The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Three Israeli Femme-preneurs To Keep an Eye On
- YC-Funded FanChatter Takes Social Media To The Ball Game
- NSFW: Trust me on the sunscreen (and the future of journalism)
- Happy Hour? “Cocktail” Is All About The Benjamins
- Pizza Hut’s Delicious iPhone App Tops 100,000 Downloads In Two Weeks
| Three Israeli Femme-preneurs To Keep an Eye On Posted: 02 Aug 2009 08:46 AM PDT “I agree on the one condition it’s not going to be a girl power post, ok”? That’s what Gali Ross requested when I asked to profile her for TechCrunch. So this isn’t going to be a ‘girl power’ post, but the fact of the matter is that female entrepreneurs are a rare breed. Let’s all try a mental game together… How many female startup CEO’s can you name off the top of your head? I am embarrassed to say that I have trouble coming up with more than a handful, but I don’t think I am alone. Here’s what I find strange about all this: I speak to VC’s and private investors regularly, and have never EVER heard anyone comment negatively on deal-flow based on the entrepreneur’s gender. Startups—at least this has been my experience—are weighted on the merits of the product, market and the team, but never on gender. Frankly, I can’t explain why female entrepreneurs are a rare commodity in our industry. (Feel free to enlighten me about the gender bias underpinning the tech industry in comments). The situation in Israel is not much different. But it should only be the quality that counts… To that end, here are three Israeli female entrepreneurs worth keeping tabs on:
A mother of two girls (hence her familiarity with the need for such a product), Amit has been in our little industry for 10 years now, starting as a photo editor at Israel’s largest news site Ynet. She then moved on to manage the biggest medical site in Israel doctors.co.il, doing everything from spec’ing to selling media to business development. It was there that she started thinking about the idea for Vikido, mostly due to gaps of communication experienced by sick kids (information, connection with friends and parents). By then it was clear to her that she wanted to be involved in consumer products with strong community reach and the ability to make an impact on people and what they do on the web. That’s when the Wix gig came about. Team Vikido is planning to launch its product in September. In the mean time they are hustling to get funding, writing code, and chronicling the trials and tribulations of startup life in a weekly article series on Ynet called ‘The Transparent Startup’. Beta Access: Register here. Twitter: Amit Knaani (@amitos), Team Vikido (@vikidoteam)
Orit is also somewhat of a local serial entrepreneur. She’s founded a Yelp-ish review site called Ramkol.co.il and mit4mit.co.il, the second most popular wedding review site in Israel. Most recently Orit held the Entrepreneur in Residence role at Decima Ventures, where she was responsible for technical and market analysis. Decima is also where her newest venture, Vetrinas was born. Vetrinas is a virtual shopping window to hundreds of stores from across the fashion Meccas of the world, be it London, New York, Paris or Milan. Vetrinas is targeting three segments: Consumers with an interest in high-fashion. Retailers that want to expose potential on/offline shoppers to specific products or brand advertising. And finally, shop window designers that can display their work (art) in order to attain job offers. Orit coded all of Vetrina’s herself and intends to generate revenue by way of affiliation through the site and rev-share through widgets that will syndicate content to blogs and websites. Vetrinas is currently in Alpha. Twitter: Orit Hashay (@orithashay), Vetrinas (@vetrinas)
She then joined eWave where she kept busy with project management and, afterward, marketing, sales and business development. Two years later she joined Israeli dev house Clementina as COO. That’s where she worked with Israeli startups such as my6sense, Spikko, and Footbo. Temptation was in the air and Gali couldn’t resist so she recruited a partner and founded Razoss. Gali is still very protective of her product so details and access are limited. In vague terms it can be described as a browser-based content promotion platform, where the idea is to enhance the browser beyond content display, to content management and distribution. Initial funding was provided by Dr. Yossi Vardi a little over a year ago and a second investment is near closing. The product is in private alpha, with a wider release intended in a few months. Beta Access: Register here. Twitter: Gali Ross (@galiross), Razoss (@razoss)
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| YC-Funded FanChatter Takes Social Media To The Ball Game Posted: 01 Aug 2009 04:43 PM PDT
FanChatter, a Y Combinator funded company that’s launching today, is a startup that’s looking to help fix this problem. The company is focused on helping major sports teams increase engagement both during and after games using user-submitted content, Twitter, and other social services. And while the company is still quite new, it’s already got some major customers, including the Minnesota Twins, the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the University of Oaklahoma. One of the site’s core features is its photo gallery. During games, fans are encouraged to Email photos taken from their cell phones to a designated Email address, for the chance to have their photos appear on the stadium’s Jumbotron. Teams receive the photos in real-time and build photo galleries from them, which they can then use in place of the candid video shots we’ve all seen so many times between innings or during a time-out. Obviously teams aren’t able to display every photo submitted, but FanChatter also takes these photos and builds a shared photo album — one for each game — which can then be accessed by fans from the team’s home page. You can see what these albums look like by checking out the Twins’ page here. Fans will also soon be able to share their videos taken at the game, though these likely won’t be appearing on the Jumbotron as they take too long to filter through. Another of the company’s features is the ChatterBox, a widget that can display a stream of tweets relevant to a particular hashtag or topic (the Timberwolves have one that shows tweets with the tag #twolves). Fans can use this to communicate during the game, and to follow the latest news from home. The widget is similar to one that’s offered by Tinker, which launched earlier this year. FanChatter licenses its technology with fees set on a case-by-case basis, and has plans to extend its technology beyond sports to include other major events, like concerts. It also has plans to roll out iPhone applications, which would give fans a better way to interact with each other while they’re still at the game.  Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| NSFW: Trust me on the sunscreen (and the future of journalism) Posted: 01 Aug 2009 02:37 PM PDT
It’s all Lacy’s fault, of course, she actually pays for this nonsense every month or so and claims it’s the reason why she no longer gets sick when she travels. Arrington and Heather apparently swear by it too. The rest of TechCrunch, meanwhile, are beyond skeptical, bandying around words like “science” and “proof” in a pathetic attempt to disguise the fact that they’re in the pay of Big Cheeseburger. Whatever the truth, I’ve bet Lacy fifty dollars that the only thing the cleanse will achieve for me is crippling hunger and a loss of feeling in my extremities, so I’m in for the duration. At least as I lie on my deathbed, puking water and romaine-and-celery juice into a cardboard bowl, I can comfort myself with the fact that it was free - a promotion by the company to tempt California-based hacks into starving themselves to death. Journalistic freebies for the win (see my statement of ethics: here). Speaking of ethics, I’m just back in San Francisco from an all expenses paid trip to the beach. Promoted as ‘Geeks At The Beach’, the trip came courtesy of J.R. Johnson who runs a new site aiming to bring people together based on things they agree on, to discuss things they don’t. According to the invitation, J.R. wanted to round up ‘influential’ social media types for a day of discussion about trends in the industry, and where it’s heading next. In Los Angeles. On a beach. Lacy and Scoble would be there - so far, so good - but so too would Seaworld-friendly haircaster, Julia Allison; LA-based red-carpet dweller, Shira Lazar and various life-casters and me-bloggers whose existence I was only dimly aware of. I hesitated for a moment in accepting: what was supposed to be a meeting of minds could very easily be a train wreck of egos and bikinis and Flipcams and bullshit. Or, to put it another way: the best. column. ever. Count me in. As it turned out, my worries were only half founded. Yes, there were Flipcams, and lots of egos and bullshit - these were bloggers and life-casters, after all. Yes, at one point the conversation touched a little too closely on whether cupcakes were more or less important than politics in driving community discussions. And yes, certainly, some of those in attendance were clearly more interested in the beach part than the geeks part of the event. But as the day went on, a hardcore group of us - including but certainly not limited to me, Scoble, Lacy and J.R. - really did get down to some proper, substantive debate over two issues that occupy almost every day of our lives. The first was Internet anonymity - my thoughts on which you enjoyed last week - and the second was the future of journalism, and how life-casting and unpaid blogging most certainly isn’t it. I’ll explain. There’s a horribly pompous misconception amongst bloggers that they are somehow ‘taking on the mainstream media’. “Those old losers just don’t get it!” they cry. “We bloggers are on the scene first, asking tough questions before the mainstream media have even put their shoes on”. Indeed, as uber-blogger Scoble pointed out, taking another sip from his glass of free sake, there were no AP photographers on the plane that went down in the Hudson. When it comes to a certain type of highly visible breaking news, no-one can argue that social media kicks the mainstream media’s ass. At any given disaster, there’s possibly a 0.01% chance that a professional journalist or photographer will already be on the scene, compared to 100% odds that there’ll be some dude with a camera-phone there. And as for asking tough questions: yep, bloggers are pretty good at that too - hardly a syllable can slip from the mouth of a politician or public official without it being torn apart by an army of ‘fact-checking’ bloggers, hungry for content. And yet, I argued back, after camera phone dude helps us establish that the plane has crashed, who can we trust to tell us why it happened? While bloggers can own the first five minutes of any breaking story - a plane crash, a fire, a burglary - it’s always going to be the professional reporters who own the next five days, or five weeks. They walk the streets, work their contacts and - yes - trawl the blogosphere for eye-witness reports, and then take all of that information, analyse it, follow it up and ultimately provide an account of events that readers can trust. Or at least this is what they used to do. If that were still how journalism works then the unpaid bloggers wouldn’t have a hope of competing. But unfortunately, thanks to a succession of journalistic fakes and the constant tabloidisation of the press, that trust is gone. Why should someone - either an advertiser or a reader - be prepared to pay for a newspaper when they can get the same old lies and fluff from the blogosphere? As we sat in Los Angeles, debating how to save what remains of professional journalism, Michael Arrington was posting one possible solution on this very blog. In a post titled ‘What If: The New New York Times‘ he argued that the New York Times should lay off all but 50 of its reporters, leaving behind the crack team of superstar hacks who truly drive the paper’s value. These cuts, he said, would allow the remaining reporters to be paid a generous wage for their work, thus solving the twin questions of trust and of how to pay for good journalism in future. It’s a nice idea, but one that overlooks the fact that a superstar hack takes days - or weeks - of legwork to get to the bottom of a single story. Without content from workaday photographers or wire-feed-re-writers, the New New York Times would be three pages long and published weekly. Good journalism is a slow, labour-intensive business. And what about unglamourous local stories? Let’s not forget that the two most famous reporters of all time - Woodward and Bernstein - were junior reporters when the broke their most famous story: Watergate. A story, let’s also not forget, that began life as a dull local burglary. Which of the 50 top flight hacks would have been assigned to that? No, it doesn’t matter how you twist it, there’s simply no way for the New York Times to regain its position as the news reporter of record in the Internet era. Instead, if Mike really wants to save the Times, while simultaneously seeing the future of journalism, he should look a little closer to home. To TechCrunch in fact. Because while TechCrunch might be ‘just’ a blog it’s also, as I’ve discovered in the past few weeks, a hell of a professional journalistic machine. Whatever the cynics might think, it’s a place where sources are built up, facts are checked, lawyers are employed and writers are encouraged to go out and get the real story behind the story. It’s also on something of a hiring spree at the moment - looking out at traditional media and cherry picking those (ahem) who it thinks can bring more value to the brand. In doing so, TechCrunch is one of a handful of tech blogs that commands solid advertising revenues and has - by and large - build up huge trust amongst readers. Trust which allows it to host events like TechCrunch 50, bringing in even more money to support the site’s journalism. Right across the Internet there are countless other sites that employ the same standards for other niches - from music (Pitchfork) to politics (FiveThirtyEight) to farming (I have no idea) - each of which can afford to dedicate more time to their very specific field of expertise than the New York Times could, even if it doubled its staff. And so if I were the New York Times, I’d realise that in the face of such solid niche competition, my days as a news-gatherer were over. I’d lay off all of my journalists, shut down the presses (a move favoured by Lacy during a recent Guardian podcast), close the doors and thank God for giving me such a good innings. Then the next day I’d round up maybe 20 or 30 of my best editors and I’d launch a brand new site. A site which, like a far more mainstream Arts and Letters Daily, would use those skilled human editors to aggregate the best specialist reporting from around the web into one all-encompassing news source. I’d link to posts on TechCrunch, and Pitchfork and FiveThirtyEight and on any other site that my professional editors had determined was providing the best coverage of each of the days most important stories. And I’d work hard - really hard - to rebuild my brand credibility so that readers knew that they could absolutely trust the reporting on any site that had been selected by editors. All the news that’s fit to link. For the New York Times, the cost in doing all of this would be limited to retaining the 30 best editors in the business, and the small support staff required to keep them productive - costs easily covered thanks to the millions of eyeballs that would visit just such a site every day, hungry for news sources they can actually trust. For the specialist sites being linked to, the boost in traffic and credibility would only bring more targeted advertising revenue and more possibilities for spin off events, books and the rest, all of which contribute to the journalistic bottom line and their ability to hire from the army of recently unemployed journalists. And as for the life-casters and amateur bloggers - they can keep having their fun too; contributing user generated content to the niche sites, and then re-parsing the coverage on their own blogs, Twitter stream or - in Scoble’s case - FriendFeed. It’s a solution where every one’s a winner. Except for the life casters, who by and large will remain losers. Of course there’s no reason the aggregating site has to be created by the New York Times; anyone with some high-level editorial experience could do it. Equally there’s no reason why there can’t be dozens of these aggregators, each with their own editorial voice: one for liberals, one for conservatives, one for wealthy Brits, one for college kids in Guatemala. The point is that the days of the profitable generalist news-gatherer are dying, but the days of solid reporting and a strong, trusted editorial voice must never be allowed to perish. It’s a point that’s so important it kept a group of us arguing until the early hours in Los Angeles, and so important that the possible solution has been bouncing around my head ever since. Hell, it’s so important that I feel like getting up from my desk right now and hitting the streets looking for the perfect newsman-turned-entrepreneur to make it happen. If only I wasn’t on this stupid juice cleanse and hadn’t lost the use of my legs. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Happy Hour? “Cocktail” Is All About The Benjamins Posted: 01 Aug 2009 02:26 PM PDT
And interestingly enough, it’s also starting to sound like the music industry may be taking a cue from the rise of mobile applications, to position this new format. Reuters has a new report today about the Cocktail plan. After you wade through the usual PR speak from music execs about how this will change the digital music experience for consumers, you get to the real nugget of information:
Is there something to be said for the missing experience of opening a record or CD for the first time, and checking out things like the artwork? Of course. But if the industry execs really cared about that, they’d come up with a standard to offer that without jacking up prices on consumers to give them a better experience. Instead, they have likely come up with a way to charge more for content, while wrapping it in some new marketing. And while the execs and most outlets are mostly pushing the Apple angle specifically, the idea is to get these new types of digital albums to all the big digital music outlets, as Greg Sandoval reported last week. But it’s smart to push Apple’s role in this because it sounds like it is doing things a little differently than what the music labels plan to do with the rest of the outlets. And it seems like a good bet that Apple’s version could offer a better experience than the others. The reason is that Apple’s digital content is so tightly integrated with its devices. So something like Cocktail on an iPhone or iPod touch could be a lot nicer than simply trying to run it on a computer or a less capable mobile media player. And from what’s being said about all of this, it’s starting to sound like these Cocktails may actually be album apps of sorts, that you open and interact with while listening to the music. Again, Apple has already proven itself in the app game. It will be interesting to see if this new format takes off in Apple’s ecosystem, but don’t be fooled into thinking that the prime motivation for this is anything but a way for the labels to make more money. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Pizza Hut’s Delicious iPhone App Tops 100,000 Downloads In Two Weeks Posted: 01 Aug 2009 09:48 AM PDT
Good for them, because Pizza Hut really made an effort with the software program, which they amusingly dubbed a “killer app for your appetite”. Aside from the ability to order food, the app boasts a bit of entertainment to spice things up. It includes a so-called “virtual fridge” where you’ll find coupons to add to your order and a free game called “Pizza Hut Racer” that you can play while you kill time waiting for your food to arrive. More of this, please. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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Amit Knaani is best known in the Israeli startup industry as the former Senior Product Manager of Wix.com. She quit the hot startup to join forces with Yami Glick, another well-known figure in the local startup scene. Together the two founded 
Orit Hashay has also been active in in Israeli startups for over 10 years, having taken on software and business development posts with public companies such as Emblaze and Comverse, as well as consulting for various Israeli startups.
Gali Ross is one those people you (or at least I) hated in school because she made you (me) look so lazy and unfocused. She took physics, math and political science. Not having gone unnoticed, she went on to become an intelligence officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and then later an Information Systems Engineering graduate of the Technion (Israel’s MIT).
Every day, sports fans congregate at their nearest big-league stadium to bask in each other’s cheers, body paint, and beer, relishing their shared enthusiasm for the teams they love. But then the game ends. Everyone is forced to head back to their normal lives to trudge through their day jobs once more, at least til the next home game comes round. Social media can offer them some comfort, giving them a chance to take the community home with them. Unfortunately, many professional sports teams are still failing to tap into this effectively.
Day two of this ridiculous juice cleanse experiment and I feel like a new man. By which I mean, I feel like my insides aren’t fully developed, I have no strength in my arms or legs and the idea of eating solid food is just a distant dream.
The existence of Apple’s new so-called “Cocktail” music experience being created with the major record labels seemed to create headlines last week more for the 
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