Spring – especially the latter part of it, in May and June, when the weather starts turning warm – is one of the nicest times of year in Israel. It’s close enough to winter that we haven’t forgotten February’s chill, and it’s still not hot enough to make us wish for February’s return, like we do when August rolls around.

But in recent years, Spring in Israel has been about more than inspirational weather; it’s been an inspirational time for anyone who appreciates Israel’s contributions to making the world a more interesting, more efficient, more healthy – and more fun – place. Two recent exhibitions portrayed Israel’s great contributions to making the world a better place – and the progress yet to come.

First on the agenda was the High-Tech Industry Association (formerly the Israel Ventures Association) Conference, held in Jerusalem in early June. The annual conference (first held in 2007) brings together heads of Israeli tech firms, venture capitalists, bankers, investors, and (for now) small companies seeking funding for their “big idea.” Sessions deal with marketing strategy, technology trends, and, of course, financing and investment issues. And this year, there were special sessions dedicated to expanding Israel’s hi-tech reach to partners in India and China, with special sessions held specifically for delegations from those countries.

Represented at the conference are all the major players in Israeli hi-tech – venture capital firms (Carmel, Gemini, Genesis, JVP, and many others.), top corporations (IBM, Microsoft – both sponsors – as well as Nice, ECI, Checkpoint, and others), along with startups that have “made it” – LiveU, PageOnce, Axxana, and others (many of which I have written about – clearly there’s a connection here!). The conference is just what you’d expect; a little geeky (it was at a presentation by Amdocs that I heard an exposition of the “Terra Play” – more about that next week), a little glamorous (there were some very big “big shots” there), but mostly lots of fun. And educational!

Not to take away anything from the HTIA, but the follow-up show about a week after the Jerusalem conference – the Israel Life Sciences Industry BioMed show – is in a class unto itself. Said to be the largest medical industry trade and technology show outside the United States, BioMed in Tel Aviv attracted thousands of visitors (some 7,000, according to show organizers), with sessions discussing the latest advances in medical devices, pharmaceuticals,  biotechnology, government approval issues, patent issues, ethical issues, and much more.  According to ILSI, first 2010 quarter exports of the Israeli life sciences industry in 2010 totaled $ 1.7 billion, an increase of about 14% over Q1 2009.

Here, too, top players from Israel – and around the world – were in attendance, sponsoring events and giving presentations. At least four U.S. cities and states and half a dozen European governments were also at the event, looking to make deals with Israeli partners or venture capitalists, who were also on the scene. Israeli universities and venture capital accelerators, where many of tomorrow’s innovations are being created right now, were also well represented.  As far as companies making presentations or sponsoring booths – name a big pharma or medical device player, and they were probably there.

It’s heartwarming to see industries celebrating themselves, but I’m a bit coldhearted – I tend to shy away from the glamor and glitz. When I go to these shows, I don’t seek out the “fat cats,” who can afford fully-staffed PR agencies and inundate you with press releases; I’m interested in the sleek, skinny “alley cats” – the outsiders looking in, the ones who struggle for a piece of the pie, trying to sell themselves to an angel. Companies with a great idea, but without the connections – the ones who, with a little luck, could become the big players at next year’s conferences. That’s the kind of story you buy a newspaper for!

Those are the kinds of companies I sought out at both conferences, and fortunately for me, the organizers made it easy, with the newest startups occupying areas on the fringes of the shows. Naturally, the snacks weren’t as good in these outlying areas, but that’s to be expected, I suppose. But what they lacked in materialism – lacking the “good” chocolate croissants, as well as major funding – they made up for in spunk, gumption and moxie, presenting the ideas and products that may become tomorrow’s must-have technology.

Ideas like these: a product that takes even lo-res cellphone camera pictures and turns them into high-resolution, high-definition beauties (HTIA); a cellphone app that lets you get personalized coupons and offers, and lets you connect with other users, when you walk into a store or a mall (HTIA);  a matchmaker service that lets startups easily find angels and VC’s interested in investing with them (HTIA); a product that will keep track of every piece of equipment in a huge hospital complex, so that a stretcher, bed, or defibrillator can always be found when it’s needed (BioMed); a device to treat wounds using ultrasound (BioMed); and a revolutionary and inexpensive device that promises to put laser dental technology in the hands of every dentists – with the device 15 times more accurate than those already on the market (BioMed). It’s appropriate these two conferences are in the Spring, the season of hope; considering the innovations presented by these and many other companies at the shows, Israeli hi-tech and life sciences has a lot to be hopeful about!

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Sometimes you’ve got such a good product or service, you can sell it to anyone, anywhere. Like the guy who could sell coals to Newcastle. Or ice to the Eskimos. Or fish to people in Akko (that one’s in the Talmud). Those must have been some tasty fish!

Or, in our case, someone who can sell to cellphone service providers a system that allows – get this – customers to offload their expensive cellphone call to their much cheaper voice over-IP systems! It’s either a fantastic product, or Ehud Sharar, CEO of Focus Telecom, is one fantastic salesman.

Actually, it’s a combination (although Sharar is too modest to take too much credit). “We sell IP services to a number of cellphone and landline phone companies, including Bezeq, Cellcom, and others,” says Sharar. “Of course, if communications companies had their way, everyone in the world would use their product alone, but in today’s world companies and individuals usually have a combination of services to meet their communications needs. There’s an added value for any communications company to act not only as a provider, but an integrator, since they can continue to increase and grow their relationship with customers.”

That dictum applies to any number of services in our increasingly integrated world, but Sharar’s company is the first to bring that integration to the cellphone and VoIP worlds. Focus Telecom’s Mobi2Save application lets users offload their contacts to their VoIP phone automatically, and integrates it into their VoIP application, enabling them to save up to 70% on their phone bill, since they can make calls using their cheaper VoIP service.

Of course, nobody’s forcing anyone to make expensive cellphone calls instead of cheaper VoIP calls; all you have to do is open your VoIP interface and start dialing. But, says Sharar, few bother. “Nowadays, most people keep their contacts in their cellphones, and they’ve gotten used to the idea of making calls directly from their cellphones by clicking on a name or pressing a button. They would rather spend more money for the expensive cellphone call even when they’re at home or in their office next to their computer or landline phone, instead of looking up the number in their contacts directory and typing that number into their VoIP phone or punching it out on their landline phone. It’s just easier that way,” he says.

And while, for many readers, the term “lazy” comes to mind (“foolish,” “wasteful,” and other choice adjectives may pop up as well), I can relate; life is so busy today, many people really can’t spare (or at least think they can’t spare) the ten seconds needed to search for the contact and dial the number manually. And so was born Mobi2Save – a seemingly simple application that automatically syncs between your cellphone and your computer, ensuring that you have one-touch access to all your contacts from your VoIP dialer. The syncing is done automatically via a central server, so there’s absolutely no extra work involved.

It sounds like something someone would have thought of long ago, but, Sharar says, as far as he knows, Mobi2Save is the only completely automated cellphone-VoIP syncing system around. To make things even easier, especially for corporate customers, who are moving in droves these days to VoIP, Sharar suggests outfitting the organization with SNOM VoIP phones (Focus Telecom is the authorized Israel representative for the German makers of the phones). “It’s an ideal combination,” says Sharar, because even the configuration is done by the Focus Telecom back office, as the phones are already programmed to sync with the Mobi2Save servers; all users have to do is install the syncing app on their cellphones. And the cost of the syncing is included in the service provided by Focus Telecom for SNOM system customers (Sharar says the syncing service will be available to anyone in the coming months, and will cost between NIS 5-10 in Israel and its equivalent overseas). Bottom line: With absolutely no extra work on your part, you can find yourself paying ten agurot for a phone call that would have cost you 40 agurot on your cellphone!

While Mobi2Save is new (it was invented in Israel by Assaf Dahari; Focus Telecom has worldwide licensing rights), the Caesaria-based company itself has been around since 1995, and has been best known for providing atomic clocks for synchronization in telecoms, where 100% synchronization is essential for ensuring the integrity of data moving along data and voice networks. So, adding synchronization for the end-user is right up the company’s alley.

And as mentioned, Bezeq, along with Israel’s cellphone service providers, are working with Focus Telecom, integrating its IP phone systems with other communications solutions – and that integration will continue with the Mobi2Save product as well. Even though a company like Orange, for example (another Focus Telecom customer) gets less money per call if a customer uses its VoIP service as opposed to its cellphone service, they’re at least getting something out of the deal, says Sharar; and the fact that the user is still an Orange customer, and that the company doesn’t have to go out and recruit him/her from another service provider, is a big boon for the company right there.

And cellphone and landline providers do like the product, says Sharar. “We got a lot of positive attention at the recent CeBIT show in Hanover, and we expect to be working with many partners on this. It gives a big added-value to IP telephony, making it more attractive and convenient,” he adds. With Mobi2Save, even the very busy (not to mention the lazy) can start saving money on their phone calls!

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Plenty, says Irit Tsach, head of Marketing & Business Development at Israel’s Ecobuilding, the first full-service ecologically-conscious home and office maintenance service in Israel. While many startups seize on an advanced, high-technology principle to develop their product or service, Ecobuilding believes in turning the clock back – using principles of nature in order to keep modern homes, apartment buildings, offices, and factories clean!

If eco-consciousness and keeping multi-story buildings clean and healthful seems like an odd pairing, think again; Tsach says that environmentalism and industrial-strength cleaning go hand in hand. “For example,” she says, “one of the tasks we deal with is cleaning out the filters of air conditioning units in large office buildings, a task most maintenance companies would use a commercial chemical preparations for. But we don’t; instead, we use a special combination of enzymes that ‘eats’ the bacteria in the vents, filters and units. Thus, we can keep the air in offices clean without leaving behind chemical residue for workers to breathe – making everyone healthier in the short and long run,” Tsach says.

In fact, all of the maintenance services Ecobuilding offices are similarly “green,” and Tsach says that the results are as good, if not better, than they are with “traditional” chemical-based cleaning systems. While some people may be skeptical – even citing personal experience that they couldn’t, for example, keep the roaches away without bug spray – Tsach says that there are many natural alternatives to such preparations. Having researched and experimented the topic in depth, the Ecobuilding folks (Tsach and company CEO Moti Davidson) present clients with different strategies – and cite statistics and evidence that show that the “green way” is the better way. “Keeping walls, floors, furniture, and other features of homes and offices is often just a matter of using the right tools – brushes, cleaning materials, etc.,” says Tsach, adding that the firm doesn’t just throw water at a problem. “We try to save water wherever possible,” she says. “We work with the client, education them on the most effective and environmentally safe way they can keep their place clean,” Tsach says.

As part of its educational efforts, Ecobuilding hosts on its website a shopping portal, where customers can order for home use some of the same environmentally-safe products Ecobuilding staff uses in its maintenance activities. The portal features products, services, technologies, even artwork and toys – all using “green” ingredients and technology (among the products is a kids’ toy kitchen made out of 100% recycled materials). Right now the portal has about 150 advertisers – all of whom are listed for free, as a service to Israelis who want to live a more eco-friendly life.

“We check out all the advertisers as well as possible to ensure that they really are environmentally-conscious,” Tsach says. “And we don’t take money from the advertisers because we want to make sure we focus on the good these products and companies can do, not how much they pay us.” Tsach says that while there are other eco-portals, none of them offer free display ads to advertisers. “Sites might give a free one or two line listing, but if a business wants to get a bigger ad, they have to pay,” Tsach says. “The criteria is not how much good the product can do, but how much they pay. We avoid that with our system,” she says.

And most of the products on the Ecobuilding portal – as well as the products the company uses in its maintenance work – are actually made in Israel! “There are several Israeli companies dedicated to manufacturing environmentally-friendly cleaning products, and we work with those products and feature them in the shopping portal,” Tsach says. “We try to promote Israeli products wherever possible, and only if a product is not available in Israel will we import one from abroad.” The fact that the vast majority of products used by the company are actually made in Israel is an indication of how many Israelis really do value the environment, she says.

As is the heavy demand for Ecobuilding’s maintenance services; the company cannot keep up with demand, and has been forced to turn down accounts, especially out of the Tel Aviv-Sharon area, “for practical reasons,” says Tsach. “We would very much like to expand to other areas, and eventually we will. There’s no reason that Israel can’t be clean, while keeping the environment safe.”

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Of course, that’s not to say there haven’t been any changes; nowadays you can load up your messages with doodads, gewgaws, and chupchiks, like little smiley faces, laughing yuksters, and beating hearts (for the romantically inclined). There are applications that let you choose stationery for your message. And, of course, there’s the e-mail storage revolution engineered by Google, whose Gmail service gives you gigs and gigs of storage space, allowing you to search your message history in an instant, and obviating the need to ever click on the delete button.

But those are just appurtenances – extras that just gussy up what is essentially a last-century technology. Which is probably why the communications connoisseurs have move on to other communication methods, which can boast the cool apps that lets you digitally connect the pieces of your life – like Twitter does, by streaming your consciousness to the whole world in 140 characters (are any more really necessary?), complete with links to the web pages you think the hundreds or thousands of your followers ought to read. That’s a lot better than email, which shoots off a single message to a single person – and nothing else.

But don’t count email out just yet; the folks at Israeli startup WiseStamp have found a way to propel email into the modern communication world – by building an application that lets you add a signature to your online email!

Of course, signatures have been a staple of email messages for a long time. But WiseStamp’s signatures are different, says Tzvika (Josh) Avnery, CEO and CMO of WiseStamp. “Our application brings the web into the inbox,” says Avnery. “You can share streaming information directly with people you communicate with, thereby promoting your ideas, your blogs, or your online presence.” That’s because the signatures you create with  WiseStamp allow you to stream your blog posts, Twitter or Facebook messages, music, video, or just about any other online activity you’re involved with, directly in your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and other web mail accounts. For the first time, says Avnery, “you can use email to direct the people you communicate with to the elements of your online presence, thus promoting your blog, webpage, etc.”

WiseStamp is free and easy to install; just surf to http://www.wisestamp.com/ and install it as a Firefox or Thunderbird add-on (other browsers, including Chrome, will be supported in the near future, and the company is working on a version for email clients, like Outlook Express). Once installed, you’ll be able to open the WiseStamp preferences in the Firefox add-on menu selection; here you can add your basic information, like contact numbers, website links, etc. But the interesting part of WiseStamp is those three tabs in the middle – Social, IM, and RSS – where you can feed your social network messages (Twitter, Facebook), instant messaging posts (AIM, ICQ) or freeform RSS (like Feedburner blog feed titles and links) as part of your signature.

With nearly 50 services supported, anyone who uses the web nowadays has the opportunity to expand their online presence through an until now inert channel, says Avnery. “We get many messages from users who tell us that WiseStamp has enhanced their communications abilities significantly by introducing a whole new audience to their blog, their eBay product page, or cause.” For example, Orly Itzchaki, WiseStamp’s Product VP,  recently posted links to a “Free Gilad Shalit” page in her signature, and many users responded, saying that they, too, were inspired to include similar links in their signatures, Avnery says (rounding out the four partners who run WiseStamp along with Avenery and Yitzchaki are Sasha Gimelsthein, VP of Technology, and Tom Piamenta, VP of Business Development).

And not only do you get an html signature with streaming capabilities when you install WiseStamp, says Avnery; you get two! “We provide users with the ability to author a business and personal signature, since what works for personal messages may not work for business-oriented messages, and vice versa,” he says. And while two identities would seem like more than enough, the company is preparing to expand that feature, as well as simplify the whole system. “I want this to be as easy for my mother as it is for a seasoned blogger,” says Avnery. “In the future, we plan to offer a gallery with streams of data – news articles, blog posts, etc. – based on user interests, that users will be able to add to their messages with a couple of clicks.”

WiseStamp is planning these, and other changes, not just because they like developing new stuff, but because the users are interested in them. “We are moving in on 400,000 users now, thanks to the fact that we got recommended as a Firefox add-on,” Avnery says, as the company, which was self funded until now, is actively seeking to add investors. “We appreciate our users and we realize they are the reason we’re here at all. So, we make it our business to pay attention to their needs.”

Which could be one reason why WiseStamp just recently won a “Webby,” the Mashable Open Web Award, where it was voted Best Social Media Gadget of 2009, winning over several other venerable applications and services. But they won not for lack of trying to lose, says Avnery. “We of course used our product to promote ourselves in email, urging people we sent messages to to vote for us for the Webby Award. But to be fair, we also told our competitors in the contest that we would help them set up a signature urging people to vote for them. For some reason, they didn’t take us up on our offer,” says Avnery, “which I guess worked out for us!”

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Huh? Why in the world would anyone want to do that?

Disconnecting dots in a picture is surely not something we’d bother wasting time on (unless a reward was being offered!). But being able to successfully disconnect computer “transactions” – actions that takes place in on a hard drive, over a network, or across the internet – is sometimes an activity upon which thousands of people depend for a resolution of a thorny computer problem, or on which the fate of millions of dollars sometimes rests. And that process, as it happens, has a lot in common with dot-disconnecting!

The thing is, disconnecting those transactions is a lot like trying to figure out which dot connects to its mate, and in which order. It turns out that when you have thousands of people using a web site at the same time, it’s almost impossible to know which click on a website by what user is associated with a specific entry in a database, for example. And while you wouldn’t necessarily care which piece of data came from what click, having the ability to figure it out might come in handy – for example, in a situation where a single user was using an automated bot program to push through hundreds of requests for services at the same time, choking the system and essentially running a denial of service attack!

That’s exactly what a customer discovered using business transaction management system SharePath by Correlsense, says Lanir Shacham, CTO of the Israeli startup.  Without SharePath, that customer – a large online banking site – would not have been able to trace the cause of a several times a day website overload that was making life difficult for all of the site’s other customers – to the extent that customers were threatening to leave. “We installed SharePath in a matter of hours, and by the next day we had the culprit – a trader in New York who was running a bot in order to take advantages of favorable market conditions for his trades,” Shacham says. “When we figure out who he was and what was going on, we confronted him – and of course blocked his account.”

While it almost sounds impossible, says Shacham, there would have been almost no foolproof way of discovering what had happened so quickly before January of this year, when Correlsense started deploying SharePath. “There was really no system for analyzing which transaction was connected to what result, unless there is specific identifying information, like a password. But for run of the mill transaction requests – such as adding information to a database, accessing an application server, or one of the other many and varied actions that result from the click of a mouse or the press of a key, the existing tools, like network sniffers, were inadequate. SharePath is the only system that can zone in on a transaction and decipher it, showing each user action and its consequences, throughout the computer, server, or database,” says Shacham.

SharePath is so unique, says Shacham, that Correlsense has three patents on the technology. “It took us several years to build SharePath – we had to dig deep into the guts of computers and networks, both online and offline, in order to figure out a way to make these connections,” says Shacham. “And as a result, we are able to analyze 100% of the traffic in a computer or network, or on a website, and determine exactly what is causing certain behaviors.”

It’s not necessarily the customer’s fault, either – a glitch in the system could be the fault of a bug in a piece of middleware that no one noticed (SharePath figured that one out), or due to a faulty deployment as a production system of what was supposed to still be in testing (ditto). “You can have 10,000 incoming calls and 40,000 outgoing ones, and each one looks the same,” says Shacham. “We go inside the server or network, analyzing the low level action calls in  the dark places no one has gone before, and figure out where the dots connect,” he adds.

Amazingly, such sophisticated tools to figure out how things interplay in a computer environment just weren’t there before SharePath – but they are now, and in just the ten months the product has been on the market, Correlsense can count on its customer list the largest bank in Israel, one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S., a slew of online banks, and, soon, says Shacham, it will count among its customers one of the largest web transaction companies in the world.

Shacham, a former IBM executive, teamed up in 2005 with his partner Correlsense CEO Oren Elias, to develop what would eventually become SharePath after they both found themselves frustrated by unexplained bugs and issues that they just couldn’t get to the bottom of.  Says Shacham, “It took us time to even figure out how to approach this, but now that SharePath is here, we hope to be able to help companies of all kinds overcome their unexplained glitches.”

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as appeared in the Jerusalem Post, 4.19.09

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Makes you want to run home and hide under a blanket, doesn’t it? I want my mommy!

Unfortunately, mommy isn’t going to be much help in this economy, if you’re a startup seeking funding. You may have a fantastic idea, an excellent product, and a valid business plan – but investors are in no mood for “wow” factors today. The most important question during normal times has become the only question now – what’s the bottom line? If you can answer that question you have a fighting chance of getting some VC or angel money.

To that end, you need a “daddy” to guide you to hi-tech investment success – or rather, a drill sergeant, such as one would have at army boot camp, to toughen you up and ready you for the battle. And while his pleasant demeanor is nothing like an army officer’s, Ed Frank’s Bootcamp Ventures toughens up hi-tech CEOs and marketing people, preparing them for the all important presentation, where they either impress the money people and get the funds they need to develop their dream – or go home with a great idea, but no money.

“Bootcamp Ventures is about helping companies tell their stories in the most effective way possible,” says Frank, who’s company is about two years old. “Most of the companies we work with are very bright and have great ideas. But they don’t necessarily know how to present themselves in a manner that investors will be able to relate to. We teach them how to clearly present themselves, so that investors can understand what their bottom line is.” So what’s the measure of success? How does Frank know a company is “ready for prime time?” They’re ready if they can handle the “five minute rule,” he says. “The pitch has to be clear enough for investors to ‘get it’ within five minutes. If they don’t, they’re not going to bite,” he says.

Like in school – or the army – companies get tested on their presentation prowess. After weeks, or months, of sessions where they learn the art of presentation, answering questions, dealing with objections, and perfecting the other tools necessary to successfully give a real-life presentation in front of investors, company CEOs do just that, making their pitches in front of more than a dozen angels and VC people, including several from large funds. Call it “the finals” – if a company does well in this forum, chances are they’ll find the funding they need, even though available money is scarce.

And indeed, sessions where the companies do a for-real presentation can be grueling, with a team of judges commenting on the idea, how it was presented, and what, if anything, the presenter needed to do to improve his or her chances of getting money. At a session I attended recently six companies gave a presentation of about eight minutes each, including time for questions by potential investors. The session is clearly grueling for the presenters, with several nervously sweating as audience members critique their ideas and method of presentation. Nothing is off limits, with comments from listeners on any and every aspect of the pitch – content, manner, and mony makng potential. Needless to say, there are several disappointed faces among the presenters.

That’s not all bad, says Frank; it gives the companies an opportunity to continue to work to improve their approach. “In today’s economy, they really have no choice. If they can’t make an effective case for what they’re doing, their chances of getting funding are slim, if any.”

The fact that such a service was necessary became clear to him was he was working in a unit of IDT that helped startups secure financing, he says. “After many years in manufacturing and sales, I got involved in helping raise capital, and I was struck by how many companies ’struck out’ among investors because they didn’t know how to present effectively. We would go to the trouble of setting up meetings with major capital people and end up being embarrassed, because our client did such a poor job.” Frank eventually hooked up with Loewy, who had worked with companies on presentations as well, and the idea for Bootcamp Ventures was born.

And it proved popular not just with startups, but with investors as well. “At first, these presentation sessions were practice only, with our staff and some outside commentators evaluating our clients’ performance,” he said. But investors got wind of what Frank and Loewy were doing, and seeking out good, qualified leads for investments, they asked to join in as well. “As it’s turned out, we’re offering service not just to the startups, but to the investors as well, who are looking to us to qualify the companies that present and for us to ensure that they don’t waste their time.”

Not every startup makes the cut for a presentation session in front of investors, Frank says. This round, several dozen companies asked to join, but only six were chosen. “We have several criteria for deciding who gets to present,” he says. “Basically, we match the startup’s projects and financial needs with the members of the audience who will be attending the session.” In the current atmosphere, he says, VC’s are looking for companies that can get out and start selling a product or service right away, and who need smaller amounts of money than in the past. In fact, according to the spec sheet on the presenters, the vast majority were looking to raise sums of less than $1 million – with one company asking for only $400,000, a mere pittance “back then,” but a respectable startup sum nowadays.

In it’s relatively short history, Bootcamp Ventures has had some major successes, with at least one company going on to “internet stardom.” Frank says that there are several deals current and former clients are working on, despite the near standstill in investment. And the company’s fame has spread so far and wide, startups in Turkey, of all places, are using Bootcamp Venture’s services too. But Israel is home, and there is plenty of room for growth. And when the investment mood swings – as it most definitely will – Frank and Loewy will be there, to help Israeli companies get their shot at “the big time.”

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