader. At the HTIA conference in Jerusalem last week, Allen discussed reinvention, Asian markets and areas of strategic opportunity.
During HTIA 2012, for the first time ever, 18 startups from three of Israel's all-star startup accelerators (DreamIt, The Junction and Microsoft Accelerator) gave five minute pitches to a full house of technology enthusiasts and the like.
On a macro level, VC funding for the most part hasn’t really changed. We’ve seen some pretty good years recently, with VC funding in Israel reaching an all-time high in 2011 at a record $2.2 billion in VC investment. While overall this is quite impressive, only 24% of VC investment in Israel actually came from Israeli VCs.
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