I visited Microsoft’s office in San Francisco yesterday to meet with some of these startups and learn more about the program and its progress.

(Also, so I could tell my Bubby I met some nice Israelis.)

Hanan Lavy is the accelerator director in Israel. He measures the program’s success based on how many startups get funding within a year, the average amount raised, and how many members of the current class refer startups to the next class. By these standards, Microsoft’s program is doing well. The second class graduated two weeks ago and 10 of the 13 companies have already raised funds. The average raise of the first class is around $900,000 and the number of applications has tripled.

“This was a new model for Microsoft to operate an accelerator fully owned and run by Microsoft,” he said. “We make sure the companies have a big vision, the entrepreneurs can execute, that a strong tech person is part of the core team, and that the participants are coachable and open-minded. Many startups get involved with what they think is a pain point, but it isn’t really.”

The program lasts for four months where the startups get out and talk to customers, iterate and develop the product, interact with mentors, and hone their pitch. At the end of it all, they come to the U.S. for marketing, fundraising, and publicity. While Israel has an active startup scene, a strong presence in the U.S. market is still important for growth.

Kitchenbug

Kitchenbug wants to tell the true story behind food. The startup uses natural language processing to analyze recipes and generate full nutritional data, as well as helpful clues to understanding what that data means.

Understanding the health impact of a dish is not as simple as checking calorie, fat and sugar content. A number of other factors are at play and people without extensive knowledge of nutrition may not be aware of the consequences of certain meals. Kitchenbug addresses this issue by attaching green or red icons to each dish that say things like “not very heart healthy” or “good for feeling full” or “bad choice for weight loss.” That way, instead of parsing through various dishes and nutrition resources, you can instantly know if a recipe is right for you.

The founders have known each other for 25 years and live close together in Israel. COO Dror Daliot said that they used to be “chin-up champions” who were fit, slim, and strong, and then “life happened.”

“I love my daughters but they are terrible for my diet,” he said during a demo. “Pancake mornings and evening pizzas are not the healthiest.  At a BBQ, I looked at my friends and our crumbling frames and said ‘guys, we have to do something about this.’ We decided to develop technology that takes any online recipe from any website and instantly provides dietary information you need.”

60 percent of the Western world is overweight and 25 percent is obese, with weight-related diseases and allergies on the rise. According to Daliot, recipes are the second biggest search category on the web with 2 billion searches a month, and almost 50 percent of Americans search for info about health food. The Kitchenbug founders are not alone in their efforts to prepare healthy, home-cooked meals.

Kitchenbug has a bookmarking button that collect recipes into an online recipe box. Clicking into an ingredient will yield a description and serving sizes can be easily adapted. The app is social so people can share recipes, follow others, and discover new recipes. The company launched a WordPress plugin in January for food bloggers and over 2,500 recipes have been published so far, receiving 40 million views in 100 days. In the pipeline for Kitchenbug are icons and filters for ideological, allergy, and religious constraints. The data is based on nutritional information from the USDA database, as well as food manufacturers and brands, Wikipedia, and FDA regulations.

The team has raised $650,000 to date.

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It’s a good day for European and Israeli startups seeking funding, as Accel Partners announced a new $475 million fund today for early-stage tech companies.

The new fund, Accel London IV, was raised in just eight weeks and makes Accel London one of the largest venture capital firms in the region, with $2 billion raised to date across its previous funds. The new fund’s total is more than what was initially rumored back in February, as VentureBeat previously reported.

“Europe has a strong talent base, including a growing community of repeat entrepreneurs, whose success, experience, and ambition continue to fuel our ecosystem,” said Accel London partner Harry Nelis in a statement. “Innovation and entrepreneurship are thriving in Europe, and with technology hubs developing across the region, the next billion-dollar company could emerge from anywhere.”

Accel, which has offices all around the world, said the newly announced fund will focus on investing mostly in companies in Europe and Israel that deal with consumer Internet, big data, cloud, SaaS, and mobile.

Accel is well known for its long list of early investments in wildly popular companies, most notably Facebook. It has also previously invested in Spotify, Rovio, Dropbox, Cloudera, Etsy, Trulia, and Groupon. More specifically, Accel’s London team has invested in QlikTech, Playfish, and Kayak, which sold to Priceline for $1.8 billion after going public last year.

Euros photo via Africa Studio/Shutterstock

The venture capital firm announced today the closure of its tenth fund, which actually includes two funds that will be co-invested. Battery Ventures X (BVX) is a $650 million fund that will back companies at all stages of their lifecycle. The Battery Ventures X Side Fund will dedicate $250 million to companies further down the pipeline and support acquisitions, “providing the flexibility to support larger growth and buyout situations without disrupting the concentration in BV X,” the firm said in a statement.

Most of the resources will go into the North American, Israeli, and European markets. Battery Ventures will focus on companies working with software-as-a-service for the enterprise and big data analytics; IT infrastructure like networking and storage; technology-enabled business services; and buyouts in markets that are “ripe for consolidation.”

Since its formation in 1983, Battery Ventures has raised more than $4.5 billion and invested in more than 300 companies. In 2012, four of the firm’s portfolio companies went public — Bazaarvoice, ExactTarget, Guidewire, and Splunk — and nine portfolio companies were acquired. On Monday, financial analysis firm PrivCo released a report of the top 20 technology venture capital firms of 2012, ranking Battery Ventures at number six.

Battery Ventures has offices in Boston, Silicon Valley, and Israel.

Photo credit: eszter/Flickr

And Facebook is growing rapidly in that part of the world with a population of about 400-500 million people: 29 percent growth in 2012, according to a new infographic from Socialbakers.

The “Arab Spring” popular uprisings in 2011 and 2012 contributed to that growth, according to Socialbakers — particularly in the most politically active countries, Qatar, Libya, and Iraq. Those three countries’s Facebook user numbers have soared in 2012, 115 percent, 86 percent, and 81 percent respectively. Facebook, along with YouTube and Twitter, helped protesters organize and collaborate during the popular uprisings in those countries.

Egypt, the most populous country in the region, grew the most by absolute measures, adding 2.5 million Facebook users.

It’s not profitable growth, at least not comparatively, and not yet: Facebook users in MENA countries are some of the least valuable users as far as advertisers are concerned. But that will likely change over time.

One oddity that I noticed in the infographic: Israel is missing from the map. In a variety of sources that I checked, Israel is included in the MENA countries in some cases but not all. It does seem strange, however, that Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon are shown on the map, but Israel is not.

Here’s all the data, in visual form.

photo credit: jonrawlinson via photopin cc

Because just as the ceasefire was being signed and the rockets and planes stopped flying, all digital hell broke loose online as electronic hacking attacks exploded 2500 percent.

“When the war stopped in the physical world is when it really started in the electronic world,” CloudFlare chief executive Matthew Prince told me today. “It was really stunning —  we saw a huge spike in attacks starting Nov. 21.”

CloudFlare, a content delivery network and a lot more, runs an incredible three to five percent of the internet. It’s growing 20 percent monthly, and adding 3000 customers a day. When you manage traffic that big, you see a lot of what’s going on. Which is exactly how CloudFlare was able to spot that, almost at the same time fighting between Hamas and Israel was settling down in the streets, it spiked a massive 25 times online.

Six days before the ceasefire was negotiated, Anonymous — a CloudFlare customer — announced its attacks on Israeli websites. But beyond a little spike in malignant traffic on November 18 and 19, little happened … apparently.

What did happen, behind the scenes, is that many prominent Israeli and Palestinian sites loaded up on protection — from CloudFlare. The Israeli Army, which had recently gamified its blog, became a client. In nearby Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood (the ruling party of the country) became a client.

“We try very, very hard not to take political positions and we try very very hard not to take side,” Prince told me. “We’re not selling bullets, we’re selling flack jackets.”

So as disruptive and destructive traffic to both Palestinian and Israeli sites escalated and crescendoed CloudFlare saw the attacks from botnets, DNS reflection hacks, and voluntary botnets organized by Anonymous. The more, the better, in a sense.

“Any time one of the sites on CloudFlare gets attacked, we learn and get better and all our sites get more protected,” Prince said. “So actually, Israeli sites were protecting Palestinian sites, and vice versa.”

In other words, CloudFlare is the digital United Nations. Which seems to be appropriate.

photo credit: gilberts via photopin cc

The HTML5 based platform responds to users’ activity by changing the apps on screen to accommodate their needs. According to a statement issued this morning, the technology bridges the gap between the web and mobile:

“Rather than the static experience of today’s smartphone, a dynamic phone adapts its offering of apps on the fly, matching the content and services a user needs with the most relevant apps available – whether locally or from the cloud.”

This is the third round of funding for this product, which was first released as DoAT at TechCrunch Disupt in May 2011. The $25 million brings total investment to $35.5 million. This round was led by Telefonica Digital, and as well as SingTel Innov8, Mozilla and previous investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), DFJTF, BRM Group and Horizons Ventures. Everything.me is based in Israel. Read the press release.

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Much publicity, high hopes, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been devoted to the Better Place electric-car service.

Now, with an apparent dearth of Israeli customers to sign on the dotted line, the company is turning over its management.

The latest defection is deputy CEO Moshe Kaplinsky. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported his resignation last Thursday.

Kaplinksy had run Better Place Israel since 2008, and was promoted just last month to deputy CEO of the entire Better Place company.

In an e-mail to employees, he said he had been considering the move for a long time.

Charismatic founder Shai Agassi resigned in early October; he was replaced by Evan Thornley, previously CEO of Better Place Australia.

At the time, Idan Ofer, chairman of the Better Place board, said, ”We owe Shai our gratitude for turning his powerful vision into a reality.”

Minimal sales

Source: Better Place

Diagram showing the battery-swapping process used by Better Place

While executive turnover is often a given at venture-funded startups, Better Place’s core problem stems from its inability to convince Israelis to sign up for its service.

As of the end of October, just 490 cars had been sold after several months of marketing–making its target of 4,000 customers by next June a stretch goal at very best.

Local press reports said that many Israeli drivers, doing the math, concluded that even the least expensive Better Place plan provided more miles than they were likely to use–and cost more than an equivalent gasoline car.

In September, the company launched a new, less costly plan that includes only 7,500 miles a year.

Other potential customers reportedly express skepticism and reluctance to be the first on the block to try the service.

“I don’t want to be the sucker, the freier,” said airline employee Moshe Kretzo, 60, as quoted in Time magazine. The word also translates to “chump.”

Packages of miles

The startup electric-car service vows to reinvent the way drivers pay for transportation.

It offers annual packages of miles for a set price–similar to mobile-phone plans–and includes both electric recharging and battery swapping as part of the package.

According to Haaretz, 38 of the planned 45 battery-swap stations have now been built in Israel.

Israeli drivers have to buy the Renault Fluence ZE electric sedan separately.

(Those drivers include our correspondent, Brian of London, who has covered his Better Place purchase and experiences here, here,here, here, here, and here.)

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It’s unclear which a-little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing moron thought this up, but whatever you believe about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, glorifying death — like assassinating a Hamas leader on almost-live YouTube yesterday — and making a game out of war is stupid, wrong, and unspeakably distasteful.

Here are all the badges you can win for participating in this sick game:

I’m going to lay my cards out on the table (stupid, I know) because I don’t want to be mistaken. I support Israel’s right to exist. I support Israel’s right to defend itself. I think that we in the West have absolutely no freaking clue what it’s like to live under threat of terror, rockets, and suicide bombings month after month, year after year.

But it’s not okay to glorify war. It’s not okay to broadcast killings as if they were some sporting match — yay, a goal for our team — or release images of enemy combatants with the word ELIMINATED pasted over top.

You shouldn’t lose your fundamental respect for human life, even in the midst of war, and terror, and death, and destruction.

This is not fun. It is not a game. People are dying. This is not Xbox, this is real life.

War is not a game.

photo credit: mugley via photopin cc; hat tip: ReadWriteWeb

Israel’s army is live-blogging and live-tweeting operation Pillar of Defense, its attacks on Hamas rocket sites in the Gaza strip. The current military campaign is in response, it says, to more than 700 rocket attacks from Gaza this year.

Update Nov. 15: Israel’s army, the IDF has gamified its war blog.

Rocket attack on Israel, and Israel’s retaliation, are nothing new, sadly.

The unprecedented and almost unbelievable part, however, is that the Israeli Defense Forces blog has been updated multiple times today with details on the attacks: intercepts of missiles fired from Gaza, pictures of what IDF says are Hamas rocket-launching sites, and Israeli Navy strikes on what it claims are terror sites in the Gaza Strip.

Reminiscent of Desert Storm, during which images of the daily destruction flashed across our TV screens every night, video of the fight is now available almost in real time via YouTube. The IDF blog highlighted a video of a missile strike that obliterated a vehicle apparently carrying Ahmed Jabari, who it says is the head of Hamas’ military wing in Gaza — and then tweeted his photo with the word “ELIMINATED” superimposed in all-caps.

Palestinian fighters are answering back with fresh attacks on Israel, documented via Twitter. Predictably, they are condemning the attack and threatening more retribution. This tweet, from Al Qassam, is just a sample of 10 or more in the last hour announcing shelling of Israeli air force bases with Katyusha rockets and mortars in response to Jabari’s killing:

Al Qassam hit Isnad Sofa base with 6 mortars in response on assassination of its leader #AhmedJabari #Gaza #Israel #terror

—
Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) November 14, 2012

The IDF says its mobile missile defense system Iron Dome – an Israeli equivalent of the U.S. Army’s Patriot anti-missile defense system — has intercepted at least 17 missiles fired from Gaza.

But why Israel is liveblogging and tweeting the attacks is unclear. Israel has long felt that international media is heavily biased in favor of Palestinian fighters, but tweets like the one announcing Jabari’s death seem more likely to provoke a violent response than to help stop the confrontation:

Ahmed Jabari: Eliminated. http://t.co/sCnQnKkM

—
IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

We tend to jump all over pro athletes, brands, and celebrities who tweet things that offend our sensibilities, or strike us as cruel, rude, or insensitive. But war is orders of magnitude worse.

And I, of course, am now complicit in this social media war.

This post is written by independent writer and researcher Kevin Ducoff.

Considering it has been dubbed the “Startup Nation,” Israel is clearly an important player on the global tech stage. Not only does it have the highest density of tech startups in the world, but these startups attract more venture capital per person than any other country — 2.5 times more than the United States, 30 times Europe, 80 times India, and a whopping 300 times China.

And with only 7.1 million citizens, Israel raised nearly $2 billion in venture capital in 2008 — just as much money as was attributed to the 61 million citizens in the U.K. or 145 million citizens in Germany and France combined. As of the beginning of 2009, more Israeli companies were listed on the NASDAQ than any other country.

I’ve been tracking foreign affairs and economic trends for years, and the technology economy that has emerged in Israel is one of the most significant happenings in the world today; not only have Israelis developed crucial technologies that affect our lives daily (including VoiP technology, flash drives, and instant messaging), but Israel’s tech initiatives are actually changing relations and the balance of power in the Middle East today.

Of the thousands of technology companies in the Israeli market, I have researched and put together a list of the country’s fastest-growing startups (either monetarily, based on customers/users, or both) that are most likely poised to transform industries and impact the world. Here are the top five:

1. Waze offers free turn-by-turn GPS navigation that takes crowdsourced traffic information into account when planning your route. The app also helps you find deals on gas and locates nearby points of interest, such as restaurants and even police traps. Waze (pictured above) has already raised $67 million in venture capital, and reports recently surfaced that Facebook was interested in collaborating with the startup or buying it outright.

2. Codename One gives developers a write-once, run-everywhere development platform for building native mobile apps across many mobile operating systems, from iOS to Android and BlackBerry. Codename One is open-source and uses special lightweight technology that eliminates fragmentation and offers developers a platform for mobile application development as easy as desktop development. Codename One is helping to defragment the mobile space and has exploded in popularity, having increased its user base 50 percent in the last month alone.

3. Kaltura is the web’s leading open source online video platform, providing over 150,000 universities, enterprises, and websites with a robust set of video software services. Kaltura allows organizations to play, share, distribute, and analyze all things video. The platform has helped businesses set up “corporate tubes” for internal communication and marketing purposes, and has enabled nearly every Ivy League university, alongside hundreds of other schools, to set up “campus tubes” for learning, collaboration, and other uses. Robust expansion and over $40 million raised in venture capital has led to predictions that Kaltura will become one of the world’s next billion-dollar tech companies.

4. Mobli is a visual media platform that lets you share photos and video in real-time with friends or people of shared interests. It gives users the ability to see the world — such as concerts, celebrity sightings, and news events — through any smartphone, creating a visual search engine. The company raised $26 million in venture capital and has added millions of users over the last few months. It counts Leonardo DiCaprio and Serena Williams among its investors.

5. StartApp is a monetization and distribution platform for Android apps. Launched in September 2011, the company acquired $4.3 million in startup funds and just surpassed 150 million downloads in July 2012. Instead of forcing developers to charge a fee or add advertisements to their apps, StartApp generates revenue by adding a search icon to a user’s home screen whenever they download an app. Whenever someone uses the search engine, both StartApp and the developer get a share of the money — a truly innovative way to monetize in the mobile apps space.

These are just a few of the Israeli companies set to significantly change the way we use technology to interact and access information. As the Startup Nation continues to experience rapid growth when it comes to acquiring venture capital and getting its companies on the map, we’re sure to see even more innovation from this important player in the near future.

Kevin Ducoff is an independent writer and researcher focusing on politics, business and technology. He writes about trends and companies impacting the economy and technology. He’s based in Washington DC.

Sequoia Capital is raising its fifth Israel-focused fund, said to top out at $200 million, according to filings and Israel’s Globes. The fund is part of a larger effort by the venture firm to raise $1 billion for a number of new funds that stretch across many continents.

This is not Sequoia’s first go-around in the Israeli market. The firm has thus far invested nearly $600 million in the country’s startups, as Globes notes. According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, both Sequoia’s fourth and third funds were also for about $200 million. Sequoia’s previous Israel-focused funds were for smaller amounts, showing an increased interest in the region.

We learned about Sequoia’s new $1 billion slate of funds in May, which it is using to create new funds focusing on U.S. Growth Equity, China, and now Israel. The firm thus far has invested in Israeli companies such as Snaptu, which was later acquired by Facebook, Amobee, Onavo, Cloudshare, and a number of others.

And more startups are cropping up every day. VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall visited Israel for the Innovation Marathon sponsored by BootCamp Ventures in Tel Aviv. There, the companies had a lot of promise: great teams, good energy, and a spirit of entrepreneurship. The problem is Israel hasn’t had any huge hits like the Googles and Facebooks of the U.S. One founder told VentureBeat at the time that Israeli entrepreneurs are “after the exits” and are “less interested in building an established company and making money for the long-term.”

We have reached out to Sequoia Capital and will update the post upon hearing back.

Check out our favorite 35 startups from the BootCamp Ventures event in Israel here.

Image via Shutterstock

Cortica’s image recognition technology fuses neuroscience and computer science by giving computers the ability to comprehend visual content on the web in real-time. It was developed at Technion, a premier technology institute in Tel Aviv, by a crack team of neuroscientists, digital media experts, and former military intelligence personnel. The technology functions similarly to the human cortex and can identify patterns, make classifications, and understand James Joyce. Maybe not the last one.

With the money, members of the Cortica team will relocate to the US, with people in New York and Silicon Valley.

UppSite is an Israeli company that provides a one-stop shop for web publishers to create mobile apps. After participating in startup incubator TheTime and receiving $550,000 in funding, Uppsite raised a follow-up round with additional input from TheTime, as well as Matomy Media Group and angel investors. The funds will go towards product development and expanding operations into North America.

While security researchers have uncovered many things about the Flame malware, one big question has remained unresolved: Who created it?

They might not be surprised by the answer. According to anonymous Western officials, Flame was the work of the governments of the United States and Israel, reports The Washington Post.

The goal of Flame was just as researchers had initially suspected: Espionage. The US and Israeli governments wanted to thwart the nuclear efforts of Iran, and to do that they needed as much information as they could get their hands on. The CIA, NSA, and Israeli military were all involved in the creation of the malware, sources say.

This confirmation follows a story from The New York Times that reported the U.S. and Israel were also responsible for Stuxnet, which attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2010.

This connection wasn’t lost on researchers, who last week discovered a code-level connection between Stuxnet and Flame. Seeing the strong similarities in certain segments of the workings of both Stuxnet and Flame, researchers concluded that the programs’ creators were working together. The Washington Post‘s sources confirmed this: Both Stuxnet and Flame were developed as a part of a program known as Olympic Games.

According to the report, Iran discovered Flame as a result of a viral strike Israel made on Iran’s Oil Ministry and oil-export facilities in April. The attack, which Israel carried out without warning the U.S., allowed Iran to uncover Flame’s infiltration.

Not that the discovery of Flame and Stuxnet have deterred the NSA and CIA: Both agencies are still hard at work on follow ups.

It’s been rumored for some time that the Stuxnet virus, which attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2010 before escaping and wreaking havoc on the public Web, was a joint effort between the U.S. and Israel. But, aside from security firm reports, their connection was mostly speculation — until today.

A lengthy New York Times report this morning confirms that Stuxnet was indeed an American and Israeli project, and it also reveals some fascinating details about the first major cyberwar effort in the world.

According to the NYT, the cyberwar campaign, dubbed “Olympic Games,” began under President Bush in 2006 as a way to stall Iran’s nuclear ambitions. After virtually mapping Iran’s Natanz plant, the U.S. worked with an Israeli team to create an early variant of Stuxnet, which was programmed to target Siemens equipment and destroy centrifuges being used to purify uranium.

Given that the U.S. was in the middle of several ground efforts in the Middle East, it was tough to rally international support for a physical strike against Iran as well. A cyber-strike made more sense at the time, and it seems President Obama agreed, as he accelerated the cyberwar effort during his first few years in the White House.

“From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian program — the diplomacy, the sanctions, every major decision,” a senior administration official told the NYT. “And it’s safe to say that whatever other activity might have been under way was no exception to that rule.”

All was going well until an updated version of the virus made its way out of the Natanz plant. The new version of the virus had an error in its code that allowed it to spread to an Iranian engineer’s laptop, and it spread to the Internet when he left the plant.  White House officials blamed Israel for the mistake, according to the NYT.

Once the virus began replicating itself on the Web and attacking Siemens equipment worldwide, security companies ended up calling it Stuxnet.

Flame, the most recent virus targeting computers in the Middle East, wasn’t a part of Olympic Games, American officials told the NYT. They didn’t comment on whether the U.S. was behind Flame.

There are plenty of advantages to cyberwarfare: it involves practically no human casualties and lengthy ground campaigns, to name just a few. But it’s not a panacea, as relying too much on cyberwar efforts will inevitably make the U.S. a bigger target for cyber-strikes. That’s something that President Obama kept in mind as he accelerated the Olympic Games effort, the NYT reports.

Photo via President.ir

Two of the leading players in the 3D printing market have merged, with Stratasys and Objet Ltd. joining forces in a $1.4 billion deal, the two companies announced this morning.

The transaction between the two will position the newly combined company as a serious leader in the fast growing 3D printing and digital manufacturing industry. The merged entity will operate under the name Stratasys.

The transaction is a sudden turn of fortune for Objet, which was planning an initial public offering expected to value the company at $500 million. Like another recent acquisition, this one represents a huge increase in value for a company that originally had other plans.

It’s also a striking validation of the Israeli startup market, which has been struggling to produce billion-dollar hits. Israel-based Objet is now one of the biggest tech business success stories to come out of that country in recent memory.

Stratasys CEO Scott Crump will become the combined company’s chairman, while Objet CEO David Reis will become the new CEO of the combined company. Objet Chairman Elchanan Jaglom will now be the chairman of a four-member executive committee that will oversee the merger.

“Today marks a significant milestone for Stratasys and an important development for the 3D printing and direct digital manufacturing industry,” Crump said in a statement. “We are bringing together two of the most innovative and respected players in the field to create a global leader in a high-growth industry. Together we will have a broader and more comprehensive product and technology portfolio, and the resources, team, and financial strength to achieve our goals.”

Stratasys also used today to announce preliminary financials for the first quarter ended March 31, 2012. The company said it expects revenue of about $45 million, a 31 percent increase over the $34.3 million it took in during the same period a year ago.

The merger news and strong Q1 results were met with positive vibes from investors, who propped up Stratasys’ stock on the Nasdaq exchange. The company’s stock is up more than 20 percent as of this writing.

Check out the video below to see the latest 3D printing advances Object has achieved lately:

Stratasys 3D printing screenshot: uPrint SE 3D Printer video

Israel is a fun country, because it shows strength in a variety of markets — from chips, to security, to web development. The startups in Israel have less of the “me-too” feel you get at some Silicon Valley events.

Separately, yesterday, I published impressions from my first trip to Israel. My conclusion: The country is incredibly successful at starting companies, but it’s still dealing with the “small” problem.

The Innovation event, sponsored by BootCamp Ventures, was held week before last.

The following four companies are the ones that I found the most interesting or provocative:

Tucoola is a social platform that helps get kids ready for school. It enhances cognitive, social, and life skills for preschool children using fun online games (with patents pending). It targets children 2-8+, their parents and teachers. It offers skills analysis, progress reports and other tools to help help progress. The company has some competitors, but mainly in the mathematics space (such as IXL). The company said it is raising $1 million. It was clearly one of the favorites of the investors who were judging the presentations.

Cell Buddy's Yossi Dagan

Cell Buddy wants to let you use your mobile phone and original number when traveling anywhere abroad. I liked the company, because of its ambition, though I heard some people in the audience dismissing it as crazy and unlikely to succeed (its customers have to think ahead to order the product, for example). Here’s how it works: Cell Buddy offers a small case that wraps around your phone, and which contains technology needed to offer its customers carrier-grade, low cost, voice, SMS and Internet service — all while travelling abroad and using their own mobile phone.  The wrap-around case contains a modem that communicates with a local SIM card that is managed by Cell Buddy’s servers. The company says the global roaming market is more than $50 billion, and business people — its target market — represent 65 percent of this. The company is still in alpha and has only an early prototype of the device; see the device in the hands of CEO Yossi Dagan in the picture above (the wrapped iPhone is on the left). The company is looking for $900,000, and has already tested the device in Jordan and the U.S.

eMotion bracelet

eMotion targets the games industry with a technology that interacts with players’ moods. The technology detects the player’s excitement and emotional condition using a biofeedback bracelet. The information is then transferred back to the game, helping it adjust the course or skill level. Developers can access the bracelet with an SDK, which will be sold or licensed. The company was founded in 2010, and is seeking $2-5 million. Apparently, Nintendo failed when it tried to do something similar. Sony has called eMotion one of the most innovative companies. The company is negotiations with Sony and Microsoft right now. The company says it will have an advanced prototype by the end of its first year.

ZImperium is a offering a very interesting mobile security product. If you’re on your mobile phone, and you walk into Starbucks, the company’s product can shield you from unwittingly having vulnerable access points such as your social networks hacked. The company has also developed a pretty slick mobile interface for IT administrators to scan security threats on devices under their control. The company was founded late last year by Itzhak Avraham, a well known hacker turned security expert.

Here are the rest of the companies. Many of them are promising. Others need more time to fix their business models or refine their pitches.

AdClarity is a business intelligence software-as-a-service (SaaS) product that provides insight into media campaigns, including how long they’ve run, over what period of time, and at what price. It does this using scraping and other monitoring technology, and provides information to outside parties who otherwise have nothing to do with the campaign. Media buyers, sales managers, affiliates and online advertising and marketing professionals want this information to make better decisions. CEO Orey Gilliam was previously CEO of messaging service ICQ, and head of AOL Messaging after ICQ was acquired by AOL.

AirBase has developed a low-cost air pollution monitoring device ($550) and a proprietary information cloud-based online platform. The device lets you know exactly what elements you’re breathing, keeping tabs on the various pollutants that can affect your health and environment.

BetterView provides better video conversion technology to content owners, helping them move from Standard Definition (SD) to true HD. The company says it uses a “Super-Resolution” discipline for graphic image processing, and that owners of old films and TV programs can use this to improve their offerings. Target customers include major studios, TV broadcasters, video-on-demand and cable firms, IPTV companies, and so on. The product is in beta testing, and the company is looking for $1 million.

Binfire offers a collaboration and project management SaaS software. It boasts things like document sharing, group chat, and event notification. The company argues that its real-time features give it a leg up on competitors like Basecamp and Huddle. However, the company could not articulate to the investors who judged the presentation how it was markedly better than Google Docs. It’s priced beginning at $9.99/month.

Cellarix offers a digital wallet that allows the user to purchase services and products via a mobile phone, incorporating things like pre/post payment, coupons, customers’ clubs, and sales campaigns. The company says its unique proposition is its Mobile Marketplace that connects thousands of subscribers and merchants. It uses SMS and Bluetooth technology, and will embrace near-field communications (NFC) when that technology truly takes off. It focuses on “unbanked” consumers in developing markets.

DiffDoof says it offers enterprises the ability to fuse formal, informal, and social knowledge for achieving their business goals. The company said its product, named ClearMash, enables control of this knowledge. However, I found the pitch somewhat vague, as did some of the investors judging the presentations. The company is trying to boil the ocean, and so our advice was for it to quickly find a focus.

Dropico Mobile develops and distributes a network of iPhone photography apps, providing users a wide set of apps to create and share professional-looking photos with no photo editing knowledge.

Evolero is an online system which empowers event organizers to set up event websites that manage registration and clearing while activating event’s speakers, sponsors, and attendees. A challenge for this company is that there are lot of competitors, and many event organizers don’t have large margins to spend money on management software.

Folloyu is a  service that provides continuous browsing between devices as a solution to reduce online content abandonment. It strives to create a seamless environment between different devices.

Friendize.Me is a social service allowing consumers to get personalized trusted advice from friends on purchasing products and services (“Quora for Consumers”).

iAlbums says it wants to bring your music to life by automatically curating interactive magazines for every album and track in your library. iAlbums likes to call itself the Flipboard for music. The company says the spread of popular services like Spotify, YouTube, and iTunes has reduced music to a single line of text in your play list, and that the cover art and wider experience of great music has been lost. It filters, optimizes, and  parses all info and media sources. It is raising $1.5 million.

Itweetlive changes the way companies engage on social networks by using conversational, artificial intelligence tools (natural language processing and computational linguistic tools) to enhance one-to-many responses. The team boasts hard-core AI talent. It is building a one-to-many service that is based on a conversational tree, where you develop answers for all kinds of activity in advance, so that conversations can be automatically responded to. [Update: The company just corrected me:  "Nothing is being sent in an automated way," said entrepreneur Agmon Porat, "but organizing search results and providing suggested responses means the conversation can move 50 to 100 times faster. We suggest to the community manager a statistically appropriate response, which they can change; and every change teaches the system new responses that will also be measured. Another point that could have been better explained is that there is no need to pre-define responses; the system learns along the way and provides responses according to other user's input."]

Mijits Media offers a light-weight, brandable self-service video player — the mijitTV — that enables anyone to customize it and then run collections of video in any web site. It is an HTML5-wrapped app, targeting small businesses, bloggers, and publishers. Ad-supported, lightly branded product is offered for free. More customization and personalization features come in a premium version. It lets anyone create their own “TV Station,” something that fills a void now that YouTube has stopped playlists as of last July.

Mobiappi is an online platform that lets anyone easily self-create and manage dynamic smartphone apps; uniquely focused on native apps and large distributors. It focuses on B2B distribution – via large distributors.

NoviSign offers a real-time signage broadcast solution to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which enables managing and broadcasting marketing campaigns from the cloud to any IP-based sign worldwide.

NovoSpeech has built a proprietary speech recognition platform. The company says it provides a consistently superior user experience in real-life environments than Apple-owned competitor Siri and Nuance-owned Vlingo (Nuance powers both Siri and Vlingo). Indeed, NovoSpeech cited the recent class-action lawsuit against Siri (stemming from complaints about performance problems) as evidence that Siri just isn’t doing a great job. NovoSpeech says its version does much better in environments where there is background noise, for example. And Siri requires a lot of computation, and so struggles to tough bandwidth environments like tunnels. The company is seeking $500,000 to $2 million.

PickN’Tell is a location-based mobile service which provides customers an uninterrupted shopping experience from store to home, while providing retailers with real time information about their customers. The company offers retailers a “magic mirror,” which lets customers see what they look like in certain clothing, and also an app where users can review usage history and connect with friends.

PlugWallet offers a payment method based on a personal device (key), email and password, which enables users to pay, receive and transfer money over the Internet easily. This lets people buy goods and services online without using their credit card or bank account details. The company is targeting the 1.3 billion people who use the web, but who don’t have credit or don’t want to use their credit card. The company said its clearing commissions will be 1/5 of the current rate. It’s not competing against PayPal, which the company says has a maximum target market of 500 million users. PlugWallet wants to go after vast markets like India and Russia.

Pluralis provides online advertisers with a crowd-sourcing platform for optimizing their website performance. It aims to be the 99 Designs for landing page optimization.

PTech HM lets users diagnose sleep breathing patterns using a common smartphone along with PTech’s application. The app provides graphical reports and other data about your breathing and snoring patterns, and lets doctors and dentists track the data and thus offer better treatment for things like apnea, coughing, rhonchus, and wheezing. The company says the U.S. market for this sort of therapy is $2 billion and it’s only 10 percent tapped so far. There’s a $5 billion market worldwide. The company has raised $300,000 and is looking for another $3 million.

Ridefrog is a location-based marketplace for ridesharing that leverages social networks such as Facebook, offering relevant rides with like-minded people to create a positive social experience on the road. For example, it lets you contact find other people who are going to the same event you are going to. The company said competitors Zimride and RideJoy are both start-ups, but are not focused on events, and are not very social.

Ringbow

Ringbow offers a pretty cool ring device, worn on the index finger, that acts as a touch-screen accessory — it lets you touch devices, and adds layers of new touch functionality and accessibility. It also lets you bypass having to separately pull down menus, access secondary menus, etc. It focuses on gaming, but will move to other support forms of entertainment, as well as vehicle, medical, security and military applications. Judges were somewhat skeptical, however, that a separate device like this could take off in a big way.

ShopZooky is social shopping application that allows local merchants and shoppers to communicate and interact with each other to share and discover products people buy every day at their nearby stores. The company will launch in cities like NY, Atlanta and SF, and is co-founded by Tareq Maayah, who co-founded the G.ho.st, the web-based operating system.

Skiller says it offers the only multi-player mobile social gaming platform, allowing game developers to increase user engagement and revenues. It says it already operates in more than 200 countries with more than 3 million users. If offers things like cross-operating system support, in-app billing, a cross-games virtual currency, community management and analytics tools. Business model: in-app billing, virtual currency and advertising.

Sygen says it is the “Mint” for the European market: an anonymous social financial network that puts users in control of their personal finances. It has launched in Israel, and will launch in Europe next year.

SyncFu provides online retailers and users with a way to create, manage, distribute & track their own group buying deals. Online vendors can easily install SyncFu’s group buying widget. SyncFu wins by sharing in the revenue generated by fulfilled deals.

Touchoo provides parents and children with a growing selection of high-quality, well categorized, educationally-sound and professionally reviewed interactive children’s book-apps.

Tygor Traffic Solutions says it has developed innovative technology to provide over 50 percent time improvement in metropolitan urban transportation as measured at peak congestion hours. It will provide a cloud-based in-vehicle application to connect drivers to the urban network to allow them to optimize their traffic routes.

VeriShow lets you use video-conferencing, live chat, and screen-sharing to improve things like website sales and customer service. It lets you share, edit and annotate content such as documents, images, video clips, co-browse, complete forms together, accept e-signatures and more. It targets the financial, healthcare, consulting and retail sectors.

Widgex provides a system for “do it your self website building” specifically designed for right to left Arabic sites.

W.S.C Sports Technologies developed an interactive video platform for sports, allowing sports media-rights-owners to enrich the possibilities and exploit their video rights; fans can control, filter, watch, share personalized highlights.

The curse of the small company

Israel’s start up economy is hotter than ever. But a question haunts entrepreneurs there: Why are Israeli start-up hits generally so small? Where is their version of Instagram, the Silicon Valley-based photo-sharing company that Facebook just bought for $1 billion within 18 months of its launch?

That was the question of debate during my visit to Tel Aviv two weeks ago. It’s not quite as bad as the Curse of the Bambino that haunted the Red Sox for 86 years, but the baseball analogy is apt: Israeli entrepreneurs are hitting base-hits all year long but they can’t seem to get into the World Series. In fact, they’re hitting lots of home runs, and occasional grand slams. Taken as a whole, Israeli entrerpreneurs are an awesome team, perhaps the best in the whole world league. Look at CheckPoint Software, the early security company, now publicly traded and valued at $12 billion. Or ICQ, the early instant messaging service, sold to AOL in the 1990s, and which inspired a  generation of IT entrepreneurs. I’ll say more about Israel’s prowess shortly.

But for some reason, the country never hits the big time. Huge successes on the scale of Facebook and Google, as well as amazingly quick viral hits of Instagram’s ilk, continue to elude it.

The good news is, Israel’s start-up ecosystem is still very young, especially in the area of the consumer Internet. Many entrepreneurs and investors I talked with vow things will change, but they caution it could take at least five or more years.

For now, though, several factors have conspired to keep Israel’s hits relatively small. Local venture capital firms, and some more engrained elements in Israeli culture, play a role here. Several entrepreneurs put it this way to me: The country started out poor, and still has far less wealth than other nations. It’s also small, and is surrounded by hostile neighbors. These factors push entrepreneurs to go for the small, safe bet.

Arye Schreiber, an entrepreneur who picked me up at the airport in Tel Aviv during my first visit to Israel (I attended the Innovation Marathon event hosted by BootCamp Ventures), explained to me that many entrepreneurs curtail their aims from the outset. If they can make a few million dollars first, that reduces the risk going forward, even if it means continued entrepreneurship. “Ask someone on the street, what’s the Israeli dream?” Sharon Tal, another entrepreneur asked me rhetorically. “They’ll say: It’s to open a start-up, sell it after one or two years, and become a multi-millionaire. Every small kid will say, ‘That’s what we want.’ … People are after the exits here. They’re less interested in building an established company and making money for the long-term.”

My stay in Israel, just three days long, was incredible. I met, or saw presentations from, at least 48 companies there (it was back-to-back for two days). I fell in love with the place, as I’m sure many foreigners do: I stayed out late one night in lively Tel Aviv, I explored the architectural and historical wonders of Jerusalem, including running through the underground Hezekiah’s Tunnel, and even got pulled over at a checkpoint in the West Bank and told by an Israeli officer to to delete a photo I’d taken of him. All this, after I was invited, quite by surprise, to a dinner at Ofra, one of Israel’s oldest settlements in the West Bank, specifically at Tanya, a winery partly owned by Benchmark’s Michael Eisenberg. Note: The Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon wines they make there are truly amazing, and I’m saying that as a Napa Valley-frequenting snob (see picture of me next to one of the big bottles below).

Israel is a country on fire with entrepreneurship. After I got back last week, I read the 2009 book about Israel’s start-up ecosystem, Startup Nation. It lists some amazing stats: There are more entrepreneurs, venture capital investments, and research and development per capita in Israel in than any other country in the world — and by a large margin. A unique mix of the Jewish chutzpah gene, bonding by engineers during service in military units, the high priority on education, a strong Zionist drive, and the influx of diverse talent among Jewish immigrants from Russia and elsewhere — all have created an entrepreneurial culture that is second to none. Israel has more Nasdaq-listed companies than any outside country outside of the U.S. (…continue reading)

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I’m setting up meetings during my stay at the Israel Innovation Marathon event on March 27 and 28, and have arranged for several half-hour slots to meet with entrepreneurs, hear their ideas, and provide feedback.

The event itself will worth attending. I’ll be talking with Israeli high-tech investors Zohar Zisapel, founder of RAD, and Ed Mklavsky, founder of Gemini Israeli Funds, among others.

The trip is part of our effort to find the best companies for VentureBeat to write about and also to find the most disruptive products globally to launch on the stage of DEMO, the conference we produce. The next DEMO conference will be held next month.

If you’re based in Israel and you’re interested in meeting me while I’m in Tel Aviv, please fill out this form, and we will be in touch with further details shortly.

See you in Israel!

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Microsoft has launched its first-ever startup accelerator at its Israel R&D Center, with an expressed purpose of helping young cloud-focused companies.

The Windows Azure Accelerator, which was first reported by TechCrunch, will provide space and mentoring like a normal accelerator, but there’s a catch. Instead of seed funds, Microsoft will give the selected companies free access to the Windows Azure cloud platform.

The accelerator acts as part of the Think Next and Microsoft BizSpark programs, which also help startups. Like Microsoft’s BizSpark Plus offering, startups in this new accelerator will get two free years of Azure access worth up to $60,000.

The Azure cloud platform is used by many companies to host and build web applications through Microsoft’s own data centers. In this situation, Microsoft is hoping to encourage Azure use with young companies.

Azure was recently hammered in the press for a wide outage on Feb. 29 that has been labeled as a “leap year bug.” However, Microsoft has since apologized for the outage and offered a nice 33 percent credit for the entire month of February to those using the Azure Compute, Access Control, Service Bus and Caching programs.

Microsoft plans to announce the first class from the Windows Azure Accelerator on April 22nd at Think Next 2012.

Microsoft Israel R&D center photo: Microsoft

For those of you who read VentureBeat, you’ll know I’ve been on a world tour, trying to find the most innovative companies to write about, but also to invite to our conference DEMO.

What better place to have as our next stop than the Israel Innovation Marathon, on March 27-28? The event is being organized by BootCamp Ventures, the same group that organized the Istanbul tech conference I attended back in November.

I’ll be opening the event with a talk about the global landscape of investing, comparing the major tech centers of the U.S., Asia and Europe. Honestly, though, my main reason for going will be to explore Israel, while trying to answer the question posed by the book Startup Nation: “How is it that Israel — a country of 7.1 million, only 60 years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources — produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada and the UK?”

At the event, I’ll also be interviewing two respected Israeli high-tech investors, Zohar Zisapel, founder of RAD, and Ed Mklavsky, founder of Gemini Israeli Funds, where we’ll discuss similarities and differences between Silicon Valley, and what the one can learn from the other.

I’ll also be moderating start-up presentation sessions featuring some of the hottest new companies in the region.

Joining me will be 14 other experts and investors from different countries.

Can’t wait. For now, though, I’m stuck in the tumble jumble world of Austin’s exciting SXSW, where the buzz never stops. It’s like 1:45am right now, and the place is still alive. Notably, an Israeli-based company, Fooducate earlier today won a mobile application competition hosted by analytics company Flurry, beating out 700 other competitors. Fooducate is a pretty awesome app, in my opinion, providing key nutrition information about grocery store items while you shop (it lets you scan bar codes with your phone, providing you all kinds of information). I interviewed the founder and CEO, Hemi Weingarten, whose team is based in Tel Aviv. Hope to write more about it soon.

I’m really looking forward to meeting more disruptors in Israel.

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The attack came in retaliation to a group of Saudi hackers, called “nightmare group”, shutting down the Tel Aviv stock exchange website and Israeli airline El Al’s website on Monday. These attacks are part of ongoing occurrences between several groups of Arab and Israeli hackers who have been hacking and releasing Facebook data and email account information over the last few weeks.

One member of IDF-Team took to pastebin to post about the motivations behind the attack and to deliver a warning to Arab hackers:

Because lame hackers from Saudi Arabia decided to launch an attack against Israeli sites such as the airport site “EL-AL” and sites of Israeli banks, today, 01/17/12, Official stock exchange site of Saudi Arabia at the following address http://www.adx.ae not be available online and is only the beginning, in addition there may be disruption to the government’s stock exchange site at the following: http://www.sama.gov.sa/ If the lame attacks from Saudi Arabia will continue, we will move to the next level which will disable these sites longer term may come to weeks or even months. You have been warned.

It looks like the Middle East beginning to wage a cyber war, with both sides ready to release hacked information to the masses. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few weeks; perhaps this is the future of conflict in the Middle East.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered between 1947 and 1956 inside caves along the shore of the Dead Sea and contain the oldest known copies of many texts from the Bible. They also include secular writings that help shine a light on what life was like for people living in the first and second centuries.

For years, the most complete scrolls have been stored in vaults in Jerusalem, but now anyone with a computer will be able to read and examine the documents. Images of the scrolls were captured using 1,200 megapixel cameras that allow for incredible detail and close examination.

“The Dead Sea Scrolls Project with the Israel Museum enriches and preserves an important part of world heritage by making it accessible to all on the internet,” said Yossi Matias, Managing Director of Google’s R&D Center in Israel, in a statement. “Having been involved in similar projects in the past, including the Google Art Project, Yad Vashem Holocaust Collection, and the Prado Museum in Madrid, we have seen how people around the world can enhance their knowledge and understanding of key historical events by accessing documents and collections online.”

The entirety of the Dead Sea Scrolls are slated to be online by 2016. The Israel Antiquities Authority, which owns thousands of scroll fragments, has also started a project to put their texts online with help from Google by that date.

The following scrolls, as described by the Israel Museum, are now available for viewing:

• The Great Isaiah Scroll, inscribed with the Book of Isaiah and dating from ca. 125 BCE, is the only complete ancient copy of any biblical book in existence.
• The War Scroll dates to the late first century BCE or early first century CE and describes a confrontation between the “Sons of Light” and the “Sons of Darkness”, which would last forty-nine years, ending with the victory of the “Sons of Light” and the restoration of Temple practice according to their beliefs.
• The Temple Scroll, from the early first century CE, claims to provide the details of God’s instructions for the construction and operation of the Temple in Jerusalem. Written on animal skin only one-tenth of a millimeter thick, the Temple Scroll is the thinnest parchment scroll ever found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
• The Community Rule sheds light on the Community’s way of life, dealing with subjects such as the admission of new members, conduct at communal meals, prayer, cleansing rituals, and theological doctrines.
• The Commentary on Habakkuk interprets the first two chapters of the biblical book of the prophet Habakkuk in a unique style that makes it a key source of knowledge of the spiritual life of the secluded Qumran community, shedding light on the community’s perception of itself.

The fund is managed by five Greylock partners, including Moshe Mor, Erez Ofer, Yoram Snir, Laurel Bowden and Arnon Dinur.

The firm has invested in over 20 startups in Israel, but the newly raised capital will be sure to bring in a whole heap of new investments over the next few months. At a time when hubs outside of Silicon Valley are beginning to make their mark, Europe and Israel are considered hotspots. Greylock Israel last raised a round in 2006.

Greylock is one of Silicon Valley’s oldest investment firms, having been founded in 1965. With $2 billion of capital under management, the firm has invested in 300 companies. In March, it expanded its early stage startup fund to $1 billion.

(Pictured: Greylock Partner Frank Slootman at Times Square)

The idea is to let gamers and other social networking users to chat in real time while engaging in various fun social activities and games.

“We’re trying to bridge the offline and online worlds, through a fun, real-time, collaborative environment,” said co-founder and CEO Dany Fishel. “It’s not just about seeing the person you’re talking to – people want to share the experience of being online together, show each other cool videos, play games and feel close to one another. This is what we are focused on at Rounds – tapping into the emotional aspect of an in-person conversation and trying to replicate that online.”

This represents an attempt to stretch users beyond what they already do on Facebook. Most apps on Facebook are asynchronous, where people play multiplayer games one turn at a time. Real-time games are a relatively small part of the audience, but they do exist. Facebook users also do a lot of real-time text chat.

But the Tel Aviv-based company believes the time for video chat has come. Many devices, even netbooks and smartphones, come with webcams built into them these days. Users are more comfortable sharing their lives with other users. Hundreds of thousands of people currently use Rounds’ platform to play real-time games, take funny snapshots of themselves, watch YouTube videos together, listen to music and share photos, as if they were in the same room.

No download is necessary.

The company, formerly known as 6rounds.com, is rebranding itself as Rounds. Rounds was founded in 2008 by Fishel and Ilan Leibovich. It has raised $2 million in venture funding from Rhodium and Startup Factory.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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