With $450K behind it in funding, Israeli-based Qmerce is helping business large and small add social games to their communities, particularly on Facebook.

The premise behind Qmerce’s value proposition isn’t new. That is, branded social games aimed at driving user engagement via rewards, achievements and consequently, loyalty.

With over 40 customers to date, including Crocs and Pizza Hut (the Israeli franchises), and 300,000 games played, it looks like this upstart might be going somewhere.

Qmerce is targeting online media, marketing and community managers, to use their platform to create customized/branded games for their audiences. Usually a high-cost endeavor, with Qmerce social games can be created minutes.

Pizza Hut, for example, used Qmerce to create a campaign that featured a time-race game tilted ‘Keep It Hot.’ The in-game ‘Car’ was changed to a pizza delivery motorcycle, with the Pizza Hut logo on the delivery box. In-game achievements had real-life counterparts in the form of free pizza and coupons.

I was a bit skeptical that wizard-built games can generate compelling engagement, but Qmerce CEO, Moti Cohen, claims that average user play is 50-minutes. I’ve already gone ahead and filed this under: ‘Eat hat.’

Creating social games on Qmerce is free for the time being. The company does however plan on providing a premium service with a higher degree of customization than available directly through the current interface.

For those of you that want to meet the Qmerce team, they will be taking part in the Israeli Pavilion at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC.

This post is co-written with Daniel Cunha, my partner at Initial Capital.

In Part I, we outlined some of the challenges facing the Brazilian startup community as it sets-out to reap the massive opportunity the local market has to offer. In Part II below, we’re going to suggest a course of action, and how it could benefit through the experience of the Israeli startup industry.

Step One: The nascent Brazilian startup community must embrace the fact that it’s going to take approximately 10 years and a lot of work and coordination to become competitive with the likes of Silicon Valley & Israel (and there aren’t any guarantees).

There are no shortcuts. Accelerated 1/3/6-month programs are a great start, but they can’t produce an entire workforce, or accelerate the accumulation of plain old experience.

Let’s look at Israel for a moment… Traditionally, Israel’s forte has been enterprise technologies. The fact that it has been able to push out consumer startups in recent years is not taken for granted. It took thirty years to get to this point. Israelis know ‘consumer Internet’ doesn’t come naturally to them and that they are competing with the best in the business, namely, Americans. Getting to where it is didn’t come easy, and staying there will remain a continuous challenge.

For Brazilians to get to this point will take time, experience, coordination and a general improvement of the business environment.

It will also take resilience. Consider that the Brazilian start-up scene back in 1999 / 2000 almost vanished after the tech-bubble burst, and was resurrected only in the past 18-24 months.

The stakeholders will have to grow tougher skin and persevere through both good and bad times if a true Internet industry is to be formed.

The good news is that the Brazilian startup ecosystem seems ready to buckle-up for a lot of hard work ahead – there is potential, talent, capital and entrepreneurial passion already in play. And frankly, 10 years go by pretty quickly in the startup world.

Step Two: If a supporting ecosystem is accepted as pivotal, physical proximity is a prerequisite to achieve it. If Brazil wants to establish a true startup industry, a critical mass of ecosystem players will have to converge on a single physical location – a Brazilian startup epicenter if you will.

While we were impressed with the quality of entrepreneurs and startups in all three cities we visited, unquestionably, it was in Belo Horizonte that we sensed the highest level of community. To share an anecdote, Belo Horizonte was the only city where entrepreneurs that came in and out of our Office Hours meetings knew each other – a subtle, but telling sign.

Again, let’s take Israel as an example… The gross majority of startups are located in two cities that are 10-minutes apart, Tel-Aviv and Hertzeliya. True, Haifa, 90km to the north also has some startups. It’s also home to the Technion (Israeli’s MIT), as well as Google’s, Yahoo’s & Apple’s R&D centers, but the honest truth is, the odds of a consequential Internet startup coming out of Haifa are small.

Consider that most entrepreneurs and investors I know are in San Francisco more often than they are in Haifa.

The same is true for the US – while Boston has its place on the Internet entrepreneurial map, it’s in Silicon Valley that gravity’s pull is felt strongest.

Is this fair to other cities? Not at all, and yet, it’s an absolute must. And as nature takes its course, secondary centers will rise, increasing competition and improving the Brazil’s Internet industry across the board. Call it ‘Geographic Darwinism’, but it’s a harsh reality that the Brazilian startup community must internalize as well.

Step Three: The establishment of an ‘umbilical connection’ between the Israeli and Brazilian startup communities.

If there is one key insight we learned, it’s that entrepreneurs become such *in-spite* of Brazil. Similar to their Israeli counterparts, Brazilian entrepreneurs are battling against all odds. It’s this similarity that has driven us to ask ourselves what role can Israel play in helping the Brazilian startup community grow. And how can we at Initial Capital put our skills and connections to use for the benefit of Brazilian entrepreneurs.

Here  are the key areas we see as a basis for this so called ‘umbilical connection’:

• Traffic: Israelis are mavericks at all forms of web-traffic acquisition and monetization, an expertise we noticed a current Brazilian deficiency in. A foundation of our ‘umbilical connection’ strategy, we are already mapping Israeli-based media players that are running ad traffic in Brazil.
• Funding: We’re going to ring-in our co-investor network on our deals. These will include private and institutional investors from Israel, Silicon Valley and Europe.
• Product & Technology: Logistically tricky, but we’re confident that an effective knowledge transfer can occur between Israeli & Brazilian entrepreneurs in areas such as UX and development methodologies. We see this being manifested via webinars and face-to-face events.
• Legal & Accounting: No real Israeli connection here, but we’re going to work with leading Brazilian commercial law and accounting firms to offer entrepreneurs ‘startup specials’ in the form of discounted fees, and free pre-funding consulting.

Ultimately, Brazilian entrepreneurs will have to prove their worth by way of execution. That means forming strategies that fit the local market, and then implementing with excellence, efficiency, foresight, and a strong orientation to cash-flow.

For us at Initial Capital, this means a commitment to working closely with our portfolio and the local startup community et large, to build-up a winning entrepreneurial culture to go along with the lucrative potential Brazil has to offer.

Mãos a obras, e aquele abraço!

Israeli-based Viewbix is announcing a Round A of $2M led by Canaan Partners, with participation by Longfellow Venture Partners.

Viewbix makes it really easy and quick to create interactive videos that are augmented by various features such as eBay listings, Skype buttons, and Twitter feeds.

From our previous review of Viewbix, here’s a recap of how it works:

Step one is to select an existing video. ViewBix currently supports YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook video.

Step two is to customize the player in terms of colors, size, call to action, etc.

Step three is really where the promise of ViewBix resides: interactive features that can be easily added to videos, including music, additional videos, photos from services such as Facebook, Flickr & Picasa, and more. The ones I found most compelling for small businesses are the ability to include a Twitter feed, eBay auctions, coupons, and Skype integration.

Once the player is created, it can be embedded and shared anywhere, including inline on Facebook. It will even display in HTML5 on mobile devices (iOS and Android).

Checkout a demo they created for TechCrunch Disrupt, here.

The premium version of Viewbix, which includes additional customization options and apps, is priced at $19.95/mo. The first 250 TechCrunch readers who want to try the premium version for free should go, here.

Also, for those of you planning to attend Disrupt in NYC, Viewbix will be demo’ing in the Israeli Pavilion.

This post is co-written with Daniel Cunha, my partner at Initial Capital.

Initial Capital was launched in 2011 as an investment firm targeting early stage startups in Israel and Brazil. The unlikely investment focus is the result of three friends — two Israeli and one Brazilian — turned professional investors.

Our Israeli investment network was rather mature when we launched, so we were able to hit the ground running and in the eleven months since our launch, Initial has invested in six Israeli-based startups. In Brazil, however, we spent our first months developing a similar network from scratch. Slowly but surely learning and embracing the state of, and the challenges facing, the Brazilian startup industry.

A few months ago we embarked on a week long, 50-meeting tour across São Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro. Here are our insights:

Local Matters: If you’re an investor and don’t have a local on the ground in Brazil, don’t bother considering any professional investment activities in the country.

Brazilians are very much a face-to-face culture. Speaking the language and being within a 1-1.5hr flight away, are not only assets, they’re absolute musts. In Initial Capital’s case, the first thing we did was set-up the local HQ in São Paulo.

Entrepreneurs: The most important piece of the puzzle—high quality entrepreneurs—is already in place.

Out of a sample-set of 50 startup teams we met, only two spoke broken English (we don’t perceive translation to be an issue btw). Ability to effectively communicate value propositions was quite high as well (especially at Rio de Janeiro based accelerator 21212).

We found Brazilian entrepreneurs to have a tight grasp of contemporary Internet in terms of real-time, geo, and eCommerce. We were also fortunate to come across hustler-DNA. All very reassuring.

Experience: While the entrepreneur potential is high, we’d be negligent not to address a deficiency in experience.

Consider that most entrepreneurs we met never worked at a startup other than their own. Most do not know what ‘comes next’. We felt this was particularly poignant when it came to paid media campaigns and user acquisition strategies.

Also, Brazil is not a ‘fail fast & iterate’ culture. Failing is both frowned upon, and painful bureaucratically – for instance, closing a company in Brazil can be a Kafka-esque experience for those who try.

Business Strategies: Given the still limited supply of venture capital, young entrepreneurs tend to avoid capital-intensive businesses such as eCommerce. Considering its large and fast growing middle-class, this means there are still great gaps (read: opportunities) in areas where Brazil has a huge potential for growth in.

The ‘me too’ mentality was another recurring theme. While we have no qualms with this type of approach, and indeed support it as a way to reduce learning curves in a country like Brazil, entrepreneurs must be diligent in recognizing trends that can be consistent in the long run, and avoid those that are already showing signs of doubt in other markets.

That said, we feel that Brazil beckons best-of-breed local alternatives to existing plays in other geographies.

Ecosystem: If we had to identify one major critical issue it would be the thin supporting ecosystem currently available for Brazilian startups.

There’s a very short supply of entrepreneurs that have ‘done this before,’ commercial lawyers that have negotiated startup investment deals and advised on tax structures, and of course, a pool of private and institutional investors to do business with.

Charting startup waters is difficult enough, doing it alone is orders of magnitude more difficult.

Taxation & Bureaucracy: Whether you are an investor, and especially if you are an entrepreneur, this is no doubt a major downside and one of the more challenging aspects of doing business in Brazil.

The Brazilian tax system is heavy, hugely cumbersome, and at times very unclear, resulting in unknown liabilities.

Labor costs are very high both on hiring and firing, and the legislation is inflexible and hardly supportive of entrepreneurship.

Take for example a recent decision by a major multinational company to block email distribution to its workforce in non-working hours and on vacations, after having lost a an ‘overtime’ labor suit for this reason.

Imagine the potential liabilities, and restrictions to productivity, of such a legal decision(!)

Brazil is laden with these ‘mines’ and unfortunately considerable time has to be spent dealing with bureaucracy rather than building great businesses.

This ends Part I, and to sum-up: Brazil’s potential is massive. At the same time, the current challenges and shortcomings must be embraced and tackled one-by-one, both on the individual level of each start-up, and as a community as a whole.

In Part II we’ll suggest a possible course of action for the Brazilian startup community, and how an umbilical cord with the Israeli startup community can be established for mutual benefit.

With a $4M investment, McCann Worldgroup has bought a 15% stake in Israeli incubator ‘thetime‘.

This move isn’t a particularly surprising considering ‘thetime’ was founded by Ilan Shiloah, who for the past 10 years has been chairman of McCann Erickson Israel. ‘thetime’ was also co-founded by angel investor, Nir Tarlovsky. Uri Weinheber, previously of Lab One, acts as the incubator’s CEO.

A Chief Scientist licensed incubator, the stated objective of the ‘thetime’ is new media investments (although this seems not to be a hard constraint). The current portfolio consists of 30 startups, including Tawkon & SohoOS.

This is of course great news for the Israeli startup ecosystem, which over the past couple of years has seen a substantial increase in early-stage investment outfits and accelerators.

Slowly but surely, Microsoft Israel is making itself more and more relevant for the local startup community. In fact, we recently covered its latest major push, the Windows Azure Accelerator.

Then there’s the annual ThinkNext conference which has become one of the local tech community’s staple events. The more interesting portion of the event (in my opinion at least) is the demo area, where startups chosen by the the local Microsofties showcase their goods. So unless you happen to be at the event in the port of Tel-Aviv this afternoon, here’s what you’re missing out:

Everything.me (formerly TechCrunch Disrupt finalist ‘DoAt’) is a search product that empowers users by putting everything they need at their fingertips. It’s simplicity of search with the mobility of apps. Just say what you need and get your results immediately from fully mobile ‘Instant Apps’.

PointGrab provides hand-gesture recognition software for Windows 8, where users can control a PC, applications and popular games from a distance.

TouchApps makes casual and social mobile games that have reached millions of downloads worldwide.

iOnRoad develops apps that improve driving in real-time using state-of-the-art machine vision algorithms and augmented reality.

Photoccino understands photos and their context. Using computer vision and image processing technologies Photoccino classifies, groups, and selects the best photos, then turns them into photo-based products.

Umoove’s technology allows the control of user interfaces of mobile devices using natural head & eye movements, in real-time and with no additional hardware.

Webydo let’s users create websites by converting any kind of graphical design into a functioning website without any programming knowledge whatsoever.

VMP provides intelligent, personalized, interactive and humanized self-service kiosks retailers and service providers.

Fooducate helps people make healthy food choices. Using Fooducate’s app, shoppers can scan supermarket product barcodes and see their “nutrition score”. The app also suggests healthier alternatives to low scoring products.

Kinvestix is a new fitness platform based on the concept of adding adjustable and linear resistance to the user’s gaming movements.

Loudlee is a social music network that gives you easy and unlimited access to music, and helps you discover music with friends.

Play My Tone is creator of Tonify, an app that lets users mix their favorite music into multi-layered, personalized hi-fi mixes in less than 30 seconds and share it with his friends.

Overwolf is a software client that adds a rich layer of functionality to games, without touching the game code. For game publishers, Overwolf is a tool to integrate social media within their games,
boost virality and reduce user acquisition costs.

Vodio is a video discovery magazine iPad app that keeps users up-to-date by matching their personal taste and preferences.

Xtendi lets users design their own augmented reality experience for mobile devices, based on natural human behavior and the proximity of a user from an object.

MetalCompass delivers a mobile gaming experience for real world games
using gaming accessories for smartphones.

DVP provides real-time make-up software for mobile video calls on smart-phones, tablets and laptops.

EPOS provides digital input solutions that rely on ultrasound to enable high-resolution and precision positioning in both 2/D and 3/D. The company’s technology is embedded in mobile devices, enabling pen/stylus input.

Not missing an opportunity to make an impression upon hipsters, Mobli is going to squeeze all the juice it can get out of SXSW with a major app revamp, and a party in Austin to boot.

Mobli, which counts Leonardo DiCaprio as one of its investors ($4M funding to date), is dubbing the new version, ‘Mobli 2.0′. Personally I feel they should have gone with ‘The New Mobli’ — zing!

Besides a Pinterest-inspired interface, the new version packs a major upgrade to the camera, along with a set of features to edit, touch-up and enhance photos, all bundled under a new section in the app called, ‘Darkroom’.

Rebuilt from the ground up, the new camera now includes real-time tilt-shift and even real-time video filters. Focus can now be locked and white balance set. This is on top of the 18 brand-new photo filters, superimposed gridlines and a self-timer.

The more significant part of this update is the Darkroom, which users can enter after they take a shot. Photos can be beautified with auto-correction for lighting and skin detail. A ‘Hawkeye’ button is an instant color and contrast enhancement feature, and there are now nine more frames.

One of my favorite things about Mobli is its context and location-based features. In drunken honor of SXSW, Mobli will feature one exclusively available for folks in Austin (see screenshot below).

And if photos don’t express enough words for you, Mobli also built in a new messaging system into the app version 2.0

All-in-all, Mobli 2.0 is like Instagram on crack. Some may hate it, others will get hooked.

Loyalize, a social TV audience platform, has been been acquired by Function(X) for $5M in cash and stock. The company intends to integrate Loyalize into Viggle, a television loyalty product designed for iOS devices.

Loyalize was founded by serial-entrepreneur Shahar Smirin whose current flagship project is GetTaxi, which former TechCrunch Editor Sarah Lacy called ‘Way Beyond Uber‘.

Smirin, along with his GetTaxi co-founder, Roi More, are also the founding duo of Vigoda.ru, a major daily deal site in Russia and the Ukraine with expected revenues for 2012 in the range of $200-250M.

Loyalize’s white-label platform allowed audiences using mobile devices and connected TVs to engage with TV shows, sporting events, and political debates by way of games, polls, discussion and sharing. Viewers were awarded badges and loyalty points, redeemable for real rewards.

The company’s customer roster included Yahoo and Viacom/MTV. Its platform was also utilized in this year’s Superbowl & Grammy Awards.

Smirin believes Loyalize has found a perfect home as in his eyes FunctionX’s strategy is to establish itself as a key social TV player. Worthy to note that FunctionX which has a market cap of nearly $1B was founded by Bob Sillerman, owner of, wait for it—American Idol.

Our industry lauds cutting-edge UX. Look no further than the exceptional work of Path. One either swoons over it, or one is blind. But what if that sends a wrong signal? Don’t get me wrong, I feel very strongly about the importance of UX, but since I’ve played around with NewsFlash, a feature-stripped free news app for iOS (iTunes link), I’ve asked myself whether more often than not users work for the UX, instead of the other way around.

NewsFlash puts the ‘dead simple’ in ‘dead simple’… Swipe-scroll for a category, tap one, and boom, you get a feed of relevant news items. Swipe-scroll past the categories and you get to languages. Tap, and boom, same category, different language.

Included are all the standard news categories, such as Sports, Business, Politics and Tech. And the app has built-in support for these six languages: English, German, Italian, Japanese, French and Hebrew.

News sources change from language-to-language. For English, NewsFlash sources from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times, Reuters, AP and more.

Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the app fetches the news items really quickly. Definitely one of the more responsive apps I’ve ever seen.

Remember the point I made earlier about working for the UX? Well, try NewsFlash, then try Flipboard for iPhone. Sure, they’re different experiences so we’re not talking about an apples-to-apples comparison. That said, it takes user effort (the flipping) to go through news items. Fun at first, but I find it exhaustive to use (speaking only about the iPhone version, the iPad version is a home run).

NewsFlash’s UX is the complete opposite. One could argue it even looks outdated. And yet, it does exactly what it’s supposed to in the easiest way possible, meaning, with neither bells nor whistles.

So if you’re a news junkie and want the UX to work for you instead of the other way around, NewsFlash is certainly worth a visit to the App Store.

A year ago, Mangrove Capital Partners invested $1.75 million in SohoOS and its small-business management service. Today the company is announcing that Morgenthaler Ventures is leading a second round of financing to the tune of $8 million (it’s also the firm’s first investment in an Israeli-based startup). Existing investors Mangrove Capital Partners, Kima Ventures and The Time are all participating in the round as well.

Joining Mangrove’s Michael Jackson on the company’s board will be Morgenthaler Ventures’ Mark Goines, whose previous experience of running TurboTax, GM’ing Inuit’s consumer division, as well as backing the likes of of Mint.com as an angel investor, should come in handy for SohoOS as it begins to double down on user acquisition.

Bringing total investment to date to $10.5 million, SohoOS co-founder & CMO Dr. Orit Mossinson tells me that the new capital will be used to expand the R&D and Product teams, as well as to grow the userbase, particularly in the United States. For your reference, 600,000 users have now signed up for the service, following the launch of SohoOS’ overhauled interface in November 2011.

Coinciding with the new financing round, SohoOS has announced the relocation of the company’s HQ from Israel to an office near San Francisco’s financial district, with senior management (including CEO Ron Daniel) making the move.

Back in May, my6sense raised another $1.1 million to continue pushing its digital intuition technology to market.

Today, the company is releasing a brand new product called ‘Smart Magazine’ which can be best described as a Flipboard for iPhone with added digital intuition that helps brings relevant content to its users ‘automagically’.

Except that the company elected to forgo iOS and launch on Android and Windows Phone instead. Both versions are free and can be downloaded, here. One thing to note is that the Android version is exclusive to all Samsung Galaxy models. In three months, it’ll be free available in the Android Market store.

In terms of usage, setting-up Smart Magazine is easy as pie. All the user has to do is select ‘Streams’ which can range from pre-set categories such as Business and Gossip, to the user’s own Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader feeds. That’s really all there is to it.

My6sense figures out everything else without requiring the user’s implicit feedback. There’s even a digital intuition meter that indicates how well my6sense has you figured out.

What’s quite evident is that my6sense can sure separate the signal from the noise. I have pretty active Twitter & Facebook feeds but was only presented content that I honestly did feel was quite relevant and personalized for me. It won hands-down compared to the stories Twitter offers me in its new ‘Discover’ tab.

Smart Magazine is a major jump forward for my6sense in terms of the overall user experience. The app is simple and intuitive to use. I also found it to be very aesthetically pleasing (see screenshots below).

The big question is whether my6sense can survive as an independent consumer play or whether it needs to license, or even sell the entire IP lock-stock-and-barrel to a company with a massive userbase.

One thing’s for sure, my Flipboard and Twitter experiences would be that much better were they to have some of my6sense’s digital intuition inside. Just saying.

The hottest deal in Israel is turning out to be a company whose name I first heard only a few of months ago. I can’t go to any industry networking event these days without being asked what I know about the company, which has managed to keep a low profile since its founding a couple of years ago.

Why are VCs in hot pursuit for a company they know so little about? First and foremost, because it’s playing in what is already and what will only grow as a lucrative performance marketing playing-field: Facebook.

By all accounts, the company developed an engine that does this really, really well. Second, it bootstrapped itself to $5M in annual revenues for 2011 and is expecting to nearly tripple that in 2012. Finally, it’s about to bet the entire house on a shift to a SaaS solution.

This company is Adotomi.

I recently had a chance to learn more about Adotomi from CEO Joe McCormack, whom I met at the company’s offices, located in a very non-chic area of Tel-Aviv, overlooking a brothel (seriously).

Adotomi’s technology was built upon the premise that in Social, advertisers are creating a demand, as opposed to Search, in which they are fulfilling a demand (users’ search queries). In the case of the latter, a new ad campaign is initiated typically with a large amount of ads which are then funneled down to a much small quantity that are the best performing. The challenge is figuring out the best performing keywords to target against.

In Social though, instead of being built upon keywords, user profiles are built upon the volunteering of demographic data (age, gender, etc.), and explicit sentiment by way of ‘Likes’ or ‘+1′s’. The challenge here is to optimize ad spend on the decypehring of the optimal demographics. The problem though is that if the pool is small and the CTR’s are high, the cost of targeting this group increases dramatically, contrary of course to what advertisers are trying to accomplish.

Adotomi’s approach is the opposite. Instead of auto-bidding on a large amount of ads, they start with a small set of ads they are fairly certain will work. They then let their engine find correlations that expand the target group. In this way, a small number of ads is expanded to thousands.

The key to this is Big Data crunching. Specifically, large data sets of user types and their behavior and engagement with ads.

How did Adotomi come to own these data sets? Well, Adotomi is a Facebook Preferred Developer and were one of the first companies to get access to the social networking company’s Ads API. This means that they’re crunching historical data that very few companies are sitting on top of. Read as ‘competitive advantage’.

“Crunching billions of pieces of data,” in the words of McCormack, allows Adotomi to figure out in real-time how to expand the targeted pool of users with a high likelihood of affinity to the advertised product, at the lowest possible cost.

Granted, a very vague and high-level description of the company’s ‘secret sauce’, however, from what I’ve been able to understand from the company itself and those that have looked deeper into it, Adotomi’s platform emobdies Israeli software engineering prowess.

What is making the local VCs really salivate is Adotomi’s intent to open up the platform. While many media platforms have built enterprise solutions for agencies and large advertisers, Facebook still does not have such a system.

Adotomi thinks it can plug that hole. Evidently, investors seems think so as well and are actively vying for participation in the company’s Series A round.

With no shortage of products and services that target small businesses in a generic way, some verticals really do need dedicated solutions — like personal trainers, for example.

Never having really thought about it myself, I asked a few of my friends to find out what tools their personal trainers use to manage their day-to-day operations. The answers ranged from old-school methods like notebooks and written invoices, to techier methods that peaked at Excel and emails.

Coachya, founded by husband and wife team Avi and Michal Grabinsky, is bringing to market a management suite that bundles a number of key features trainers need, into a single one-stop-shop solution. To be more specific, it seems perfectly suited for personal fitness coaches, or any other kind of coach that provides workout schedules to individual athletes (customers).

What I like most about Coachya is that it doesn’t overload in features or is too fancy a design. It just streamlines the basic activities trainers need to perform when managing athletes.

Features range from registration management (from single customers, to teams), to athlete billing, to training plans, assignment and tracking. Nice touches like prebuilt workout libraries that can be dragged-and-dropped onto athlete schedules are real-time savers.

Trainers can track athletes’ progress by having them log into Coachya as well and plug-in data such as distances covered, speeds, durations, and physical conditions like weight and minimal heart rate.

Team management is also made is via a shared calendar and feed and the ability to designate assistant coaches/trainers. Also, athletes can be connected to multiple coaches and teams. For example, someone training for a triathlon may have both running and cycling coaches.

Coachya is offered in three tiers, ranging from free to $59/mo. Steroids not included. I kid. I kid.

I love finding services that bring value to small businesses. Viewbix falls squarely into that category.

ViewBix comes from the founders of Qoof, who gave agencies and advertisers a way to easily create interactive videos. The need for customization, however, tended to bring a lot of friction to the selling process.

For SMBs, it was pretty much completely out of scope. This was frustrating for Qoof’s founders, who were noticing growing demand in that vertical.

Viewbix was created to dramatically reduce the aforementiond friction that came with customization, allowing videos to be wrapped-up in a variety of features quite effortlessly. Here’s how it works:

Step one is to select an existing video. ViewBix currently supports YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook video. Step two is to customize the player in terms of colors, size, call to action, etc.

Step three is really where the promise of ViewBix resides: interactive features that can be easily added to videos, including music, additional videos, photos from services such as Facebook, Flickr & Picasa, and more. The ones I found most compelling for a small businesses are the ability to include a Twitter feed, eBay auctions, coupons, and Skype integration.

Once the player is created, it can be embedded and shared anywhere, including inline on Facebook. It will even display in HTML5 on mobile devices (iOS and Android).

You can check out ViewBix in action, here and here.

Viewbix tracks every action that occurs in the player, so more savvy users can dig into the data and optimize their players with the best performing apps.

The service is based on a freemium model with a base product that is currently free. In the near future, Viewbix plans to charge a monthly fee, starting at $14.95/mo, for branded players, premium apps and detailed analytics.

SohoOS is on a tear. Users are growing at a rate of 30% month-over-month, just recently shooting past 400,000. And soon, the company will make a hard bet on a brand-new design — a complete revamp — aimed at singeing it into the backbone of the small businesses it serves.

Some background: SohoOS offers small businesses a utility suite of applications, for example, invoicing, CRM, and inventory management. The startup, which I’ve been following since its debut, closed a $1.75 million financing round led by Mangrove back in January.

I recently had another chance to sit down with the company, with the revamp being the core of our conversation. It’s a bold bet that is based on insights from the hundreds of thousands of small and micro businesses the company has on-board.

What the SohoOS found out is that small businesses are used to services (think QuickBooks, FreshBooks, InvoiceMachine etc.) that market a particular value proposition, that being, efficient accounting. The premise is that the heart and soul of a small business is its accounting activities. Except SohoOS found that small businesses don’t see it that way at all, and for two main reasons:

First, actual accountants are still very much in the picture. This means that the services such as the ones noted above aren’t a substitute, they’re more like data collection silos. Second, small businesses don’t see ‘accounting’ as the heart and soul of their businesses management activities. Rather, it’s the ‘contact’ they view as the heart and soul. Don’t mistake this as a subtle difference, it’s a holistic difference, and is the one that SohoOS is betting the entire revamp on.

Eran Manor, lead designer at SohoOS walked me through the new design (see screenshots below) where every action is centered around the concept of the contact in question. As Manor put it, they reverse engineered an iPad app to create the new UX for the web application. Sure enough, everything is 1-2 clicks away. The screenshots below aren’t final, but paint a very clear picture of the ‘contact in the center’ approach being bet upon. The new design will be rolled out to all users in the over the next two months.

One other aspect I’ve always like about SohoOS is that unlike the conventional wisdom, of ‘do one thing and do it well,” the company is focusing on several services that are key to the daily management of a small business. These are: invoicing, billing features, CRM, inventory & project management.

The thinking here is that providing these things to a sufficient depth allows SohoOS to appeal to a larger userbase. With the US, UK, and the EU constituting 54% of the userbase, this is a smart move.

Humanity has poor taste. Correction: The worst. For proof, look no further than the person sitting next to you … That’s right, wait until their phone rings and blasts the latest Shakira mega-hit (Full respect to bf Gerard Piqué. Visca Barça!).

Coupled with humanity’s bad taste, is humanity’s uncountable urge to spend money on said bad taste, and in the case here, booty-shakin’, Colombian-sung god-awful ringtones.

Waka Waka indeed.

Thing is, and here’s a little gem they don’t teach you at business school: where there is bad taste, there is money.

Usually, a bunch of it.

See, the ringtone business has for years been a cash cow for mobile operators and the cellular ecosystem, but as with everything smartphone, ringtones have to smarten up as well.

A new Israeli-based startup called Pops sees new smartened-up tones for Android notifications as a commercial opportunity and is launching a landgrab for users’ lock screens.

Pops, which comes in packages, are installed via an Android app. They basically let users customize their email, SMS, Facebook, and Twitter notifications, as well as their ringtones. Packages include sounds effects and music, as well as visuals such as videos and animations. Check out the video at the bottom of the post to see what they look like.

Pops is featuring only free content right now (yes, I view Pops packages as ‘content’ as opposed to plain old ‘tones’), but for-pay material is sure to be introduced soon enough.

My jabs aside, Pops is actually a nifty app that will surely put a bunch of smiles on lots of people’s faces. Of course, their friends will chuckle the first couple of times, then move swiftly to the ‘If I hear Waka Waka one more god-damn time, I’m going to lodge this ashtray in your left eye socket!’ stage. Friendship is priceless.

What can I say, I just dig Kutiman. I first covered the work of the Israeli-born artist back in 2009 with the release of ‘Thru You,’ a seven-track music project created by splicing and dicing YouTube clips.

It was back in March when I covered the release of a new, jazzier sounding tune of his called, ‘My Favorite Color‘.

Well, he’s back with another one of those block rockin’ beats… This time Kutiman unleashes his splice-and-dice style upon democracy. Enjoy:

In my previous post about Mobli, I claimed it would be the break-out photo sharing app of the year. I went to say that like Instagram, it has something special in between the pixels. I backed that up with a starting figure — users were spending an average of 33 minutes on the site. (The latest stat the company shared with me is that on average, there are 3.4 pictures added per user per day.)

Stats aside, today Mobli is kicking it up in a major, major way by introducing a new breed of photo filters that not only put every other photo app’s on the defense, they set a new bar for user convenience and possibilities for brands. Let’s dive in:

Server-side Filter Effects:

Maybe it’s the geek in me, but I’ve found it surprising to learn that most people around me didn’t realize that applying and switching back-and-forth between filter effects within photo apps is a major battery guzzler. Well, it is folks. See, applying filter effects puts a computational strain on any CPU and/or graphics chipset, which means of course, sucking more power to make that happen.

What Mobli is doing is pushing the computational heavy lifting server-side. This has two major benefits: First, it means less power-guzzling on smartphones’ already lacking battery packs. Second, it means that adding additional filters no longer requires an act of download of any sort on behalf of the user. New would filters just ‘appear’ in the app.

The new version of Mobli features 22 free filters.

Location Filters:

What’s really exciting about pushing the filters server-side is that doing so kicks the doors wide-open to brand-new filter possibilities. Examples? Think filters that are geo-based, venue-based, time-based, etc. Let’s look at a couple examples:

Say you’re at a conference, where folks regularly take photos of the stage, the exhibition floor and other attendees. With Mobli’s location filters, the app would recognize that users are at Disrupt, for example, and bango, there would be a ‘Disrupt’ filter. See the screenshot below to see how that would like.

Now say you’re at the Camp Nou to watch FC Barcelona annihilate Real Madrid (again)… Barça could work out a deal with Mobli for filters that would frame photos taken in the stadium in club colors, or stamp them with images of team players like Messi, or newly signed Cesc Fàbregas.

Clearly brands could have a field day with the possibilities presented with Mobli’s location-based filters.

Of the 22 filters, 7 are location-based, including: TechCrunch Disrupt, Silicon Valley, Vegas, NYC, LA, Omaha, and Canada. A few examples are at the bottom of the post.

In other Mobli news, with the new version being released today the company is also leveling the cross-platform playing-field. Brand new Android and Blackberry versions are now available, and are identical in terms of functionality to their iPhone app predecessor.

For the developers in the crowd, Mobli has also been working on an API. It’s still behind lock and key, but you can apply for access, here.

To all the other photo sharing apps: Your move.

It’s one thing to hear praise for an app from geeks, it’s another when you hear it from ‘normal folks’. Onavo falls in this category.

The free data-shrinking app which we’ve praised in the past runs quietly in the background and dramatically reduces data consumption. I myself keep it running all the time, and on a recent trip abroad to San Francisco it helped me save in the neighborhood of 75% of my potential data consumption. Seeing as I was running on a roaming plan, this meant I could email, tweet, and use mapping apps with far greater freedom.

Today, Onavo is announcing it’s first venture into the Android waters. Now before you get all excited, Onavo for Android is actually a ‘Lite’ version. It’s not data-shrinking ready quite yet, but it does however give users impressive visibility and control over app data consumption on Android devices.

I sat down with Guy Rosen, CEO, who explained that unlike with iOS, it’s pretty much a wild-west in terms of app data consumption on Android. It seems that apps can launch in the background and run tasks, such as updating, on their own accord, without having being launched by the user.

With Onavo Lite, Android users are alerted when an app suddenly consumes data at a disproportionate rate, or at improper timing, for example when traveling. Onavo makes it easy to block particular apps from running on 3G, or disable 3G completely at certain data consumption caps.

A really neat feature, taken from Soluto’s play book, is advanced warning on data-hogs. This is a crowd-sourced feature that provides users information about the data consumption characteristics of an app, as soon as it’s installed.

Just like for iOS predecessor, Onavo Lite is free and can be downloaded here.

In the four weeks since the social protests have begun in Israel, hundreds have been killed, dozens of women have reportedly been raped, a number of children tortured, and countless districts have been looted. The authorities have imposed a complete lock-down on all cellular networks. All access to Facebook and Twitter has been blocked. Little information is going in, or out.

Except the absolute, complete opposite.

The social protests in Israel began 4 weeks ago with a national outcry over the rising price of basics such as cottage cheese. They then snowballed into a full-blown national movement by way of a simple act by a then unknown young woman. The act? Striking a tent in Tel-Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard in protest of high apartment rental costs.

A single tent became the heart and soul of the movement whose main gripe is that the middle-class is bearing the brunt of an imbalanced budgetary spend. “The People Demand Social Justice” is the key chant.

The protests are local, scattered all across Israel, drawing hundreds to hundreds of thousands. Big name musicians volunteer to headline these protests. Barricades and PA systems, all donated. People talk about the movement at every cafe, over every lunch, at every business meeting, at every family dinner.

There have been a few skirmishes with the law. Small stuff though… For example, small groups of protesters were arrested by the police for blocking roads and were released without charges within a day.

Small potatoes aside, it’s been four weeks and zero acts of the barbaric, non-discriminatory violence we’ve seen across the middle east, and even in the UK. No shots fired. No stores looted. No form of communication has been shut down. In fact, not only have the Israeli police and army not taken any role other than safeguarding the protests themselves, they have even been applauded, literally, by hundreds of thousands for their efforts.

While in neighboring countries regimes are slaughtering the opposition, in Israel we have complete free speech to criticize our politicians and leaders. As I’m typing this, on the TV is Israel’s version of SNL doing a parody skit of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s mishandling of the situation (they have him wearing a red t-shirt with Che Guevara on it). YouTube mashups featuring the PM’s soundbites? Posted below for your scrolling convenience. Professional-level videos advertising the protests? Also, posted below.

Sorry Shervin, no need for your curation and retweeting on this one, the Israeli people are doing A-OK. Really, look:

The backbone of the movement has unquestionably been Facebook, via pages, and events, and of course Twitter, via the #j14 hashtag. A revolution needs a site, right? Right.

At this point there’s no guessing which people will next rise-up and demand political and social change. The world is not what it used to be before Tahrir. I wonder though how many of these future civil disobedience movements will be modeled upon Israel, where technology and love trumped violence.

Photo Credits: Itai Bachar