Israel Digital News

Mobile social networking platform provider Jag.ag will partner with Israel's leading cellular phone provider, Cellcom Israel, to launch a new personal photo sharing online service. The new service, which will be provided for free, can be applied to all phones and cellular networks.

The mobile content service allows Cellcom’s 3.2 million users design their own mobile site. Each personal site includes features such as picture upload and text editing. Updating the site does not require any prior experience.

“The new service is straightforward, works on any mobile phone and transforms any site into a personal blog, including pictures and text. It is a great tool for self expression for any phone owner and is not limited only to those owning high end phones,” said Lior Netzer, CEO of Jag.ag.

Mobile photo sharing sites can be created on a mobile phone through Cellcom’s Mobile Portal or Web site. Once such a site has been created friends can be notified via SMS that includes a link to the site.

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In-store digital media solutions provider YCD Multimedia has raised $12 million in a new financing round led by Pitango Venture Capital and Arts Alliance Digital Ventures and conversion of a bridge loan facility.

"This new investment gives us the capital to support the initiatives we are undertaking with larger chains in the US and internationally," said Barry Salzman, Chief Executive Officer.

YCD Multimedia providing retailers with a turnkey platform to create, manage, distribute and optimize in-store digital media to help drive sales and profitability. YCD's clients include some of the world's most recognized brands such as American Airlines, Toyota, Kodak, Hilton Hotels, Cartier, Pizza Hut, and Heineken. Founded in 1999, YCD has offices in the US, UK and Israel.

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Web semantic advertising startup Peer39 has raised $10.5 million in a third fund-raising round led by Evergreen. Existing investors, Canaan Partners, Silicon Valley Bank, JP Morgan, and Dawntreader Ventures, joining this round, bringing the total financing raised by the company to over $22 million to date.

"With this financial commitment, we will expand our US sales presence and continue to develop our proprietary technology, thus helping publishers get higher returns from their online content while enabling advertisers to confidently protect their brands," said Amiad Solomon, CEO of Peer39.

Founded in 2006, Peer39 is creating the next generation online advertising and content monetization platform. Based on natural language processing and machine learning, Peer39's patented algorithms increase the value of online content by understanding page meaning and sentiment, and matching the most relevant and effective brand safe display and text advertising. Headquartered in New York City, Peer39 maintains a research and development center in Israel.

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IM service provider ICQ has chosen innerActive’s mobile advertising network to offer free ad-supported premium content such as video, games and applications to its users, through its PC client, mobile website and mobile portal.

Integrating innerActive’s content and their in-game advertising solution will enable ICQ to provide its 42 million users worldwide with quality rich media content for free on all media platforms, according to Ofer Oved, vice president of ICQ.

innerActive is a leading premium ad network for mobile rich media content. The Israeli start up has already partnered with the leading off deck portals like Boungiorno, Fox Mobile, Cellfish, and IMImobile.


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UK’s ticket comparison site Tixdaq had acquired Sportingo, a global online sportswriters’ community site, to enhance its price comparison services to sport fans across UK.

Tixdaq is a free comparison service that allow user to find, compare and buy tickets for live sport and music events. Sportingo operates three Web sites that address the different areas of interest for sport fans: user generated sport magazine site, sportingo.com; football blog caughtoffside.com, as well as the online directory of online sport video, getsport.tv. These sites generate one million visits every month.

“In the past few months it become clear that with the current business climate our best chance to succeed would be by joining forces with another company,” said Ze’ev Rozov, CEO of Sportingo. “Combining the audience and platform from our sites with the innovative ticketing information and services at Tixtaq creates a much stronger company.”

“In the same way that Tixdaq has helped to simplify the ticketing space, Sportingo has used the social internet to democratise sports journalism,” said Steve Machin, EVP Tixdaq. ”We see real opportunities to combine quality user generated content with our entertainment comparison service.”

Sportingo was founded by Israeli entrepreneurs Tal Boneach and Rozov. Sportingo Web site was officially launched in February 2007, and in June 2007 the company completed the acquisition of CaughtOffside.com. In October 2007, Sportingo has raised a $3.2 million from Ingenious Media Active Capital (IMAC).

Founded in 2006 by Will Muirhead, Tixdaq is now the leading provider of ticket resale data to the live entertainment industry.

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Smart phone compliance and data leak prevention solution provider Onset Technology has secured $3 million in a funding round from Cedar Fund, The Challenge Fund and Jerusalem Global Ventures. Onset will use the capital to expand its support of METAmessage Advanced Compliance Tool (ACT) for BlackBerry smart phones and introduce new versions of ACT for iPhone, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices.

ACT allows organizations to scan, block and archive all wireless communications to keep companies compliance under regulations like SEC, NASD, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, FINRA and more. The company’s solutions are available from all major US wireless carriers.

“Wireless compliance is a new and increasingly important challenge for large organizations,” said Ronen Yehoshua of the Cedar Fund. “Smart phones are evolving into a laptop replacement communications tool, meaning that companies must expand compliance controls from the desktop to smartphones. We firmly believe that Onset Technology has a breakthrough smartphone compliance and data leak prevention solution that will help enterprises save money and hassle by keeping them covered on compliance.”

Onset Technology develops software solutions for wireless messaging compliance, data loss prevention, emergency communications and mobile device management. Onset’s METAmessage Wireless platform serves more than 1,400 enterprise, government, health care and emergency services clients globally. Onset was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, with a research and development center in Herzliya Pituach, Israel, and offices in New York, Washington, and California.

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Dynamic video generation solution provider SundaySky has completed an $8 million venture capital financial round led by Carmel Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners. The round of investment will allow the company to rapidly expand its marketing, sales and business development activities mainly in the US while continuing to develop its product line.

SundaySky provides real time, personalized and automatic generation of video content for e-commerce, social networks, news and entertainment Web sites and blogs. SundaySky’s platform enables Web sites to automatically convert their content into dynamic, continuously updated, high quality video clips, in order to increase their conversion rates while creating a significant inventory of video ads.

"Video is becoming the most important and fast growing form of web media,” said Avi Zeevi of Carmel Ventures, who joined the Company’s board of directors. "We found SundaySky to have a unique combination of an outstanding founding team and a breakthrough technology which can change the way video content is created.”

Founded in 2006 by Shmulik Weller and Yaniv Axen, SundaySky has developed innovative video solution which enables publishers to quickly and easily infuse their Web site with video. The SundaySky dynamic video platform extracts the content from any Web site and molds it into professional video clips.

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Software applications developer startup Soluto has raised $2.3 million in first financing round led by Giza Venture Capital and Proxima Investments.

Naftali Bennett and Lior Golan, who previously founded and managed Cyota, which was sold to RSA for $145 million, also participated in this investment round, and will joined Soluto as advisors to the management.

Soluto is an early stage startup that developing unique and innovative software tool for the personal computer market. Based in Tel-Aviv, Israel, the company is currently in stealth mode and plans to release its initial product in early 2009.

Soluto was founded in November 2007 by Tomer Dvir, the company’s CEO, and Ishay Green, Soluto CTO and Chief Architect. Nadav Zohar, a former senior executive at Morgan Stanley, is serving as Soluto Chairman.

Dvir formerly served as a senior executive at MDG Medical, a provider of medication management systems. Green previously co-founded data protection solutions provider Onigma which was sold to McAfee for $20 million in October 2006.

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SemantiNet, a developer of semantic Web based information discovery Tool, has secured $3.4 million in Series A funding from Giza venture capital, Yossi Vardi, Ronald Cohen, Jeff Pulver, Robert Imershein and Moudi Ben-Shach. Those investors also participated in SemantiNet $1.7 million seed round on January 2008.

The Israeli startup also announced the opening of a new San Francisco sales and marketing office to support its upcoming worldwide product launch in late September of 2008.

SemantiNet product is an intelligent browser plugin that dynamically discovering, integrating and providing easy access to personally-relevant content. The company software leverages key technologies and services from companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Yahoo and many others.

"SemantiNet's core technology is now being leveraged by a unique consumer application, combining a crowd-sourcing approach with the power of semantic web reasoning," said Oz Leave, Chairman of the Board for SemantiNet. "We are are looking forward to providing our users with an information discovery assistant that is fun to use, easy-to-understand and seamlessly integrated into their browser."

SemantiNet headquarters and R&D is based in Tel Aviv, Israel. The company was founded in February 2007 by Tal Keinan, SemantiNet CEO, and Tal Muscal, the company CTO. Keinan was a member of the Risk Department of Morgan Stanley and Muscal previously served as a developer at Go Networks.

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Mobile search and advertising company JumpTap has closed a $26 million funding round led by AllianceBernstein. All existing investors also participated in the round including General Catalyst Partners, Summerhill Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Valhalla Partners, and WPP.

The funding will be used to further develop JumpTap's powerful mobile search and advertising solutions and to continue expansion of its global ad sales and operations divisions to meet increased demand from advertisers.

JumpTap's has developed search and advertising solutions that enables mobile operators to maintain a strong, sustainable position in the mobile marketing value chain, drives traffic and revenue opportunities to content publishers, and gives advertisers access to targeted customers. The company is currently reaching over 150 million mobile subscribers through partnerships with 17 mobile operators and numerous content publishers like NBC Universal and Fox Mobile Entertainment.

Founded in 2004, JumpTap is a privately-held company headquartered in Cambridge, MA, USA, with a development center in Tel Aviv, Israel. The company has recently opened new offices in Madrid, Stockholm, and New York City.

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Mobile marketing solution provider Celltick and China Unicom has launched a new and unique mobile media service for the Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing.

The new service, powered by Celltick's LiveScreen Media platform, provides official Olympics-related content directly from Xinhua News, the official news agency in China, including the latest news, results and anecdotes and accompanied by topical games and applications. The service will also include content relating to news, lifestyle, fun, business and entertainment.

The launch of the mobile content service in Beijing will be the first in a series of LiveScreen deployments across China. China Unicom is an integrated telecommunications service provider with over 180 million mobile subscribers nationwide.

Celltick's LiveScreen Media application will be embedded on SIM cards that are being distributed in China Unicom retail outlets around Beijing. The service will be available in both Chinese and English.

Celltick systems are already deployed by more than 25 mobile operators in Europe, Asia Pacific, South America and Africa. Founded in 2000 and privately owned, Celltick is headquartered in the UK with offices in Russia, Singapore, India, Thailand and Brazil and R&D in Israel. In November 2007, Celltick has closed an $8.5 million funding round from its principal investors JVP and Amadeus.

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Mobile multimedia and advertising solutions provider Mobixell Networks has received a total of $6 million in funding from existing investors Apax, Intel Capital and smac partners.

The funds will help Mobixell address the many opportunities emerging in the mobile messaging, TV, and advertising market, and will enhance customer support and professional services to support large-scale projects with operators, as well as further sales and marketing activities.

“Multimedia and advertising in the mobile market are evolving and hold significant potential for innovation and growth,” said Arun Chetty, director, Intel Capital. “We see a unique opportunity for Mobixell Networks to not only continue growing its core business in media adaptation, but also expand into multimedia and advertising in the mobile market.”

Total annual ad spend on the mobile will reach $1.3 billion by the end of 2008 and rising to nearly $7.6 billion by 2013, and mobile TV will grow from $3.8 billion in 2008 to $16 billion by 2011. According to Juniper Research latest estimations.

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Animation content network platform provider aniBoom has closed a $10 million Series B round of funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) and DFJ Tamir Fishman Ventures and existing investor Evergreen Venture Partners.

The company will use the new financing to expand operations, fund short form premium content for web and mobile platforms, and develop original animation series for television.

“The new media content space and specifically animation, is growing at an explosive rate. aniBoom created a disruptive model harnessing the power and reach of digital distribution to generate tremendous opportunities for animated content created by a massive network of independent professionals around the globe,” said Andreas Stavropoulos, Managing Director at DFJ.

aniBoom was founded in 2006 by Uri Shinar, the company current president. aniBoom intend to leverage the web and mobile platforms to create a production pipeline and an audience base. The Israeli startup has a network of more than 4000 independent creators from over 70 countries around the world, and features thousands of animation movies on its web site.

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Web developer of consumer applications and portals IAC CAP has acquired StarNet Interactive, the owner and operator of GirlSense and KiddoNet, popular tween girl online community sites. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

IAC CAP has a product portfolio that centers on properties that enhance online communication and social networking through self-expression. In addition to Zwinky, one of the largest teen virtual worlds, the company properties include site like SmileyCentral, a popular consumer application that features emoticons primarily used for email and IM, and Webfetti, a social network profile customizer. IAC CAP will expand and strengthen its focus on the teen and tween girl market with the addition of the GirlSense and KiddoNet sites.

"Part of our growth strategy includes acquisition of products and companies that complement our core competencies," said John Park, president and CEO of IAC CAP. "Adding GirlSense.com to our existing teen targeted product portfolio provides us with broader teen mindshare, as well as access to the coveted tween demographic."

GirlSense offers highly customizable tools that allow girls to create their own virtual fashion boutiques. Since its inception, GirlSense has primarily grown its audience of 13 million registered users through word-of-mouth and viral networking.

StarNet was spun off from Gteko, which was acquired by Microsoft in November 2006, with $2.7 million funding led by Leo Capital and additional funding by Cathy Glazer, StarNet CEO and Founder, Pitango Venture Capital and other former shareholders of Gteko.

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Libox, an Internet startup that is developing a consumer facing media product, has completed a $1 million pre-seed financing round from Evergreen Venture Partners, Eilon Tirosh, Partam Tel Aviv and Argonaut.

“In Libox we recognized a winning combination of an entrepreneur who has “done it”, a solid business model and a market with a huge growing potential,” Erez Shachar, Managing Partner at Evergreen.

Libox was founded by Erez Pilosof who is also the founder of the Israeli Internet portal Walla. Libox, currently in stealth mode, will release its beta product later this year.

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