StartupIsrael News:
Triptouch launches
Submitted by ron on November 22, 2007 - 18:51
Triptouch has launched their beta website earlier this week. Triptouch is a personalized location based "travel home page" - bringing information, services and community for people during their trip. Triptouch has rich content for more than 2,500 destinations world-wide, partnering with several companies for content and booking services (including eventful, kayak, hostelworld and wikitravel). eSnips launches social DNA
Submitted by ron on November 14, 2007 - 08:30eSnips launches a new site called Social DNA. It lets users find new friends by personal preferences and character. You can answer short 'questioners' or test, or make lists and thus get your 'digital gene'. Then you can find compatiable mates...
eSnips reports they have around 13 million monthly users, out of which 200K are Israelis.
AOL buys Yedda, financial terms were not disclosed.
Submitted by ron on November 12, 2007 - 10:02AOL has acquired Yedda, the Israeli Q&A company. Yedda has raised 2.5M$ from VCs, and is growing quickly. Techcrunch reports they had 800K users last month.
Update - the.co.ils has more interesting information (hebrew)
Peer39 raised 8M$
Submitted by ron on November 11, 2007 - 09:32Peer39 has finished their round B financing, raising a total of 8.2M$ from Dawntreader Ventures, HighBridge capital and other investors. Peer39 developed a system that allows you to match the ad content to the content - according to user interaction. Basically these are tools that are supposed to really 'understand' the text using Natural Language Processing tools, and machine learnings.
AOL buys Quigo for 340M$
Submitted by ron on November 7, 2007 - 19:12The rumours are true - AOL has bought Quigo, a contextual ad network, for 340M$.
EMB Capital - a new fund to invest in internet/cellular content companies
Submitted by ron on November 7, 2007 - 19:04EMB capital is a new fund (or really an angel club) that wants to invest in content companies (internet/cellular). They will invest in 3-4 companies a year, no more than 1M$ per company.
MIT Forum Events: Getting Media attention and Entrepreneurship Workshop
Submitted by gil on November 4, 2007 - 16:13Interesting activities of the MIT forum, which will take place in Tel Aviv University:
- Expertizing & Maximizing Media Attention
November 14th, 2007
Speakers:
Fern Reiss, CEO Expertizing.com
Nir Ben Levy, co-founder, GStock.com
Guy Grimland, TheMarker
Building Scalable Web Sites
Submitted by ron on November 3, 2007 - 13:20A book detailing how to build and maintain "scalable" web sites. This is a must book if you want to get great tips about building your site, maintaining it, and making sure it is scalable. It also talks about security, performance, optimization, i18n, benchmarking and more issues. It mostly deals with the LAMP architecture, but the ideas can also be helpful for other platforms.
Highly recommended!
5Min - How to raise 5M$
Submitted by ron on November 1, 2007 - 16:305Min has raised 5M$ from spark Capital. 5Min is a web site where users can upload short (5 minutes...) 'how-to' movies - and of course 'how-not-to'. Techcrunch says that the previous angel round was "painful" as they had to give 50% of the company for 300K$.
Previous coverage about 5min:
EasyStart - get 100K$ for your project...
Submitted by ron on October 31, 2007 - 09:28EasyStart is a new venture from Dan David - they will lend 100K$ for your new project - interest free. You will have to repay the load in 18 monthly payments. You will also have to give 25% of your venture. If your project fails, the load is cancelled. It's an interested idea - they will make 12 such loans in the coming year (each month a new venture).