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 One could argue it even looks outdated.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

Generally speaking, video producers have a much easier time producing content than monetizing it. This is because the monetization side of the equation has two x-factors that are hard to get right. The first being the ‘with what to monetize’ factor–that is, the mechanism that facilitates the billing aspect of the user-flow. The second, being the ‘how to monetize’ factor– this being the model(s) under which the content is charged for.

Enter Cent2Cent, an Israeli company with a video monetization solution that is versatile enough for both high-end tv broadcasters (NBC is a client), and low-end bloggers. And with over 200,000 paid transactions to date, they might be on to something, too.

One immediate benefit with Cent2Cent is that choosing its monetization solution doesn’t require the content owner to bet the entire house on it. By this I mean that monetizing via Cent2Cent doesn’t require the content to be migrated to Cent2Cent’s hosting infrastructure. Content can be encased within a JavaScript wrapper, or for those that want more programmatic control, there are also a SOAP/REST APIs. For those however that do require hosting, Cent2Cent is integrated with Kaltura, so that’s solved as well. And to round off, there are also plugins for Drupal & WordPress.

The second key benefit with Cent2Cent’s solution is that monetization options are quite varied. These include: Daily/Weekly/Monthly/Recurring Subscription plans, Pay-per-View, Bundles and Packages, and Metered plans (by number of views, or time viewed).

On the face of it, all these options can be overwhelming, but this is where Cent2Cent’s built-in diagnostic tool can assist the content owner make monetization decisions. The module collects viewing data that it segments for insights to be deduced. For example, a content owner can discover that 2% of users viewed more than ten videos, while 5% viewed more than five. Both segments fit more of a subscription model, as opposed to the rest of the users which could be offered only a pay-per-view purchase model.

Cent2Cent began its commercial activity in October 2010 and has raised $500,000 from private investors to date.

If you’re a blog or forum owner, engagement is always on your mind. There’s only so much you can do, though, to pull your audience back in to read new content, right? Well, what if you could send a push notification to users when new content is posted? It’s this feature exactly that sits in the center of new Israeli upstart UppSite‘s offering.

UppSite requires just a bit of work, mainly, installing a plugin. Right now it’s only available for WordPress and vBulletin, but support for more CMS platforms will be rolled out in the future. If you run a site powered by a CMS this is pretty basic stuff. Look & feel can then be customized with a custom logo and colors and such. That’s it really.

This is where UppSite’s system kicks in and creates iOS & Android native apps, which are made available in the App Store or Android Marketplace. If you’re curious about Windows Phone 7 and webOS, support for these is coming soon.

True, a native app for a blog or a website may not be significantly more compelling than a bookmark in a mobile browser, but if the site’s icon catches the user’s eye while flipping through apps and he or she decides to launch it to check out what’s new, well, that right there is an upside. Every bit counts.

What I found to be most interesting is the Push aspect, and the fact that it’s bi-directional. Once the blog/forum has created its native app with UppSite, it can then ping users of new blog posts via Push notifications which launch the app. Popping-up on a users smartphone screen is not going to be a difficult pitch to make to blog/forum owners. Sure, it may get a bit out of control, but most mainstream users won’t follow that many native apps for blogs. Plus, both Android and iOS5 have quite convenient Push notification dashboards.

The bi-directional aspect is that blog/forum admins can elect to receive push notifications when users leave comments on posts. UppSite makes replying back simple and seamless by integrating with the native WordPress and vBulletin commenting systems, as well as with Disqus and Facebook. Again, seeing as with engagement, every bit counts, the fact that a site owner can reply back quickly, is another upside.

UppSite boasts two business models: The first is creating an ad-network across the free native apps. These are the ones the company is currently making available. The second is a premium offering which will remove ads and allow site/forum owners to register the apps for download under their own developer accounts. The latter offering will be made available soon.

There’s something about Instagram that you can’t quite put your fingers on. It’s just a fantastic, sticky, launch-a-few-times-a-day kind of app. There’s really nothing you can point to that makes it any better than the bazillion other photo sharing apps. In fact, it even under-whelms features-wise. But, but … there’s just something about it. Something in-between the pixels that makes it resonate with users.

And that’s exactly what Mobli has, too.

While we already reviewed the app back in April, it was only a couple of weeks ago that I got around to check out the app for myself.

Its iTunes App Store description reads:

“Have you ever wanted to see what’s going on somewhere you couldn’t be? Have you ever wanted to show your friends what you’re seeing?”

Already I’m rolling my eyes, trying to hold down the rush of vomit determined to spew out.

I install the sucker, do the Facebook Connect bit, and … no vomit. I actually hear myself mumble, “hmmm”.

I play with the app and try as I may, there’s just no special feature I can point to, nor breakthrough UX I can speak of. And yet, and yet … as cynical as I want to be, there’s just something in-between the pixels of Mobli that feels terribly right.

I can go through the motions and describe how Mobli offers three types of channels for people, places and one for topics/events. That the channels create an implicit social graph around say, fashion, or a bar. That users can comment-back with photos, videos and text. That interaction occurs both on the iPhone app and on Mobli.com. I can go through all these features, and still not be able to capture that special something in-between the pixels.

Intrigued, I ask to meet Boaz Hecht, the company’s VP Marketing. Done with my in-between the pixels spiel, he just smiles back and says, “Let me show you something.” He fires-up Google Analytics and shows me a figure that blew me away.

Mobli users have been spending 33 minutes on average, per day, using the app. Thirty-three minutes. Kid you not. And this is while the app is only on iOS (in the coming weeks Mobli will push out cross-platform video and photo sharing across Blackberry, Android and iOS).

I’m of the opinion that the odds are quite slim for photo/video-sharing apps to be formative companies with viable business models. I love Instagram, but don’t see it more than a bright-shiny object that I’ll toss-out for a newer photo-sharing app that will get it right(er).

That said, I’m going to keep Instagram on my main iPhone pane. Path will remain there too. Having read this post, you might be surprised that Mobli will not. With all of its undeniable “right stuff”, the app feels more attuned to a younger demographic than my own 35 summers.

Mark my words though … Mobli. Will. Blow. Out.

It was a couple of months ago that BiteHunter.com beta-launched itself as an aggregator for dining deals. Easily described as a “Kayak for restaurants,” BiteHunter is designed to help users locate dining deals, a problem which has been been addressed quite well for verticals such as travel, but quite poorly for dining, at least on an aggregated basis.

Today BiteHunter is announcing a new iPhone app (iTunes Link) that expands its dining deal search across the US, from the initial markets of New York, San Francisco and Chicago.

The uniqueness of BiteHunter is the real-timeliness of the deal data it exposes. By this I mean, that BiteHunter scours real-time sources such as a restaurant’s Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook accounts, as well as Groupon, LivingSocial and newsletters, to bring users the freshest deal info. Compare this against, say Yelp, which restaurants seem to use more as a business card rather than a customer engagement medium.

BiteHunter’s new iPhone app has nicely designed search and discoverability features built-in. Deals can be searched for, or discovered on a map. Filtering can be applied to cuisine, price, distance, and type of deal. Alongside the deal info, BiteHunter also provides restaurant information, related deals, reviews, photos and menus. Users can even reserve tables with the app.

A feature I really like is that the app alternates tabs depending on the time of day. So the Lunch tab will become Happy Hours, and Dinner as the day progresses.

There’s no question that BiteHunter brings value to users, however, the big challenge, as always for these types of services, is customer acquisition.

Today the company is announcing a $3M Round A by Sequoia Capital, with participation of Magma Venture Partners.

I asked the company to share some usage statistics for the first twenty days since launch. Here’s what they came back to me with:

• Onavo saved users approximately 500GB in data consumption.
• Data consumption of 30,000+ different apps passed through Onavo’s data-shrinking technology.
• Onavo saw particularly high demand in two main user categories: The first, among travelers seeking to save on data roaming plans. The second, among domestic users with capped plans looking to get more bang for their buck.

Also noteworthy, and by popular demand (mine included), Onavo is now also available for iPad.

When we think of smartphones and geo-location the two main use cases that come to mind are mapping and check-ins. These are fine and dandy, but what if you could use smartphones to keep tabs of where your child is? Footprints lets you do just that.

The new app (iTunes link), available for both iPhone & iPad, tracks the location of the device and shares it with family and friends. These can then know in real-time a person’s exact location. The app can have several use cases, but the parent/child one seems the most compelling.

What about privacy? With more and more parents shelling out the cash to equip their tweens and teenagers with iPhones, I don’t see why a basic requirement couldn’t be running Footprints in the background. As my father put it when I grew up, our household was run as a totalitarian democracy. Ergo, he buys my iPhone, he gets to run whatever app he likes in the background. Parenting rocks.

Using the app is fairly simple. A quick set-up process and then you just let it run in the background. The app was designed to run efficiently, without draining the battery. Once installed on the device to be tracked, permissions are then given to those individuals that should be able to view its location. A passcode can be put in place to make sure that the app isn’t removed.

Once setup and permissions are given, the location is provided in real time. Movement speed is also provided, so you can get a fairly accurate indication of how fast your kids is driving as well. That’s a nice bonus.

Theoretically, Footprints also has business-case potential. Companies who are subsidizing iPhones for their employees can surely enforce running Footprints in the background (certainly in business hours). Sure, there’s the big brother aspect to it, as in, boss-man making sure employees are where they’re supposed to be. However, I see it more as a potential utility between co-workers, as in, “Hey I see John is out on a customer call”.

Another use-case could be couples, well, ones with trust issues… “Hey sweetie, why were you at the Motel Six right off of Exit 123 for two hours today?” Riveting dinner conversation guaranteed.

Footprints provides users with 60 free days of usage upon registering. Then, an additional 3-month subscription will cost $0.99. A yearly subscription goes for $2.99, or $4.99 for a 2-year subscription.

The app is iOS only for now, but Android support is on the way.

There’s really no better way to describe Onavo other than a must-have app for any and every iPhone user on a data plan. I’ll go a step further: I think it’s the very first app one should install.

Why? Because Onavo shrinks your data usage (and thus, your bills).

All you need to do is install the free app and you’re done. The app will then run in the background and do its thing and all you have to do is continue consuming data as you do today … surfing the web, emailing, tweeting, using maps, etc.

The techies among you are asking yourself whether there’s any slow-down in data speed. I’ve been using the app for a few weeks and I have perceived no noticeable slow-down.

What happens behind the scenes is that compression technology resides on Onavo’s cloud servers. Once the data is routed through them, the compression takes place before the data reaches the device (or the carrier).

Onavo is targeting travelers who have a very obvious pain-point of being forced to purchase ridiculously expensive data plans when on business or personal trips. Mind you, saving 5MB-15MB in data usage can equal direct savings that can go as high as $50 and up. However, with all-you-can-eat data plans a thing of the past, I contend that Onavo provides significant value for domestic data usage as well. I, for example, keep it running all the time.

I’m currently away on business in San Francisco (I’m based out of Israel) and in the past two days alone I’ve saved 11.32MB, and I still have four nights to go. Most of my savings were with Maps on iPhone, where Onavo saved me 75%, or 8.87MB of 11.80MB. Onavo also saved me 64% surfing the Web, and 12% on email.

To the best of my assessment, this is an upside-only app. And being free, there’s really nothing that should hold you back from downloading it.

It’s this particular problem that Payoneer, whose Master Card debit card solution we’ve covered in the past, has made into its house specialty and why it’s become a popular choice for international affiliates.

Need proof? How about $500M in yearly payments going through its systems, and a year-over-year growth rate in the past four years of 100%? No question that Payoneer’s offering has jumped the shark.

Affiliates typically receive their payments by way of wire transfer or check, directly into their local bank accounts, in their own countries. When they buy traffic, however, they usually need to make an international payment.

This moving of money back and forth is costly (fees can be upwards of $30 for wire transfers), and also time consuming (wire transfers take several days to make it to their destination).

With Payoneer, all users are Master Card debit card cardholders. This means that once funds are deposited into their accounts, users can immediately make standard credit card payments, or withdraw cash from ATMs. For affiliates, the real upside is that they can use their cards to pay for traffic they buy **without** the back and forth local-to-international money transfers.

Also, using Payoneer doesn’t require users to have bank accounts, and the cards can be reloaded within hours of funds being deposited in user accounts. And now with the newly launch local bank transfer service, Payoneer can transfer funds in the local currency of the user, as opposed to the currency they were paid in (typically USD). Local currency transfers are both cheaper ($6.95-9.95) and faster than a standard wire transfer. For international users residing in countries where banking systems are still lagging decades behind those of Western countries these are big deals.

The local bank transfer service is going to be gradually released to different countries and partners, so it will take a while to become available all over the globe (although that is decidedly the goal).

Payoneer’s value proposition hasn’t gone unnoticed. The company already has over a thousand partners making payments to hundreds of thousands of users. And with the signing of Direct Track, ~100,000 additional affiliates will be exposed to Payoneer’s solution.

Payonner is backed by Carmel Ventures and Greylock Partners.