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The difference in approaches has to do with Israel itself.
“Israel has a long history of producing more entrepreneurs per capita than almost any other eco-system. They have a strong technical education system which when coupled with the universal military service provides unique pool of talent.” explains program advisor Robert Goldberg, a long-time executive and investor in Silicon Valley who has been active with Israeli companies for years. | Startups |
“While there have been a number of successful Israeli startups the proportion of homerun exits has been low. UpWest Labs aims to change this by leveling up and arming entrepreneurs with access to knowledge, people and capital. | Startups |
”
To date, most of these people have been building companies in tech-heavy areas like security and databases, that could then be sold to multinationals, as this recent Economist article explores. While the overall venture industry in Israel has had its ups and downs, the data suggests early internet companies are being ignored. | Startups |
One recent study, by the Israel Venture Capital Research Center, indicated that angel funding has dropped as a share of total venture investments to under 2009 levels; while internet investing has gone up, it hasn’t been at the early stage, and it’s still not in proportion to the pool of quality companies.
UpWest Labs’ founders decided to start the program after watching the Israeli startup scene change over the last decade. Gil Ben-Artzy spent the last six years doing corporate development and operations management at Yahoo, responsibilities that involved regularly going to Israel, working with Yahoo’s local team there, as well as local entrepreneurs and investors. | Startups |
Shuly Galili, meanwhile, is the cofounder and executive director of the California Israel Chamber of Commerce. | Startups |
The organization that has spent more than a decade helping Israeli companies with marketing, fundraising and general business development here.
The program pairs companies with some 30 mentors, ex-patriots and others with some connection go Israel and the program founders, who are also Silicon Valley-based experts on particular areas. | Startups |
After startups finish their three months, the goal will be for them to have the connections that will keep them coming back to Silicon Valley and other parts of the tech world.
While some programs have been expanding their class sizes over the years, Ben-Artzy says that’s not the plan at this point. | Startups |
Instead, he’s aiming to keep a small -class feel so each of the companies can get maximum attention. This might seem a little risky considering that breadth of investment is often the best way for early-stage investors to actually make money. | Startups |
But it makes sense, considering that UpWest is bringing in companies that already have something to show for themselves.
For now, UpWest is just getting started. The first class arrived in Menlo Park last month. The six companies in it are working on consumer mobile, social, gaming, SaaS and enterprise software (so, it’s not entirely consumer, but still heavier in that direction). | Startups |
We’ll be looking at the more closely later on. In the meantime, the program has started recruiting its next class of start-ups. Israeli TechCrunch readers, you can get more details on it here.. | Startups |
Say you, like me, wrote a book about the two Lithuanian lovers who find themselves trapped in a basement and have to solve mysteries and learn magic to escape the traps set by them by an evil wizard robot using their brawn, brains, and a little sultry lovemaking. | Startups |
How would you publish and sell it?
Presumably you would visit the Kindle, B&N, and Apple book stores and upload it, making it available on all of those platforms and raking in the dough. Now, however, you can just use Booktango.
Before we get too deep into the “Whys” and “Wherefores” of this thing, I’d like to riff a little bit on Booktango and it’s parent company, Author Solutions. | Startups |
Author Solutions runs a number of what were once called “vanity presses” including iUniverse, Xlibris and the like. A few years ago I would have told you to stay as far away from these guys as possible and that their services were, at best, predatory and at worst rapaciously bad. | Startups |
My buddy Scott was excoriated for daring to say self-publishing wasn’t great six years ago but, on the aggregate, vanity presses usually took your money and left you with a crate of sad, unwanted books. | Startups |
However, as the rise of digital self-publishing shows us, everything changes and it’s fascinating to see the company move into the epub world with services like Booktango.
That said, how does this service work? You upload your book and a cover and prepare it for sale. | Startups |
The company offers a tablet-based editing suite so you can do a few touch-ups on the fly, but the real magic happens after you upload. You can sell your book on the Booktango website and receive 100% of the “royalties” or 90% of the sale if you sell through any other ebookstore including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo. | Startups |
The “free” service includes a full editing suite, cover designer, and ISBN assignment. Then, as you sell your book, the company tracks your sales and pays out royalties based on “net sale.” You can also pay $49 for a bit of hand-holding in terms of book upload and management and $189 for assistance with the book as a whole as well as copyright protection.
Now net sale gets a little tricky. | Startups |
Booktango, for example, takes $1.50 per book as a retailing fee but then you’d get the remainder of that sale. If you sell through Amazon et al, you have to deal with their fees and then Booktango gets 10% of that net sale, leaving you with 90%. | Startups |
It’s not a horrible deal, to be fair, but it’s not quite clear unless you read the FAQ.
There are plenty of sites out there like this and there are plenty of good ways to get your content into ebook stores. However, Booktango might make a good tool for the technologically maladroit to upload and sell their masterpieces without much fuss. | Startups |
I tried it today and it was a bit confusing and the editor a bit underpowered, but presumably you’re going to do most of your work offline and upload it when you’re done. | Startups |
While I doubt I’ll see my Lithuanian love story on the site (I’m holding out for a huge advance), I would publish my other beautiful work including my epic, 100,000-line adventure poem featuring Andy Dick and King Arthur and my advanced guide to sandwich making. Look for them wherever fine ebooks are sold.. | Startups |
Today, mobile promotion and discovery service AppsFire is launching a new toolkit for developers called App Booster. | Apps |
Meant to boost user engagement and retention, two of the toughest challenges developers face today, the App Booster SDK (software development kit) introduces a suite of tools for things like in-app notifications, user feedback, analytics and mobile app cross-promotion.
According to AppsFire co-founder Ouriel Ohayon, mobile app engagement is not optimal today because developers don’t have relationships with their users. | Apps |
In addition, because apps are these walled off, sandboxed pieces of software, they’re often forgotten soon after download.
Push notifications, like those powered by Urban Airship, for example, can help address some of these issues, but they only work for users who agree to accept the notifications to begin with. | Apps |
Many don’t. Ohayon says that these notifications are only activated around 50% of the time – a figure that hints at users’ growing resistance to these interruptive type of alerts. It’s something that’s likely a function of the increased number of apps users have installed on their phones. | Apps |
The average smartphone user has over 60 apps today, and, let’s face it, not all developers have used push responsibly. The better option lately (especially when you’re just testing a new app), is to say “no” to the “allow push notifications?” message.
App Booster presents an alternative that can re-target those non-push users, in the form of in-app notifications. | Apps |
These are different from push, as pop-up messages aren’t involved, nor do they clutter the phone’s notification center. | Apps |
However, the in-app notifications can trigger the bubble on the icon of the app and appear in a News Feed-like way within the app.
Here, the developer can communicate with their users as much as they like, posting welcome messages to newbies, offering app tips, communicating about updates and changes, and attempt to re-opt in users who didn’t accept push notifications initially.
Developers can also solicit feedback and ratings from their users, something that has typically come in the form of a push message: “do you want to rate this app?” – again feeling more like an annoyance than a feature. | Apps |
App Booster’s in-app feedback system is structured differently, however, allowing users to submit different types of feedback, like bugs and ideas, alongside their review. | Apps |
And when the user leaves the feedback, the system re-routes automatically to the iTunes App Store or Android Market to post the review.
On the backend, App Booster provides a web dashboard for tracking engagement analytics, plus creating and targeting the in-app notifications. The latter can be filtered by geography, language, app version or OS version. | Apps |
Developers can also cross-promote their apps, or arrange free barter programs with other developers via the SDK.
In early tests, the company has seen engagement improvements of up to 50% and CTRs from 15% to 50%. It will be interesting to see what numbers a broader rollout provides. After all, many app users have become blind to red badges too. | Apps |
Will apps really be launched more? Or will it just be that those apps that are already popular will now have an improved way to enable developer-user communication?
Besides, it’s just as possible that the best feature in the toolkit turns out to be the less intrusive way it pushes users to leave app reviews. | Apps |
More reviews of a positive nature will in turn lead to better app store rankings, and that leads to more downloads.
But for now, the in-app notification center is the SDK’s top draw. Ohayon notes that many of the biggest apps (e.g., Facebook) have built their own notification systems, but it’s very hard for developers to create something like that for themselves. | Apps |
The App Booster toolkit, for example, has been in development for 8 months and still isn’t done.
Currently, the SDK is available for iOS and Android, and will arrive soon for HTML5 apps. It’s available as a free download here.. | Apps |
Popular restaurant app Urbanspoon is releasing new data today related to its growth over the course of 2011. The company says its traffic is up by 80%, with mobile growth outpacing the web. | Apps |
The site is now seeing 28 million visits per month, with traffic now split roughly half and half between mobile and web.
On the mobile side, Urbanspoon has seen 112% year-over-year growth, while on the web side, it’s at 70% growth over last year. | Apps |
Overall, the company saw 255 million visits in 2011, up from 141 million in 2010.
Across all mobile platforms, including both apps and mobile web, Urbanspoon is seeing 6 million mobile monthly uniques and 10 million mobile monthly visits. | Apps |
The interesting thing about this data is that Urbanspoon can’t always tell when a user hits a particular webpage where that user originated – app or mobile web. | Apps |
That’s because many pages within Urbanspoon’s native mobile applications are actually mobile webpages built using HTML, a decision that the company tells us has been “great for scalability.” (Now to work on improved analytics!).
Urbanspoon attributes its growth to several things, from new features launched over the past year, to its continued focus on improving its mobile experiences. | Apps |
Notably, it launched a food diary / check-in feature called Dineline in recent months. It has also been aggressively going after OpenTable with its Rezbook iPad app that allows restaurants to take reservations directly from the Urbanspoon app and website. As of last month, Urbanspoon had over 1,200 restaurants using this service. | Apps |
(It had just 800 in August).
The company also integrated Zagat reviews in August 2011, just before Google’s September acquisition of the well-known restaurant reviews company. For what it’s worth, there hasn’t been any fallout coming from Zagat’s new ownership in terms of its partnership with Urbanspoon, we’re told. | Apps |
It’s been business as usual.
As for what’s next, Urbanspoon is exploring other ways to help diners “close the loop” with restaurants that extend beyond its bread-and-butter (ha!) offering of restaurant discovery. Reservations and waitlisting are just two of the services the company aims to provide. It’s also exploring ideas like food delivery, customer loyalty programs, and incentives. | Apps |
One of these new transaction types will debut this year. But, cautions Urbanspoon SVP of Publishing Kara Nortman, “when we get into doing something on the loyalty and incentive side, it will be something we consider very carefully.”
The company already allows restaurants to target customers via “Perks” – specials that appear in the reservation flow to entice customers to a particular restaurant. | Apps |
Presumably, the loyalty program could tie those perks to the individual, then reward them for their selection.
In the nearer future (a matter of weeks, in fact), Urbanspoon will deliver new mobile app updates, but specific details on what those will involve will have to wait.. | Apps |
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One of the more annoying aspects of starting a new jobs recently was switching email accounts — I tried figure out an easy way to transfer messages and contacts, but after a few minutes of fumbling around with my email client, I gave up, forwarded a few key messages, and then set to work rebuilding my contact list (mostly) from scratch.
In other words, I could really have used something like YippieMove, a product from startup WireLoad that promises to make the email migration process as easy as possible. | Startups |
You just enter your account details (the company supports more than 100 email providers — co-founder and CEO Viktor Petersson says it should work with pretty much any email service that uses IMAP) and YippieMove handles the rest of the process, no software installation or constant babysitting required.
Petersson says the company just reinvented YippieMove in a way that could turn a cool technology into a significant business. | Startups |
The YippieMove site has been redesigned, but more importantly, the company has developed an API that should help it work with larger clients and partners.
Originally, Petersson says YippieMove was designed to address his own needs as a Santa Clara University graduate who need to move his mail from his student account before everything was deleted. | Startups |
He quickly realized that college students aren’t a great customer base, at least if you expect them to pay, so he refocused his attention on businesses, where the email migration process can be a big headache. | Startups |
YippieMove started working directly with IT departments (the company’s testimonials page includes a comment from an IT support manager at Kiva.org, for example), but there were still challenges to the business model — as Petersson puts it, “People tend not to do email migration all that often. | Startups |
It’s not a repeat purchase thing.”
So the company also works with Google Apps resellers who manage their clients’ transition to Google, and who use YippieMove to handle the email migration. And with the API, Petersson is hoping to partner with any company (some Internet Service Providers have express interest), that offers email migration services. | Startups |
The big vision, he says, is to become “the Twilio of email migration” — in other words, to become the underlying, often invisible technology powering email migration wherever you find it.
YippieMove is already using the API to power the email migrations on its own website. It will be available to beta testers in the second quarter of the year, Petersson says.. | Startups |
How do you meet new people in today’s digital age, without over-exposing yourself the creeps, trolls and spammers? The answer, perhaps, is build a social service on top of Facebook, leveraging your network, your friends of friends and shared interests to form connections with people you don’t know. That’s what the new startup Speeksy is doing. | Social |
The service is virtualizing the experience of going out to a bar or nightclub by offering an online venue where users can interact, message each other and video chat, while bonding over their shared music playlists.
The startup is similar in spirt to TechCrunch Disrupt winner Shaker, the Facebook app that turns your Facebook profile into a walking avatar, similar to what you would find in a game like The Sims or Second Life. | Social |
However, unlike Shaker, there are no avatars or virtual worlds involved here.
Instead, when you sign in to Speeksy (a play on the word “Speakeasy,” a nod to the startup’s virtual bar experience), you’re presented with a list of “venues” and people with similar interests to you. | Social |
The venues can best be thought of as something like Turntable.fm rooms – there’s live music, a playlist, and fellow music lovers. The music, however, comes from SoundCloud and the point of the room is not necessarily to enjoy or discover new music (you can even turn it off), but to meet other people. The music just serves as a tool to facilitate those interactions. | Social |
Any user can add to the playlist and people can give “props” to tracks they like. It’s like an ice-breaker for the modern age.
Speeksy offers a number of features that allow users to get to know each other, but the main one involves leveraging Facebook profile data. | Social |
Users are listed as 1st, 2nd or 3rd degree connections based on whether you’re friends, have mutual friends, or have no friends in common, respectively. Speeksy also matches you up with those who share your interests, again, based on Facebook profile data. | Social |
And you can search and filter this list by a number of things, like location, gender, and various personal traits, like whether someone smokes or not.
Ah, yes. That’s right – at its heart, Speeksy is a new-fangled dating service, built on top of Facebook profiles. | Social |
But just don’t call it online dating, pleads co-founder Barry Cassidy, a former Adobe engineer who previously worked on Adobe Connect.
“We’re going for the people who are alienated by the social stigma of online dating,” he says. “Even today, something that gets identified as online dating turns off 85% of singles – it’s essentially a dating agency. | Social |
It’s analogous to going to an office and saying, ‘I’ve really failed in the social environments that I go to, so I’d like to get put into a database to try and get matched with somebody.'”
(Burn! For what it’s worth, I know many happy marriages among friends that arose from online dating, but I agree – it’s not for everyone.)
The other problems with meeting people online, explains Cassidy, involve unwanted attention from undesirables and the static nature of online dating courtship, involving emails that lead to phone calls that lead to real-world meetings. | Social |
“90% of the time, there’s absolutely no chemistry,” he says. “We wanted to create an environment where people could talk to each other in real-time and see those things that people get attracted to.”
The service offers tons of tools for virtualized flirting, without being overly creepy about it. | Social |
When you view another’s profile on the service, you can click buttons like “make eye contact,” “send over a drink,” etc. Alternatives to the Facebook “poke,” essentially. You can also click on another user’s interests to add it to your own, e.g., “oh, you like “The Office,” so do I!” It’s a conversation starter. | Social |
Plus, you can start a text-based chat, or, if you’re feeling more adventurous, move into a one-on-one video chat.
The virtual venues can hold up to 50 people, all with webcams a-blazing. However, due to technological constraints, you don’t see the webcam view until you hover your cursor over a user’s profile card in the venue’s lists of participants. | Social |
You can also view a user’s full profile in order to see their live cam feed.
As for keeping out the creepers, the site “gamifies” social interactions, offering rewards for good behavior (engagement, participation) while doling out warning labels to naughty users who get blocked by others on the site. | Social |
In other words, if you misbehave, act rude or crude, you’ll strike out and be ignored, just like in real life.
The startup, founded in early 2011, has raised $60,000 in seed funding from its founders and angel investors, Gerad Cassidy and Michael Dwyer, CTO Exigen Insurance Solutions. Speeksy’s other co-founder is Tom Tsatsos, who formerly ran his own web agency that build apps and sites for clients.
The site is launching into private beta today, so you’ll need an invite to get in. | Social |
There are a couple of thousand of invites for TechCrunch readers tucked away behind this link. | Social |
In testing, the “beta” label definitely applied – there were bugs, odd design choices, and frankly, the overall experience could use a bit of polish.
Speeksy, it should be noted, will also soon to face a fierce competitor, the well-funded Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker creation known as Airtime, which is even more of a direct threat than Shaker.
Aren’t you worried about Airtime?, we asked Cassidy.
“I definitely had nervous moments when I heard more about what they’re doing, especially the fact that they’re bringing in social graph information,” he says. | Social |
“But the more I think about it, I think it’s actually be good for us. There may not be just one winner in this space.”
. | Social |