If you are running an internet startup in the US, chances are that you have been nominated or chosen for some kind of award in a startup competition in the past year. The same goes for Israel, but it happens less often and usually with limited visibilty from abroad.
Yaron Orenstein, fouder of the.co.ils (Hebrew only), did something right with TWS2008, a one day conference in Tel Aviv that aims to find and present the top ten most promising Israeli startups. He put together a panel of prominent American bloggers as judges and guaranteed some international buzz and an authoritative voice for the 100 startups that applied. Good work. Among the judges: Guy Kawasaki, Pete Cashmore, Om Malik and more.
So without further ado, according to the official winner announcement, the winners are:
Wix is an authoring platform that allows users to create striking and easy-to-build web content in flash (web sites, widgets, blogs etc), and publish it anywhere they want online. Users can create content without coding in flash/html or being constrained by templates. At the heart of the product is the drag & drop editor that allows users to pull in any content from the web or from their own media files (video, audio, animation, text etc) and create web content.
See VC Cafe’s Interview with Allon Bloch, CEO of Wix
WorkLight develops and markets a line of server products that allow organizations to do more business securely using popular consumer Web 2.0 tools and technologies, like iGoogle, Windows Live, Netvibes, Facebook, and others. Through WorkLight, employees, channels, partners, and consumers connect to protected enterprise data (and to each other) using Web 2.0 services.
See VC Cafe’s coverage of Worklight’s last VC round
HiveSight helps marketers discover new facts about consumers. Our technology sifts through and analyzes millions of social media profiles and blogs to construct consumer profiles. Our customers use our online application to write simple queries that define consumer panels, and get instant reports on demographics, consumer interests, trends and more. It’s the fastest, easiest and most affordable way to explore consumer markets and discover new insights.
Qoof is the video commerce platform that bridges the world of Online Shopping, Internet Video, and Direct Response TV to create a distributed, targeted, and ersonalized video commerce network. Think QVC for the internet. The most powerful way to sell a product online is with video and as more merchants are looking for video solutions, the Qoof Platform is their answer. Companies currently using our platform include Dell, Ice.com, & DrugStore.com. Qoof plans a major product release further converging the worlds of DRTV and e-commerce this September.
Learn more about Qoof’s participation in the Israel web tour earlier this year
WikiAnswers gives you useful answers about anything by harnessing people’s collective knowledge, but with a wiki-twist. Our mission is to grow a collaborative answers resource; anyone can ask, answer or edit questions, building a global Q&A database covering all topics.
Dapper’s vision is to allow people to consume the web where, when and in whatever format they choose. Dapper users point and click on the content they want from a website, and Dapper turns this content into a live semantic feed that can be used in a variety of formats (RSS, widget, XML). Dapper is leveraging its core technology to create live content-based ads (MashupAds) that combine publisher and advertiser content within an interactive ad — creating the world’s first content ad network.
Did you know that Dapper created a Facebook App Creation Tool?
Mo’Minis is a revolutionary platform for the development and publishing of mobile games. The platform allows advanced as well as non-skilled developers to rapidly create original games from scratch and have them seamlessly supported on a wide range of handsets. Furthermore, developers can collaborate and share game assets on Mo’Minis developers’ community and enjoy distribution and monetization services through various on\off-deck channels.
Mo’Minis wants to be the one stop shop for mobile content creation and distribution
Kaltura provides the first open-source video management platform, empowering any site with online video. With Kaltura, web publishers can seamlessly and cost-effectively integrate interactive and collaborative rich-media functionalities, including uploading, importing, editing, remixing, and sharing. Kaltura also offers its global network of publishers content hosting, transcoding, advertising, merchandising, and syndication.
Kaltura recently partnered with Wikia and LinkedIn to increase monetization
MocoSpace is a mobile social network that allows anybody with a web-enabled phone to have a full social networking experience on their most trusted device, the mobile phone, whenever and wherever they want. Members Users enjoy expressing themselves and staying connected to friends by setting up a profile page, sharing photos and video, chatting, inboxing, instant messaging, blogging, debating in forums, sending mobile cards and playing games.
Nuconomy Studio is the world’s first “performance insight platform,” built from the ground up to provide completely new ways to measure today’s interactive Web. Go beyond the old page view model and start to measure the new metrics of the web – your users and site engagement and contribution metrics.
Watch Shahar explain the impact of engagement metrics on brand-advertisers
Congatulations to all the winners. If you’re into lists of top sites, you might also enjoy Time magazine’s list of the 50 top sites of 2008. Some of the winners include:GasBuddy, AfriGadget, Geni, Hulu and 46 more.
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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