Israel Digital News

Gizmoz, a provider of 3D talking characters that enable individuals to put a unique face and voice to their digital communications, raised $6.5 million in Series B financing. The investment was led by DoCoMo Capital, a subsidiary of Japan's biggest mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMO, with additional funding from ngi capital. Series A investors Benchmark Capital and Columbia Capital also participated in the round.

Gizmoz also announced an agreement with AOL to allow users of its instant messaging service AIM to create 3D, talking Gizmoz characters to personalize their messages. The highly-engaging, animated Gizmoz Expressions can be customized, using a digital photograph and personal message, to trigger verbal and facial reactions as key words are typed in the instant message window.

Gizmoz will use the new strategic round to fund expansion into the Asian mobile internet market. "Gizmoz has enjoyed widespread adoption by consumers, advertisers and media partners over the last year, and with a number of exciting new products, programs and partnerships underway, the company is poised for significant expansion in 2008," said Eyal Gever, Gizmoz CEO. "As we move forward on a number of key initiatives, building cross platform synergies into our service is at the top of the list. To pursue our strategy, Asia will be key. This financing will play an important role in helping us develop unique offerings for this market."

"Gizmoz has done an excellent job of creating a social media platform for user-generated content that is unlike anything that exists in the world today," said Nobuyuki Akimoto, president and CEO of DoCoMo Capital. "Gizmoz's offerings come at an opportune time in the development of Japan's extensive mobile ecosystem, and they should feed the strong desire of Japanese consumers to embrace innovative content enhanced by Gizmoz's technology."

In May 2007, the Israeli provider of 3D animated avatars has secured $6.3 million Series A investment from Benchmark Capital and Columbia Capital. The company has offices in Menlo Park, CA and Ramat Gan, Israel.

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Blogs rating platform developer Outbrain has closed a $5 million investment round from Gemini Israel Funds, Lightspeed Venture Partners and GlenRock Israel.

Outbrain is a platform for ratings and recommendations of blog, news content websites and RSS feeds . Bloggers and digital publishers can use Outbrain's free widget or API to provide readers with rating functionality and personalized reading recommendations. Thousands of blogs have already installed the Outbrain widget, which support most leading blogging and RSS platforms, such as Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, Drupal, and FeedFlare.

Outbrain was founded in 2006 by Yaron Galai, Co-Founder of Quigo which was recently acquired by AOL, and Ori Lahav who previously headed R&D teams at Shopping.com. Outbrain is headquartered in New York City, with its R&D based in Israel.

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Global Web services company AOL has acquired the Web 2.0 search based Questions and Answer platform provider Yedda. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Israeli startup will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of AOL.

AOL will incorporate Yedda's platform into select programming areas on AOL.com. "Incorporating Yedda's unique technology into AOL enables us to bring together our traditional search resources and an entire community of people to help users quickly find answers to questions," said Ron Grant, President and COO of AOL.

Yedda employs patent-pending technology that automatically matches questions to other related questions and topics, while selecting the best available users to answer the question. Yedda helps publishers and content websites to enhance user engagement and overall user loyalty, improve monetization, and increase search engine visibility through promoting their sites as knowledge communities.

Yedda was founded in 2006 by Avichay Nissenbaum, Yedda CEO and Yaniv Golan, the company CTO. Yedda’s R&D center, which currently employs approximately 20 people, will continue to be based in Israel. Yedda has raised $2.5 million from Israeli venture fund Genesis Partners and private investors.

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