Friday, March 17, 2006

Eye Contact


If you thought there were commercials everywhere already, watch where you walk next time you go to the mall - they're under your feet now too.

Source: Israel21C

Israeli company EyeClick combines rich media with motion sensors to get potential customers interacting with promotional advertisements on the floors of shopping malls, airports, banks - anywhere, in fact, with lots of eyeballs and a few square feet of space.

Tel Aviv-based EyeClick, which was established in 2003 by artist and software engineer Ariel Almos, the company's CEO, is built around Almos' final year project as a student at Tel Aviv's Camera Obscura School of Art. He created a floor-based version of the simple Pong game which veteran computer users will remember from early PCs, involving a ball and two rectangles as bats.

"I tried to design a different interface for the game with human movements," says Almos, who also lectures in interactive media at several art schools in Israel. His installation, a Pong game for five players who chase different-colored bats around the image projected on the floor trying to hit the ball, has been exhibited in various Israeli museums. Motion sensors follow the players' movements so that when they swing their foot the "bat" moves and "hits" the "ball," which rebounds as it would in the computer game.

Almos, who served in one of the prestigious technology units in the Israeli Defense Forces, is not only an artist but a businessman: "I soon realized that there was a commercial opportunity here and started working on it," he says. "People started suggesting that I sell this for advertising. In the ad world, they need a new medium."

Television, radio and newspapers, the traditional venues for commercials, are not as effective as they once were, he says, given the emergence of the Internet and a huge increase in the number of TV and radio channels, all of which dilute the potential audience for each particular commercial. "People don't notice these commercials anymore, they are so used to them," he says, and this, in conjunction with the new technologies - such as Tivo, which digitally records television programs and allows users to skip the commercials - leads to the need for new approaches.

"Advertisers are looking more and more for options to create an emotional experience for people," says Almos, and this is what EyeClick aims to do. "It is said that 55 percent of buying decisions are made in the street or the shopping mall. We combine interactivity, an emotional experience, and we are right at the places of entertainment and shopping, where people are open to new experiences."

EyeClick's first advertising campaign was for Milki, a chocolate dessert produced by Israeli dairy Strauss. The promotion, which was part of a campaign which included television and radio commercials, ran for a week in December in five shopping malls across Israel during Chanukah, the Jewish festival associated with sweet foods, and got mall visitors chasing a spoonful of Milki around the floor in the centre of the shopping mall. "It was just for fun and promotion," says Almos. "Strauss was very happy with it."

As well as the novelty value of floor-based, interactive ads, EyeClick - whose all-weather, outdoor and indoor MotionAware system combining projector, motion sensors and proprietary software, is installed on the ceiling or a wall at any height and can project onto any surface - offers an added benefit. "We can count people," explains Almos, and not just the number of people who interact with the ad, but also the people standing around watching, up to an area of roughly ten feet by ten feet. So, as with many Web-based ads, a company can get a precise idea of how many eyeballs the ad attracted.

EyeClick has three products based on their MotionAware technology: one for interactive retails displays, which could be in store windows or on walls as well as the floor; one for trade shows and other promotional events; and a product for advertising in large spaces such as shopping malls, airports, train stations, and cinema complexes. The trade show product has been used by clients such as Microsoft Israel and Volvo, and the product for large spaces, which was launched in October, has featured in campaigns by Israeli food company Osem and Coca Cola Israel.

UK-based Barclays Bank installed the system in its Madrid branch in Spain in January. "Barclays gave us the graphic and we designed the promotion," explains Almos, who demonstrates by standing on a map of the world with the words "Barclays Bank" and a slogan in Spanish. Stand on different countries on the map and a wave of blue with white stars washes over the country underfoot. Barclays are considering using the system in other branches, he says.

Almos, who worked for various technology companies in Israel including telecommunications company Comverse and Quiver, a Web bookmark-sharing start-up established by his former army commander and later sold to Inktomi for $12 million, set up EyeClick with $250,000 of his own and several hundred thousand dollars in funding from private investors. EyeClick does not sell directly to clients but rather through distributors such as advertising and marketing agencies, who offer EyeClick as one component of a larger ad campaign. Almos, who has already lined up distributors in Spain, Belgium, New Zealand and South Africa, is in touch with several potential distributors in the US and hopes to enter the US market shortly.

EyeClick, which has ten employees, including two PhDs in the field of machine vision from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and is looking to recruit more, is not just a technology provider: the company will design the interactive ads in conjunction with the client, creating graphics or incorporating the images being used in ads in other media. The cost of a system installed in a shopping centre for a week, for example, will start at around $5000.

EyeClick has a few competitors worldwide, including Californian company Reactrix and the German Blueplot, but Almos claims that the fact that his system uses off-the-shelf components which means it is cheaper to produce and to maintain, and also its support for many graphics formats such as the popular Macromedia Flash, which can be easily integrated into EyeClick's technology, differentiates his company from the rest.

Soccer is the company's current focus: as the World Cup approaches, Almos will be wooing clients, primarily in soccer-mad Europe, with EyeClick's floor soccer game, a rather addictive promotion where two players - or one player against the computer - stand on a virtual soccer field with ads around the perimeter and kick a ball, which can also feature ads, back and forth. So, as Yeats might have said, next time you visit a movie multiplex cinema or shopping mall, tread softly for you may be treading on an ad agency's floor-based promotional dream.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Valleywag - The tabloid of Blogs


Valleywag, a dirt blog owned by "Gawker" has some pretty good articles and is rapidly becoming the "Us weekly for geeks".

Their welcome message is:
Valleywag is a tech gossip rag. You people in Silicon Valley are far too busy
changing the world to care about sex, greed and hypocrisy. But if you ever need
a break, come visit us at Valleywag.


One of the latest articles I read was relevant to our topic:
"In Communist China, the VC swarms YOU"
[Read More]

The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint


Guy Kawasaki has nothing to do with Japanese motorcyles. But he is an interesting author ( "The art of the start" is only one of a long list of books on start up) and a venture capitalist. In this not-so-recent-post he offers some epiphanies on power point presentations.
[Read More]

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Lunch in Israel: 6 startups a VC and a blogger


Source: Techcrunch

Last Sunday Michael Arrington met six promising "web two point o" start ups in sunny Tel Aviv. Attending were founders from I4giveu, Maxthon, Raw Sugar, Spotback, Triplay and Yedda. Daniel Cohen from Gemini Israel Funds, Ouriel Ohayon (TechCrunch France author) and other tech enthusiasts were there as well.

Pictures of the event can be found on Flickr.

The six startups are:

  1. I4giveu
    Founder Alon Carmel is a gifted designer and developer and is getting ready to launch his stealth project I4giveu. Very few details on the service were revealed, but as always I love the email collecting landing page with promises of amazement in a very short time. Sign up here. One thing Alon did say was this: “Each user will earn his reputation from angel to devil according to his post ranked by other community users.” Sounds like fun!
  2. Maxthon Browser
    Netanel Jacobsson represented Maxthon Browser, the controversial but popular IE based browser that has surpassed 50 million downloads. Ouriel Ohayon writes about Maxthon here.
  3. Raw Sugar
    The executive team of Raw Sugar is based in Silicon Valley, the development effort is led by Frank Smadja out of Haifa, Israel. I’ve written about Raw Sugar on TechCrunch previously, and they are moving toward launch of a new feature which will automatically import tag and category information from blogs to create a single browsable and searchable directory. Great stuff.
  4. Spotback
    Spotback founders Micha Kaufman and Amit Kaufman gave me an early look at credential-protected Spotback, which is going to be a winner. Look for a full profile soon, but Spotback is a personalized news and rating/sharing site that has very strong features and will give front runners like Newsvine a real run for their money. Design and functionality is top notch. Sign up for the beta here. I would not be surprised if Spotback received joint Israel-US VC funding in the very near future.
  5. Triplay
    Yaron Orenstein spoke to me briefly about Triplay, a very young company that is looking to create a cross-platform mul­ti­me­dia platform (computer-mobile-television). There are very few details on the site, but Triplay looks interesting. “Think People NOT technology…TriPlay’s Super Messaging service will enable people to easily communicate all types of media and content across their PC, TV, and Mobile devices.” Look for a full review on MobileCrunch soon.
  6. Yedda
    I’ve been talking to Yaniv Golan and Avichay Nissenbaum, the founders of Yedda, since last December. See my teaser post on them from January. Yedda should be taking the wrapper off their service within the next few weeks, and I’ll be dong a full profile.
    All of these entrepreneurs are humble and flat out brilliant. I’m excited to see good stuff coming out of Israel, and look forward to watching these six new companies grow.