After a week packed with meetings, presentations, pitches and networking opportunities, the Israel Web Tour concluded on Friday after a great party at Slide. I believe that sharing is caring, so I thought I’d share with you my notes from the public showcase. First, let’s take a deeper look into the companies that participated in the Israel Web Tour. On some of the fifteen startups, there’s only little public information available.
Nuconomy – Shachar Nechmad
What is Nuconomy: A web analytics startup, optimized for web 2.0. Nuconomy enables publishers to know how users interact with their content, and what’s the impact on the conversion. Not only that, but as the owner of a UGC site for example, I can geet the top community leaders, which are the users that contribute the most to my community and drill down per users – what do they comment on, what content do they read, etc. Impact: great data helps with SEO and SEM –
As I publisher I can where are my users coming from. 80% of the traffic came from Google, but the 8% from other sources contributed 60% of the content on the site. What keywords do I need to buy or emphasize? Nuconomy will help you answer that question and slice the data by campaign, demographic group and geographic location.
How can you get it:
Nuconomy has been live in a closed beta for 5 months. Integration is easy, using
I spoke to Sachar after the event and asked him to provide a comment for VC Cafe.
He said: “If traffic is king, ROI is god. Advertisers and publishers don’t care about traffic. They care about meaningful traffic. They care about getting (and understanding) the contribution you get from any content, tag, user, campaign, keyword, etc…
Our platform not just allow you to measure this contribution, but also to understand what you need to do in order to increase it.”
What is Sportingo: Sportingo is a media company, focused on the creation of professionally edited original user generated content. If you think about it, 50% of online users look at sports online in a regular basis, so the need is there. Sportingo put a little twist on traditional media by moving the commentary from few sport commentators to the fans.
Product: Sportingo has
- News –scores, statistics and game schedules. Sportingo created a directory that aggregates data from all over the world.
- Conversation, including discussion boards, blogs, forums
About Sportingo: Founded in 1999 and headquartered in London, UK (marketing, sales) with a development office in Israel. Headcount of 20 peopole. Currently, Sportingo is the largest sports platform in Europe. So far Sportingo has raised $4M both in Israel and the UK. As many other media companies, Sportingo’s business model consists of three revenue venues: advertising, sponsorships and premium services (vertical search model).
Clicktale – Dr. Tal Schwartz
What is ClicTale? Clicktale provides in-page web analytics, recording everything customers do on the publisher’s page. Using Clicktale, a client can see more than just clicks, by watching exactly what users are doing and how they are interacting with the site. One of Clicktale’s most interesting feature is the heatmaps, providing aggrgated results of users interaction with a site. For example, a heat map showed that users spent 36 seconds at the the top of the page. That kind of data allows publishers to strategically position content, where it will be most likely consumed.
Differentiation: Unlike web-analytics tools like Google Analytics, ClickTale considers itself a “a huge usability lab”
. Using Clicktale, publishers can increase conversions and revenue and increase the usability of the site. Integration is simple – ClickTale is a SaaS product that requires only a couple of javascript lines to get started. No slow downs occur to the site’s users.
About: Founded in 2006, ClickTale is already live and selling. It also claims to already be profitable. Sign up for free or sign up for a pro account to get more recordings. ClickTale is currently looking for partners and users –
anywhere from mom and pap shops to large companies.
Delver –
Liad Agmon
What is Delver (formerly known as Semingo)? Delver is a “socially connected search engine”, a combination of a search engine with social content. Delver has pre-indexed all the major social networks, including the social graphs (the relationships of a user with other users). Then, it processes that data with the web index.
About Delver: Founded in 2007, Delver raised an A from Carmel ventures and it is looking for a round B in 2008. Delver developed its own IP, by creating their own crawler and search technology in house.
5min –
Ran Harnevo and Hannan Lashover
About 5min: 5min launched 9 months ago and was able to secure a $5 million A round from Spark Capital. It is currently in process of relocating its headquarters to New York.
Bunsiness model? in the UGC world, there’
s a big monetization problem, but what 5min created is a monetization platform focused on brand enhancement/ placement. It’s a segmented advertising form they’d like to call “Advertorials”. For example: the video on “How to beat the stock market?” would be put together by Goldman sachs. How get the best workout? you can imagine that LA fitness would love to tell you.
Technology: one of the most exciting aspects about 5min is the propietary IP. Using a new player that’s about to be released soon, 5min plans to bring much more than just the video to the player window. For example, when watching a Martha stuart video, users will also be able to see related articles, blog posts, videos, external links, story boards, related links and etc. The new player will also be embeddable as white label on any publisher site.
… more to come on the other 10 companies and presentations in the next post. In the meanwhile, I’ll point you to Frank’s video coverage of the showcase, BlogTV’s video interviews with the founders and the Flickr stream of the Israel Web Tour 2008.
I’d like to send a special thanks to Shuly Galili, the CICC staff and the rest of the steering committee for making the web tour so successful this year. I am already looking forward to exciting milestones from the Web Tour’s companies. See you at the next one.
Shamless plug: if you are an Israeli entrepreneur, a startup member or an investor in Israeli startups, you are invited to join the VC Cafe Networks on LinkedIn and Facebook to connect with other members of the community and further business opportunities through introductions. If you are looking for talent or capital for your startups, contact me directly.
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.
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