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Browsing Posts published by Lisa Damast

Company in Focus: Explay

News
“Israeli nano-technology firm Explay and Luminetx announced that they have signed a collaboration agreement for Explay to develop and commercialize an ultra small mobile projector that will be a key component in the future development of the Luminetx’s VeinViewer.” (Globes)

Company Background
Since it was founded in 2001, Explay’s mission has been to develop the smallest projectors with the highest quality that can be used by itself or integrated into other technologies. During the SID 2007 conference this past May, Explay established itself as a leader in the nano-technology field when it introduced the oio, as the first truly mobile and fully operational nano projector.

Analysis: Market and Future
The deal to provide a biomedical company such as Luminetx with nano-technology is within Explay’s target market, but is not the center of it. This collaboration primarily exhibits the far-reaching possibilities for Explay to integrate its technology in a vertical market.

The real opportunity for Explay’s nano-technology will be to influence the consumer mobile device market and revolutionize the mobile lifestyle, which has driven the direction of the company’s research and development in recent years. While it will penetrate the portable media player market (i.e., digital camera, gaming devices and music players), it seems likely that the company will first focus most of its efforts on reaching the mobile handset market, which, when 3G enabled, allows consumers to display video, TV and Web and is a growing field with an estimated 528 million devices in use by 2010.

According to Insight Media estimates, by 2010 18M-55M Integrated Projectors will be sold and 7M-8M Companion Pocket Projectors. While the current and future market place shows demand, there are still several obstacles in nano-projection technology that can slow down the integration and production processes for Explay. The company also faces plenty of competition from Microvision, Texas Instruments and Light Blue Optics. Despite these challenges, Explay’s agreement with Luminetx signifies the wide-spread potential of this technology and marks the beginning of the different markets Explay’s products and collaboration will impact in the next few years.

Additional Resources
Explay: A Micro-Projector Application Extraordinaire
Explay Projects Big Business for Mobile Video
Interview with the competition, Microvision
Nano Projector Competition
Video: How to get a deal in 30sec

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Israel: The first gasoline-free economy?

Israel as the first gasoline-free economy sounds pretty far off to anyone who has walked down a major street in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem lately and was showered with soot from an old public transit bus passing by, but it is in the works. Former Israeli whizkid and SAP Chief of Products, Shai Agassi, who left the company in March with plans “to help convert his native Israel and its neighbor Jordan into gasoline-free economies with nationwide electronic transportation systems,” has raised $200 million for his stealth-mode company, Project Better Place to make electric cars and to use existing battery technologies, which are enough to get cars to go about 100 miles before recharging.

According to the news release, the company has received funding from Israel Corp., an Israel-based oil, trade and shipping conglomerate (which invested $100 million), and VantagePoint Venture Partners among others.

This announcement is impressive considering 9 months ago he was still working hard at SAP and talking about plans for SAP to go green. Hear his thoughts on the environment and SAP below in a video interview of him from the World Economic Forum at Davos this past January.

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Companies in Brief: Week of October 21 News

This past week saw big announcements from MySpace and Facebook, the U.S. market continuing to struggle and OpTier named Globes Israeli Start-up of the Year. How this will all affect technology and investments in Israel will be essential to follow in the next few months for innovations. In the meantime, review the news related to technology in Israel in this week’s Israel Innovation Companies in Brief: Week of October 21 slideshow.

For a larger version, you can go here,

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Facebook and Israel

No, there haven’t been any deals or ideas yet about Facebook opening an office or investing in Israel. But my experience at the WordCamp Israel blog conference yesterday and the announcement of Microsoft’s 1.6% buy-in into the social network, makes this a perfect opportunity to discuss how Facebook is still impacting the technology industry in Israel.

First, at one point during a panel discussion at the WordCamp Israel conference in Tel Aviv yesterday, a panelist asked the audience how many people are on Facebook. Nearly everyone in the room raised their hand. Then as a joke, since nearly a quarter of attendees were using laptops at the conference, the panelist asked how many of them were on Facebook even at that moment. At least 10 people raised their hands. Out of about 200 conference-goers, at least 5% couldn’t be away from it during the length of the conference. Basically, since Facebook opened the network to everyone, it seems that Israelis have been very quick to adopt it (there are over 100,000 members in the Israel network) and come to rely on it.

continue reading…

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Company in Focus: Oberon Media

News
Oberon Media is on a role right now. First it made news last week for buying two European companies, and then yesterday, it was announced that it will provide a new gaming channel on social network, MySpace. The company is such a hot topic right now, that in the past week alone, it has received coverage in over 12,000 blog entries.

Background
Oberon Media was founded in 2003 by Tomer Ben-Kiki, Tal Kerret, and Ofer Leidner and has its main headquarters in New York, with an R&D center in Tel Aviv. According to Matimop, Oberon Media has developed the leading global distribution network for casual games, hosting casual gaming sites for companies such as, MSN, Blue Mountain and AOL ICQ. The company is backed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers.

What it does
Through R&D and acquisitions, Oberon Media has become the source for creating integrated casual gaming solutions that support its clients brands and users. According to a Globes article, “Oberon Media develops, publishes and distributes games across online, mobile and interactive TV platforms.” Additionally, its current games Microsoft, Yahoo and Comcast have reached over 33 million users. A sample game center can be viewed here.

Competitors
Big Fish
RealArcade
Pogo.com
MiniClip

Market and Future
Oberon’s deal with MySpace will have ripple affects in almost every medium. Oberon’s casual gaming channel is part of MySpace’s recent efforts to compete with Facebook. Meanwhile, already the leader in causal gaming, Oberon will now reach 100 million MySpace users to further its share of the gaming market. Additionally, this deal is big news for the marketing world, just as Facebook and Google begin to go head-to-head on which advertising-platform is better. Of course, advertisers will be following how the addition of a gaming channel on MySpace will affect the site’s use as well as to see if this channel has potential for different companies desperately trying to reach the MySpace and Facebook demographic market to advertise on.

Should Oberon’s gaming channel prove to be helpful in saving MySpace, it will not only reach millions of users, but is certain to be carefully scrutinized by other companies and websites for potential future deals. A benefit of the partnership for game developers is that the platform for the gaming channel will be open and MySpace and Oberon Media are currently receiving submissions for games for the channel.

Regarding Oberon’s spending spree on different companies over the past year, perhaps its recent acquisitions of Kenjitsu and Friends Games helped seal the MySpace deal. According to an interview in Gamezebo last week after the acquisitions announcement, company Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder, Ofer Leidner, mentioned that there is a clear trend of successful casual games being developed in Eastern European countries and Russia. How this will effect the Oberon’s Israeli R&D center, if at all, will be interesting to watch over the next few months.

Additional Resources
Gamezebo interview with Oberon’s co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Ofer Leidner
Casual Gaming Stats
Few job cuts in I-Play deal
Overview of casual gaming competition
Casual Games Association

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Coming soon: NSC’s multimedia search engine

Here’s a bit of news that I missed when I was going through headlines last week. Last Wednesday, Israel-based Natural Speech Communication Ltd. (NSC), announced in a news release that it “will be launching a multimedia search engine, designed with the capability to recognize spoken words in online multimedia files, as the firm seeks to develop partnerships with content providers.” The engine is due out in 2008.

According to the website, NSC is a privately owned company, backed by AudioCodes, Corex Israel Industries, Telrad, and Polar Communication. Lead by its SpeechBlade Server, the company’s products are used by such companies as, Cellcom, Bank HaPoalim and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The announcement of a multimedia search engine with voice recognition technology will make it significantly easier for users to find the content they are looking for and will provide media companies with another opportunity to improve their search rankings. This technology also has the ability to give smaller web-based productions more visibility that can provide yet another disruption to the rapidly evolving broadcast world.

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Israeli TV on the Internet: ahead of the curve

In the past week, several articles have come out about television networks making episodes of their shows available online. In his weekly column, David Pogue raised some excellent points about the major networks in the United States doing this and how ads are shown, while web-strategist, Jeremiah Owyang also mentioned in a blog post the benefits of watching episodes of his favorite shows online and how necessary it is for the networks and advertisers to be savvy about it in order for them to survive.

Of course, my problem is that you can’t watch any videos on American television network sites from outside the country, but that’s a different topic… or perhaps not. Variety International has published a web exclusive that Israeli TV programs from the television station Reshet TV will soon be available for online viewing and downloading using Israel’s HIRO-Media Ltd.’s downloading technology.

Users will be able to download ad-supported whole episodes of Reshet’s programs that can’t be stripped of the ads. They will also be free to legally distribute the episodes anyway they want to, including on file-sharing sites and social networks, such as Facebook and MySpace. While advertisers might be scratching their heads wondering how viewer-demographics will be traced and measured with users having such free reign, a blog post from the Digital TV Weblog explains that “Hiro’s codec, a program used to encode and decode digital data, will report back viewing figures to content providers so they can charge advertisers for how many people watched their ads.”

Additionally, the Variety International article adds that “users have the option of registering anonymous demographic information to choose what type of advertisements they see, allowing for more personalized, localized or relevant campaigns.”

The article also mentions that this technology is patent-pending. However, if this patent gets approved, I certainly hope the American television networks will implement the technology. Maybe then I’ll finally be able to watch last week’s episode of Desperate Housewives on ABC’s website instead of watching it on YouTube or Veoh.

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Companies in Brief: Week of October 15th

The following is a slideshow of some major headlines related to Israel technology that I have collected and bookmarked over the past week. The week started with an analysis of what went wrong with Saifun and ended with news that the Dow Jones dropped on Friday. How the slide in the U.S. market will affect venture capitalist investments, especially in Israel, will be something to watch over the next few weeks and months. In the meantime, catch up or review the news related to technology in Israel with the video.

For a larger version, you can go here,

Note: The slideshow was made by bookmarking web pages I found relevant using Diigo WebSlides. Diigo is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to also add comments to bookmarks and highlight certain passages. I discovered WebSlides the other week when Orli Yakuel of Go2Web2 used it in a post of hers.

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Blog conference excitement

The upcoming WordCamp Israel conference in Tel Aviv on Thursday October 25th, isn’t just exciting for WordPress enthusiasts. The excitement leading up to it, has even had me, a Movable Type user, talking about it to my friends for days already.

Most of the conference’s topics won’t be WordPress-related, but will cover general blogging ideas. Here are some reasons why I’m looking forward to the conference:

To learn more about monetizing blogs
To learn more about where the blogosphere is going
To meet fellow Israeli bloggers whose blogs I’ve been following
To meet fellow Israeli bloggers who I haven’t heard about yet
To get feedback about current blog trends and ideas
To network
To spend the day in Tel Aviv

I am also looking forward to reporting back about how the conference and its topics relate to technology in Israel. If you will be there too, feel free to come up to me and introduce yourself!

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Meshing environment and technology

Snorkelers of the world-renowned coral reefs in the Red Sea off of Israel have been getting a different view of the sea’s marine life lately. Over the summer, a team of Israeli and Jordanian researchers placed an artificial coral reef made of specially designed concrete near the natural reefs in an attempt to prevent the destruction of the reefs by divers, while still allowing them and others to see the coral life. So far, the reef has already attracted over 20 species of fish.

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The work and research that went into this project represents part of a greater trend of Israelis taking more interest in protecting and preserving the environment. In addition to preserving sea life, finding solutions for the world’s 2 billion-plus population that doesn’t have access to fresh water and using water as an energy source have also become a focus in Israel’s technology community. Showcasing this trend will be the 2007 Water Technologies and Environmental Control (WATEC) Israel conference in Tel Aviv on October 30 – November 1st in which Israel’s solutions and innovations for water-related issues will be discussed and presented to an international audience.

According to the website, “Israel is poised to play a major role in supplying the world with cutting-edge water and environmental solutions.” The site then goes on to list such reasons as Israel having the world’s highest reused wastewater rate, the world’s most developed irrigation methods, and the world’s largest RO desalination plant.

With sponsors and exhibitors such as Netafim, Yissum, Auqatech, Dorot Water Technologies and Ormat Systems, Ltd., and the conference’s goal to bring together the international research and business communities to stimulate debate and discussion, this conference promises to be the cornerstone of innovations in the water-industry over the next few years.

Note: Images are from thediver.co.il.

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