Israel Makes Strong TC50 Showing
Here is a round-up of the 6 Israeli companies that presented on stage:
The Personalria platform requires buy-in from both users and RIA’s. Users are required to open a brokerage trading account at Ameritrade or eTrade, for example, in order to use the Personalria service. RIA’s will need to create profiles describing their education, experience, etc.
The big question is whether the company can pull off the chicken-and-the-egg challenge, meaning, getting a critical mass of users and RIA’s that make it worthwhile for each group to join. The judges on the panel also noted the challenges the company will face in customer acquisition and the density of competition, both offline and online such as Cake Financial (a company that launched at last year’s TC40).
The service is initially being targeted at bloggers which can provide AlfaBetic an RSS feed that will then be translated and consequently monetized globally. Their engine will do most of the work, but human intervention is used to edit and proof every piece of content. The engine employs domain language templates such as technology, sports and finance. These are improved over time through machine learning and as a result of the human QA.
The company’s planned business model requires it to provide the translated content to portals and then the selling of ads against it. This will be “non-intelligent” targeting, i.e. basic demographics, sponsorship, etc.
Panel judges Om Malik & Tim O’Riley were asked whether they would use the service and indicated they would not use a translation model. Instead they would opt for a full-blown localized operation such as fr.beta.techcrunch.com.
TechCrunch50 marks the company’s launch of its American play—Tweegee.com—a social network aimed at being MySpace for kids aged 8-14. Positioned as a destination site, TweeGee is intended to offer tweens a safe environment to express themselves and interact with others in their age group.
The site offers email with a feature called WordUp, a patent pending application which works in a very similar manner to T9, but attuned to the 8-14 age group with relevant blacklisted words and such. Kids can also use a calendar app, build avatars, play multiplayer games and create their Zones which are websites built on Flash and HTML.
One of the big challenges the company will face is an issue panel judge Ron Conway raised and that is how to get gain a share of the time kids are already spending online in places such as ClubPenguin. Curiously, the company is adamant about not widgetizing its offering.
Next week the company will launch a Russian version called Tvidi.ru , the result of a partnership with Russian Media company RBC which paid $6M for 50% of the license. A Turkish version is in the works.
The company’s solution—similar to that of Mo’Minis—is a Rich Content Authoring Environment called RUGS which utilizes a customized Eclipse-based IDE. Developers can use this environment to develop any number of mobile game applications without any platform-specific knowledge such as Symbian, PlamOS, or iPhone SDK. The application designer works independently of the programmer to design the app skin & layout—the code remains the same.
MyTopia claims that a single cross-platform game developed on RUGS required one developer four weeks at a cost of $50K, while it would cost $1M using current development methods.
MyTopia is also running a game destination site called MyTopia Online which was considered a distraction by the panel of judges.
devunity’s fully functioning code editor currently supports Python, PHP, ASP, Javascripts, CSS, and HTML. It also sports built-in integrated APIs such as BOSS, Google Apps Engine, Digg, Flickr, Facebook, etc. The code is completely exportable, meaning, devunity does not lock you in to having them host the app.
There’s also no need to worry about versioning issues such as waiting for other developers to check-in code—devunity does all of this in real time. It also allows the developers to create discussions right on top of the code and gain additional visibility by way of a mini feed which is automatically created for each project.
The company is aiming for a two pronged business model approach. The first is a service play where developers would pay for usage based on a subscription model. The second is a white label approach where companies can form their own devunity environment. An interesting example for the latter would be to allow an outside development firm to use devunity in order to work and interact along side an in-house dev team.
plaYce believes there’s a gap between high-end and casual games, where the former is expensive and might not give you the bang for your buck you expect, and the latter being free but flat in game graphic quality.
plaYce is attempting to bridge this gap through a propriety graphics rendering technology that requires no-download yet still delivers high graphics quality and fast frame rate, right within the browser. While still restricted to IE—it requires a DirectX plugin—the company claims the technology will be applicable on other browsers and is optimized for low-end computers. It is also able to recreate dense scenarios streamed over slow web connections.
The company has no intent to develop the games itself, rather it sees itself as both platform and publisher. It intends to lure independent game developers by offering them what it calls “Game Infrastructure as a Service” which would include everything from the game infrastructure to user acquisition.
The major challenge for plaYce will be to find 2-3 killer games that will bring the critical mass of users necessary to attract game developers to the platform.
For more information on plaYce, see John Biggs’ post, here.
DemoPit Companies:
Update: A prominent angel investor walking the TC50 DemoPit has expressed interest in investing in the company.
Exhibitor Companies:
2Pad is a web service that integrates with your email service—currently limited to Windows Live, AOL, Gmail, MobileME and IMAP service providers—in order to mine it for pictures and videos. 2Pad then automatically tags them with the email’s subject, sender, recipient—all of which are then available as filters. The service is very similar to xoopit with the major difference being that 2Pad does not require an installation.
The company recently closed an $8M Series B round from Greylock and Carmel Ventures.