Israeli web

This might be interesting for Israeli web2.0 startups: the Next Web Awards is open for nominees.

Last year the awards were with 85.000 votes .

More info- here

nominate your company here before March 10.

As of March 11 the final nominees are announced and the website will be open for votes.

Payoneer is announcing it has received the remaining $3M of a $4M Greylock investment. All earlier investors participated in the current round including Crossbar Capital and several angel investors. Payoneer will use the additional funds to expand its services for Web 2.0 companies and other businesses that need faster, easier and more cost-effective ways of paying people around the world.

Jamster, one of the world's leading providers of digital entertainment, able to reach one in six consumers around the globe, and Israel based  innerActive Smart Media, a leading provider of innovative ad-funded entertainment channel, have announced today a trial of a new Mobile In-Game Advertising service in the UK.

Shvoong Homework is designed to assist students of all ages manage and organize their homework. Instead of using messy and disorganized notebooks, students can use Shvoong Homework to type-up their schoolwork, keep it organized, and then share it with individual or groups of classmates, the entire class, students from other schools entirely, or no one at all.

Shvoong.com is a world-wide center for abstracts, summaries, reviews, and short essays on a wide variety of topics in 34 different languages.

Techcrunch pays a lot of attention to Israeli startups lately.

Roi Carthy covered Meemix, Ouriel Ohayon covered Clicktale, and Michael Arrington covered  KnockaTV .

Roi will be covering the Israeli startup scene for TC.

Gizmoz, an Israeli startup that allows people to create realistic 3D cartoon avatars of themselves and embed them on other websites, will be getting a little mainstream attention at the upcoming MTV Music Awards in September.

On Monday, MTV, Taco Bell and Gizmoz will jointly announce a new website and promotion: users will go to tacobell.gizmoz.com and create a fifteen second audition of themselves doing anything they like. Taco Bell will select three winners and create a new thirty second spot with Gizmoz technology that will be played at the MTV music awards in September. The site is live now, but all content will be cleared or the Monday announcement.

LivePerson, a provider of online conversion solutions, today announced an agreement to acquire Israel-based Kasamba, Inc., a leader in live expert advice delivered online via real-time chat to consumers. Under the terms of the agreement, LivePerson will acquire the outstanding common stock of Kasamba and assume all of its outstanding options for total consideration of approximately $40 million, comprised of $9 million in cash and approximately $31 million in stock.

Kasamba's thousands of experts sell their knowledge via real-time chat to the more than 1 million monthly visitors to Kasamba.com. Kasamba has experts in dozens of categories, including personal counseling and coaching, computer services, education and tutoring, health, business and finance. Currently, Kasamba's business model is based on receiving a portion of the gross expert fees. In 2006, the experts generated approximately $20 million in gross fees of which Kasamba received approximately $7 million, an increase from approximately $8.4 million in gross fees and approximately $2.7 million in net revenue to Kasamba in 2005. LivePerson currently provides live chat and customer service software to companies such as EarthLink, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Qwest, Verizon, Orbitz and The Home Depot, and supports more than 50 million consumer chat interactions annually across its existing customer base. LivePerson' presence in the direct-to-consumer market will solidify its position as a leading provider of real-time solutions for both businesses and consumers Kasamba offers a turnkey solution for professionals offering expert advice online in real time via chat. Experts provide their services via chat for a negotiated fee to thousands of consumers each month. Kasamba's commission- based business model generates revenue from each paid consumer-to-expert interaction.

Read/WriteWeb, the reputable blog, has a post about Israeli Startup UrbanSeeder.

Generally the writer liked the site, the design and the user experience.

The conclusion: "In all, UrbanSeeder is a nice idea and quite well executed. I always liked the idea of using social networking to strengthen your real world contacts, rather than building up a buddy list of thousands of people you barely know and will likely never get to know. UrbanSeeder lets you take new, real world contacts online into a safe, intimate environment where you can learn more about them and start cultivating a friendship (or perhaps a romance)."

For people who spend much of their time in front of a PC, Yoomba has build a unique and simple solution to this problem, instantly communicating with any email address, by voice or chat for free. There is no registration required, no new identity and you get instant access to all your contacts immediately.

It is a proprietary peer-to-peer topology which overlays all email networks and provides one global network that all email addresses are a part of. It is the first open standard for any community, reaches anyone you wish to contact and it is all for free.