As Tom Wolfe put it (in his chronicle of the ’60’s, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Tests) way back when, “You’re either on the bus, or off the bus.” I’m on the bus – to Baltimore, that is traveling with The Roadshow, as it has come to be known. The Roadshow, sponsored by The Trendlines Group, is an unprecedented (as in first-time-ever) gathering of over a dozen Israeli early stage hi-tech companies (many in the biotech area, but with others as well) who are in the U.S. for a week to meet with investors across the country.
Monday we were in Manhattan, so if this is Tuesday, it must be Baltimore (which the aforementioned bus is now on the way to). Then it’s on to Chicago on Wednesday, and L.A. on Thursday, before breaking up and returning home.
I was invited by Trendlines to check out the process, and see what really goes on in these investor meetings. Everyone in Israel (and the U.S., for that matter) knows that Israeli companies seeking startup money are frequent visitors to the U.S., trying to raise funds in their “first round” or “second round,” etc. For most of us, the process by which this money is raised – what goes into the selling of Israeli hi-tech ideas to American investors – is a deep mystery. What’s the motivation for the investors? Why does one company make it big, while another languishes (assuming it has a valid technology and would pass due diligence)? How do Israelis overcome the language barrier? How do they find investors, what do they promise them, and why do the investors believe them? There’s a whole subculture here of Israeli tech folk who go on the road seeking funding – a story that will unfold here and elsewhere (including in the Jpost) in the coming weeks.
Israelis, as a whole, are very loyal to their country – but Ikea is by far now the most popular furniture store in Israel. Why have Israelis abandoned Herzl St. in Tel Aviv, the country’s furniture center, for Ikea? What does Ikea have that Israeli furniture stores don’t?
Variety – that’s what they have! Israelis want nice homes with knick-knacks and bric-a-bac, and they’re willing to pay. Until Ikea opened here a few years ago, Israelis would journey to the U.S. and Europe and bring back what they could – usually little items – to try and distinguish their homes from others. And when they were finally able to get the “big ticket” items that they couldn’t shlep on the plane, they descended on Ikea like hungry wolves.
You’d think other retailers would have realized by now that Israelis are ripe for the plucking, but so far no other major international chains have opened here – although Israeli furniture retailers have gotten the hint and have significantly updated their offerings.
Why am I going on about furniture? Because Ikea proves that choice and competition work; you get more for your money when companies have to compete for your business, and businesses that do not have to compete in this way feel they can inflate prices as much as they want. Take treadmills, for example; why are they triple and quadruple the price at Megasport than they are at Sears? Because. Whaddaya gonna do about it?
Well, Megasport’s day of reckoning – and the day of reckoning for many other retailers – may be coming soon, thanks to an Israeli-invented company called FiftyOne. FiftyOne runs a service that allows U.S. retailers to sell and ship goods around the world. I interviewed Mike DeSimone, the CEO of the company for Israel21C, and he told me all about it. They have several dozens stores – many of the ones you see in U.S. malls – as well as some big online retailers, like Overstock.com and Shoes.com. They will soon be adding retailers like the Gap, Macys, and Bloomingdales. And, they also have Sears.com, which by itself has tens of thousands of products!
You can connect to all of these retailers’ international sales services directly from FiftyOne’s merchant page. When you make a purchase, you’re essentially making it from FiftyOne, which keeps the books, determines the shipping (to Israel it’s usually five to fourteen business days) and the customs duties and VAT. It’s all determined before you place your order, so you know exactly how much you’re spending (not all stores ship to Israel, but enough do). Not all products are available at all sites; for example, we’ve been wanting a futon, which seem to be unavailable in Israel, but I couldn’t find one Sears was willing to ship here. On the other hand, I could have bought all the beanbag chairs I wanted.
The prices at Sears looked to be what they would in the U.S. (where most shipping is free) but the shipping pushes the price way up. Depending on the item, though, it might still be cheaper to order it online than to buy it here, even with the shipping and taxes. An exercise cycle, for example, came out to about $400 – NIS 1,500 or so – from Sears. I can’t imagine it costing less here.
Not all the prices were that great, however; Overstock.com seems to have more expensive prices for its Israeli customers, and a laptop I checked out there cost more than $200 higher than it did on Amazon. To order from Amazon, you can use the Mustop service – and when their shipping was added to the price of the laptop, the two figures weren’t that far apart.
But I’m willing to give FiftyOne some time – to get more stores and better (ie cheaper) shipping options, especially for bigger (and bigger ticker) items. Sooner or later, we’ll be able to import Kenmore washing machines and dryers directly into Israel!
I’m always amazed at how Israelis can do so well raising money or selling stuff abroad with such poor English. Especially people, like angels who are trusting high-tech people with their money; angels are very picky when it comes to deciding with whom to invest money, and they make judgements based on all sorts of criteria that are more impression than fact (I got this from more than one angel).
So imagine my shock when an angel investor who has put money in a number of companies – ie he is a person of some means – makes a presentation in front of about 100 people, and in his slide show puts up a cute picture of a bear, with this caption:
“a vision without an action is mearly a dream”
Just looking at that sentence I can find five things wrong with it (“mearly” is the least of it!). This is a person who interfaces with lots of American and European investors, and you have to figure that if he could make such a mistake in a presentation he had to prepare for (he was invited, planned out his presentation, used PowerPoint to make the show, etc.), he’s probably making mistakes in spelling and grammar left and right!
Okay, maybe the guy was in a hurry. But what about the many websites I see by Israeli companies with atrocious English? Like this, from a website for a company that is a fairly large player in Israeli commercial VoIP (ie supplies equipment and services to many integrators):
Telephony and telephony related systems based on Voice over IP (Voip) technology had reached the stage in which it could be used in any business in order to reach maximum efficiency. . Voip based soft-switches as well as small office PBX’s are becoming to be the natural choice for businesses all over the world, supplying its owners with a vast variety of telephony functions without the burdening expenses and costs of the old ‘traditional’ analog phone systems.
Besides being boring, that text has several grammatical errors. It’s on their website, as part of their “window to the world.” And there are plenty of sites with much worse texts which are obviously translations of their Hebrew sites (some of them look like they ran the Hebrew through Google Translate and forgot to clean it up). If they’re not careful with the way they present themselves to the world, are they going to be careful with you, the customer?
If you’ve been looking for a hi-tech job in Israel, there’s good news: New statistics indicate that the long drought in hi-tech jobs is over. A poll released last week by Israeli placement company Jobinfo says that demand for hi-tech workers is up 40% this year – while the numbers of those seeking jobs in the field has fallen dramatically, as companies retain their current workers and hire new ones.
Jobs in hardware development rose significantly – by over 30% – in the first quarter of 2010, compared to a year before. There was also a 12% increase in jobs for internet programmers – especially for developers with skills in PHP, Java, and C.
Along with the new demand, salaries have risen, the poll says. Engineers with 2 to 5 years experience are making 8% more this year than last, while salaries for web engineers have gone up as much as 20%. Jobinfo says that “The positive statistics are a positive sign that indicates that the time is ripe for hi-tech workers who lost jobs in the past to look for new ones now, and it is also an excellent time, in our opinion, for those who already have jobs to examine the opportunities in the marketplace.”
Well, of course they would say that – they’re a placement company! But still, the numbers don’t lie – and neither do the anecdotes, as a number of people I know who have been looking for quite awhile have begun new jobs in the past month or so. Yeah! Party like it’s 1999!
Remember that old commercial, “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” That’s a question we will soon be asking about what we see, not just what we hear, thanks to the development of a technology called Augmented Reality. Using a device’s camera, GPS, Bluetooth, digital compass, wifi, and other networking and input capabilities, you can turn reality into a video game, run through “what if” scenarios, or get a text or video overlay on something that they are looking at.
Example: You’re checking out what movie to see at the multiplex, and you forgot to check out the reviews. With an AR app on your phone, you could point your phone at a movie poster, and then get reviews displayed on the screen, without having to press any buttons! More sophisticated versions would let you see a trailer, or even buy tickets. It’s not at all science fiction – actually, an application like this exists for some Nokia smartphones, and there are already a slew of AR apps for Androids and cellphones (I could have used this onewhen I installed my non-YES satellite dish a couple of months ago!)
As it turns out, an Israeli company called Ogmento, is deeply involved in developing AR applications, especially for the iPhone. If you want to try it on the web, check out the application they developed for Vampire Academy. Scary!
We hear a lot about business “giving back to the community,” but everyone knows it’s BS. There are no free lunches, and everything has strings attached. It’s always all about the money. Everyone knows it.
But maybe what everyone knows isn’t always right. It certainly wasn’t at the “startup roundtable” meeting I went to, hosted by Israeliinvestment adviser and social media expert Sharon Weshler. Sharon and his buddy Aviad of the Termiks startup investment center ran a “roundtable” for fledgling Israeli startups, where entrepreneurs with great ideas could get some help in getting their idea ready for presentation to investors.
The ideas were really creative, ranging from a system to improve management of nursing homes to a home entertainment gadget, and a better way to grow food! Presenters gave the group their core idea and “elevator pitch,” and attendees could comment, question, or give constructive criticism on ideas and presentations.
The startup roundtable idea isn’t a new one, and I’ve been to a number myself. But most of them are sponsored by advisors for their clients, prepping them for presentations to investors. In other words, the sponsors of the roundtable have a financial interest in ensuring that their candidates present well, so they can bring in the bucks
Not so at Sharon and Aviad’s roundtable – from what I could tell, there was no financial or contractual relationship between the presenters and the sponsors. That said, I’m sure Sharon and Aviad would be happy to find a company to work with, but you have to figure there are better ways to track down companies interesting enough to invest in without spending upwards of four hours listening to ideas that they had no idea in advance would be worth listening to! That is what I call really giving back to the community!
So I was looking for something to blog about when I decided to write about my new favorite phone program, TuneWiki – when I came across this press release that said that it was actually an Israeli-made program! But of course that makes sense – of course it would be an Israeli company that came up with the ultimate on-the-go music/social/internet program out there!
TuneWiki turns listening to music into an event – a social event. You can use it to play music on your device’s library (there’s a version for Symbian, iPhone, and Android), and display the lyrics and album cover art. Not only do the lyrics automatically show up for any song, but they display “karaoke style” – meaning they change in the window as each line of the song is sung. You also get access to videos of the song on Youtube – TuneWiki will create a page of all the videos with the name of the song you’re listening to (not necessarily only by the artist performing the version you’re hearing), which you can play just by clicking on it.
TuneWiki works not only with your device’s music library – it can also play any online Shoutcast station! The app connects with a mobile version of the Shoutcast service, where thousands of stations of all genres are available right on your phone! I have three different internet radio apps on my Nokia XM5800, and none really work (two do absolutely nothing and one connects to just a few stations). TuneWiki “picks up” all the stations, even the high-bandwidth ones (tip: when you connect on 3G, go for the lower bandwidth stations). If for nothing else, TuneWiki is invaluable for its Shoutcast component, finally giving phone users real access to online music.
But wait, there’s more! My favorite part of TuneWiki is its social component. On the TuneWiki menu there is feature called “Where is this song playing,” which connects you to other TuneWiki users listening to the same song you are right now! You can then follow/connect with those listeners, and check out what each of you are listening to anytime. When you follow someone, they send the name of their selections to your “song inbox,” and you can display the lyrics, as well as play the songs on your device (there were buffering issues, though). And, you can comment on any song to Twitter or Facebook, with a “blip,” either “love it” or “hate it,” or give a whole commentary (140 characters or less, of course!)
And the best part? It’s all free! I don’t want to give the TuneWiki people any ideas, but one question I am dying to ask TuneWiki CEO Rani Cohen is – why aren’t they charging for this app, considering so many apps of much lesser capability seem to be selling very well?
Could the recession really be over? According to Israeli placement company Etosia, 75% of managers in the hi-tech sector see hiring during 2010 set to grow by at least 20% – with half seeing hiring grow by as much as 30%, or even more. In addition, 46% see salaries in the hi-tech sector growing next year. The poll of 80 directors and top managers in Israeli hi-tech companies was conducted over the past several weeks, with companies of all sizes polled – from those with fewer than 10 employees, to companies with over 500.
Quoting Eyal Solomons, director of Etosia, Globes (in this Hebrew article) said that according to the poll, the hot areas in hi-tech next year – in order of “hotness” – will be software development, sales and marketing, hardware development, and product engineering and development. “Already now we can see a sharp rise in the number of open positions. Since the beginning of the year, demand for workers has gone up 40%.” Salaries, he said, are now more stable as well, since there is more demand.
Perhaps the best result coming out of the poll is that 81% of the bosses believe that the world economy will improve next year. Why is that “the best?” Because Israel’s hi-tech markets are overseas – in the U.S. and Europe, as well as the Far East. Companies wouldn’t be looking to hire if they didn’t think sales were going to rise as well – in the U.S. and Europe. While sales to China are already up, China is still far smaller a customer of Israel’s than the U.S. (first place) and Europe (second).
After being battered for the past couple of years, hi-tech companies have been very conservative in hiring – so the fact that they’re going out on a limb and proclaiming their desire to hire means that change really is in the air. Let’s hope that these guys are right!
With the weather turning wintery in Israel over the last few days – and more promised for this week – I wanted to tell you about a great service you may not know about. Dr. Barry Lynn’s Weather It Is is a weather forecasting service that gives a specific forecast for dozens of cities in Israel, usually much more accurate than the forecast you get on radio or TV.
I interviewed Dr. Lynn for the Jpost a few years ago, and he told me that the standard “one size fits all” weather forecast issued by the Israel Weather Service is the result of bad equipment, small budgets, and poor motivation (as in small salaries). The one perk the forecasters doget, it appears, is fame – the one on duty during prime radio hours gets to jabber with the hosts a little bit, but beyond that there’s little to attract talented meteorologists to a government job, he said.
By the way – weather forecasters do a lot more than just tell you whether you should take an umbrella when you leave the house. As I wrote then:
…improved and more accurate weather prediction could be a boon for many industries that need to wrestle the environmental elements in order to get work done. Take an electric company crew that needs to do major line work, for example. These guys get paid a huge hunk of change for field work, and if the company sends them out on a job, while they sit in the truck instead of working because a surprise electrical storm has made it too dangerous to work, the company – and, of course, its customers – end up footing that bill. An accurate weather prediction for the specific area in question is valuable information for the utility, says Dr. Lynn, and they’ll pay – as will oil and gas drillers, farmers, airports and a host of other industries and services.
When I spoke to Dr. Lynn, he mentioned that he was involved in forming some deals, and indeed he now has a general website where he advertises his services, and it appears he’s “weathering” the recssion. Meanwhile, he updates his Israel site on a regular basis. It’s interesting to see what the differences in weather are in various places in Israel during stormy times like these!
Remember the startup contest, Exit’09? The one where the winner gets – would you believe it – a package worth $250,000? Well, we have a winner!
If you will recall (and if you don’t, the original article is here), Exit’09 was a contest to decide what Israel’s most promising startup was. Applicants submitted ideas, videos, and details to the judges, who decided whether or not they qualified for the contest; those that did survived by getting people to vote for them, with the top winners each week advancing to the finals. Eventually, there were only two companies left, and they participated in a “Big Brother” style internet broadcast, with web viewers able to watch them put together their final presentations, which the judges would then decide between, declaring one a winner.
And the winner? While you’d expect the people (and the judges’) choice to be a really sophisticated new web service, or groundbreaking piece of software, the idea that got the prize belongs to Penina First, a young lady from the town of Givat Ze’ev, who wants to organize an SMS alert system for odd job seekers and the people who need them to run errands.
Penina foresees a site called Day-Job (doesn’t seem to be in existence yet), where people looking for someone to do a short task – say, babysitting, filling in for an absent waiter or secretary, someone to do some housework, etc. – can search out a worker and hire them. Candidates who are members of the service get an SMS, and the first one to respond gets the job.
First says that the system is perfect for students, soldiers, etc., who can’t commit to a regular work schedule, but want to earn some extra money. Her sympathies are with the workers (she’s clearly “been there”), so all fees are collected from the employers – who are asked to pay a modest sum of seven shekels, collected by reverse SMS when they close the deal to hire someone.
It’s really an ingeniously simple idea – so much so you would have thought it already existed. But it doesn’t! Even more – the idea is genuinely Israeli. I read somewhere that Tel Aviv is one of the best cities for temping and odd jobs. Meaning that First’s idea is bound to be a winner. Good choice, Exit’09 judges!
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