Go Israel: Out of 8 stories on Techcrunch's homepage, 5 are on Israel: AllofMe, SeeToo, Google Israel, eToro and SuTree

The front page at TechCrunch looks as if it was taken out of VC Cafe today. Out of 8 posts displayed on the home page, 4 are related to Israel. If you scroll back one page, you'll see another one - not bad for a tiny country in the middle east.


Here's a quick recap:

1. Yossi Vardi invests in Tel Aviv Based startup AllofMe - the Israeli company is developing a timeline generator for digital assets. It puts your emails photos, documents and videos on a time scale, thus allowing you to keep track of your media while giving it a new perspective. Next time some one asks you "what did you do on your birthday?" AllofMe should help you answer the question. Addy Feuerstein is the Founder - the company was founded in May of 2007 and has 8 employees. (via TechCruch, Haaretz, Orli)
   
   
2. Yet another investment by Yossi Vardi - this time it's an Israel/New York City based startup called SeeToo, a web-based application that allows individuals to invite friends and family to watch home videos with them in real time in a chat room. It's a bit similar to Meebo Rooms and soon-to-be-covered by VC Cafe, Ekko TV. TechCrunch is giving away 500 invites - try to get yours here. Yoav Ilan, head of marketing and biz dev gave the demo to TechCrunch. Yoav- Can I also get a demo and some invites? (via TechCrunch)
   
   
3. Google Israel acting Evil - According to Globes Online, Google initially stated that “disclosing the blogger’s identity violated rulings on the balance between freedom of expression and a person’s right to his reputation” - BUT Google finally caved in and provided the IP address of an "anonymous" blogger to an Israeli court voluntarily as part of a defamation case against a politician. Not that I support protecting a criminal, but it's important to note: G wasn't forced to give the data - they volunteered it. (via Globes, Techchrunch)
   
   
4. Roi Carthy posted an interesting review of eToro - a visual Forex (Foreign Exchange) Trading platform that simplifies trading by allowing users to trade money in a game-like setting. The parent company is Israel-based Tradonomi Ltd - It is incorporated in Limasol - most likely for taxing purposes, with offices in Tel Aviv. Trandonomi is led by Ceo and co-founder Jonathan (Yoni) Assia. was founded in 2006 and has 30 employees. Most recently, eToro released an affiliate platform called eToro Partners. (via PR Web, Techcrunch and Linked in).
   
   
5. Bonus: scroll one page back and see an article on Israel's SuTree, an online index and library for free video lessons, tutorials, lectures and how-to's from all over the web. SuTree got a serious facelift and a content collaboration agreement with Israel based 5min.

On a related note, If you haven't done so already, please visit the new 'under construction' home of The Venture Capital Cafe at http://www.vccafe.com and subscribe to my feed. VC Cafe covers early stage companies, innovative technologies, and venture capital news with a spotlight on Israel. There's a bunch of new features and ideas on the way in December, as the VC Cafe celebrates two years!

AfterDox - Former Amdocs Executives Form an Angel Investment Group

43 former and present executives from Amdocs have raised several million dollars and formed AfterDox, an angel group targeting early stage enterprise software and telecom companies. The group explicitly expressed that they will not invest in medical devices or hardware companies. The angel group has already met with 70 prospect companies and is getting ready to make its first investment.

The group of veterans plans to take active roles as mentors, board members and consultants, in order to help build the portfolio companies and raise additional rounds of investments, leveraging their experience and personal rolodex.

AfterDox's is led by Menachem Shalgi, former VP business development at Amdocs. Other members of the team include Amdocs co-founder Boaz Dotan, VP Eli Gelman, SVP Amir Goldstein (co-founder of Cellcom Israel Ltd. ), Arie Offner, Yossi Ben-Dov (CEO of Schema)and some other high caliber Israeli execs. According to IVC online, other managers of the group include Zvi Avron and Gary Sapir.

There are a few other Angel groups in Israel. The prominent ones are Israel Angels, the Angels Club (sponsored by "The Israel Export and International Cooperation Institute") and Silicom Ventures. In addition, there are hundreds of non-grouped angels who invest privately in high-tech companies. One of the most known is Mr. Yossi Vardi (founder of ICQ) who invests in early stage internet companies.

The reason for the recent buzz around angel investments in the Israeli market is the rising wave of investments in the tech industry in the last two years. As posted here a couple of days ago, high tech investments peaked in the second quarter of 2007, which caused high net worth individuals to consider venture investments as another asset in their portfolio.

More: Globes

SpeedBit's Speedy Growth

Tired of staring at a motionless movie player while waiting to watch videos online?






Israeli startup SpeedBit, creator of the popular Download Accelerator, has found a way to innovate and leverage the exponential growth of videos online.

Delivering high quality videos to fast to the end-user has become a real challenge even for the big video sites such as YouTube and MetaCafe. These performance barriers slow down the adoption of the online rich media.

SpeedBit's latest product, SpeedBit Video Accelerator improves the viewing experience of streaming videos by alliviating the frustration of 'movie freezes' and buffering problems. The product claims to increase the video download speed from 400 to 1,000 percent, using patent pending multi connection technology to accelerate the caching of streaming videos.

In addition, the technology even allows users to view films on YouTube without disruption while BitTorrent is downloading at full speed - something that was technically almost impossible before the introduction of the new software. More features can be found here.

According to CEO Ariel Yarnitsky, the new product has attracted 1 million users in two weeks, and 20-30K new users are signing up every day. The product is downloadable for free and is not being monetized at the moment. However, Yarnitzky has several plans to cut the coupon by offering a premium service for the accelerated downloading of video files from iTunes. Using SpeedBit's technology, a film that normally takes three and a half hours to download from iTunes will take only 22 minutes.

Speedbit was founded in 1999 by Yerach and Idan Feigenbaum (father and son) and currently has 30 employees. Speedbit is funded by Pitango venture capital and Yossi Vardi (founder investor of ICQ).

Download the Video Accelerator here.

How does it work?