Web X.0

HopStop.com

This morning HopStop.com announced an angel investment by a group that I am part of. I am joining HopStop's board of directors. Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks broke the news here.

A couple of months ago, waaay before the investment opportunity even came up, I was interviewed by Eze over at VC Cafe. His last question was "What are 5 sites you can't do without?", and HopStop was on my short list. HopStop is my car replacement in the past couple of years. I use it on average 3-4 times per day and cannot imagine how I got around the city without it. If you live in NY, or plan to come for a visit, you should absolutely head over to HopStop and start planning your public commutes from place to place. (BTW - if you're even considering using Google Transit, take my word on this one - HopStop is 10x better and much more accurate and useful).

HopStop has done a great job of building a wonderful service on a shoestring. It has been integrated on sites like TimeOut, Corcoran, and Halstead. Now were looking to add many more partners to use HopStop for powering their "How to get here?" directions/mapping pages. HopStop's free API is available here for any site to embed. If you are a local site in one of these metro areas - NY/NJ, San Francisco, Washington DC, Boston or Chicago - HopStop is the *best* directions service for your users, and it is absolutely free for you.

I can go on and on about how much I like the site, but I'm not objective... head over to NBC's local NY channel to watch a great item about HopStop from a couple of days ago.

Tevel Angel Club

I've recently volunteered to join the executive committee of a non-profit organization called Tevel. Tevel is the first angel club established in the US, focusing exclusively on bringing US angel investors together with young Israeli startups.

Tevel was founded by Oren Fuerst and Oren Heiman (more here). What got me interested in this project is Oren's (Fuerst...) description of why they started Tevel:

They floated the idea last summer, around the time of the war in Lebanon. Being Israelies in NY, they were approached by friends asking how they can help the community in Israel in a 'real' way (ie - not by giving a donation to a random organization without ever knowing if/how that helped anyone specific). Oren, coming from a business background, thought the best way to contribute would be by helping the economy, and the best way he knew was by supporting entrepreneurs in the beginning of their ventures.

With Tevel the idea is to introduce young and promising Israeli entrepreneurs to American investors. While the hope is that the investments yield investors great returns, the primary goal is to help support the entrepreneurs and through that help support the Israeli economy.

We're now looking for investors who are interested in joining the club, and entrepreneurs looking for early seed investments. If you're interested, shoot me an email (yaron [at] galai [dot] com) or go directly to the Tevel website - www.tevel.org

Top-10 Israeli web 2.0 companies

alarm:clock has a nice overview of their top-10 Israeli web 2.0 startups. I particularly agree with one of the runner-ups... ;-)

TWS 2007 - Israel's DEMO'ish conference

the.co.ils, one of the finest of Israel's tech blogs, has announced an upcoming startup event called TWS2007 (Hebrew only...). In Yaron's words (not me, Orenstein):

"The idea is to Identify and present up to 10 small startups with great technology and strong teams, who are seeking for funds and on the other hand, allow all other web entrepreneurs to mingle and approach the VCs and angles with no formal barriers. It is a "pro bono" event with the sole purpose of promoting the Dot Com industry in Israel."

They've also launched a TWS group on LinkedIn for folks involved in the Israeli startup world, which you can join here.

TWS2007 will be held in the Interdisciplinary Center (Merkaz Bentchumi) in Herzelyia, on April 10th. I'm not sure I'll be in the right side of the world on that date, but if I do make it - see you there!

Israel's exports, part 6

Israel's high tech export machine[1] has been firing on all cylinders in the past two months:

• Onigma exported to McAfee for ~$20M
• Storeage exported to LSI Logic for $55M
• Power D-Sine exported to MicroSemi for $245M
• Topio exported to Network Appliance for $160M
• Relegence exported to AOL for ~$60M
• ItemField exported to Informatica for $50M
• Followap exported to Neustar for $140M

Nice batch - cool!

[1] My theory - there are countries that export products, countries that export oil and those that export agricultural goods. Israel builds and then exports high-tech companies.

Israel’s Hottest Web 2.0 Start-ups

Going to the Web2.0 Conference? On November 7th (first day of the conference), Mike Arrington will be moderating a showcase of 15 of the hottest web 2.0 startups from Israel in Palo Alto. Registration for this is a steal at $100. Full details about this event are here and on the IsraelWebTour blog.

See you there!

Israel's exports, part 5

Regular readers of this blog are familiar with the theory: There are countries that export oil, countries that export electronic goods, there are those that export agricultural produce, etc. Israel builds and then exports high-tech companies.

The pace of roughly one exported company per week has slowed down a bit over the summer/war months, but the export business is still solid:

• Mobilitec exported to Lucent for ~$75M
• M-Systems exported to SanDisk for $1.35B (pending all sorts of legal crap)
• Gteko exported to Microsoft for $120M

Previous editions here, here, here and here.

* Not a company export per-se, but a notable mention goes to QBI which licensed a biotech drug to Pfizer for a reported "hundreds of millions of $$'s"

Holy shit!

This post is about one of the coolest startups I bumped into recently called TerraCycle.

A little background - My next startup, after I finish with all this web stuff, is going to be around recycling/reusing. Yup - the business I aspire to get into is - just like Tony Soprano - the waste management business.

My dream is to invent the ultimate contraption that descends upon landfills, chews up all the garbage, and spits out useful products on the other side.

That's why I loved everything about TerraCycle, though I have to admit that I've never bought or used their product which is basically a fertilizer (NYC apartments are not particularly famous for their spacious backyards...).

What they do is basically release a bunch of worms on a pile of garbage, and collect the worm-shit (hmmm... not sure that's the most scientifically accurate term...) and package it as plant fertilizer. In their words:

TerraCycle Plant Food is the first mass-produced consumer product to have a negative environmental footprint.

But obviously there are a bunch of products in the market that claim to be organic/recycled/eco-friendly/whatever. The thing is, that usually these products pay the minimal lip service needed to be able to claim eco-friendliness (for marketing purposes), and then do all the rest in some of the most eco-unfriendly ways.

Here's an example:

Organic Valley produces organic milk. They claim that "Organic dairy farmers do not use any chemical pesticides or fertilizers on their land. This protects our soil, water and air resources and also protects the health of wildlife and people."

So they get all the good will and great eco brand image, but then they go ahead and package that wonderful milk in a box that's pretty much a disaster to the ecology (the embedded plastic cap being the icing on the eco-disaster cake...). It's not recyclable, not reusable, and doesn't degrade elegantly when dumped. Yuck. 

And that's where TerraCycle gets really cool. Their product is driven by passion to be eco-friendly, not by passion to gain some PR points or appeal to amateur tree-hugger shoppers. Their whole product, end-to-end, is truly eco-friendly. The full story is on their website, but I'll just point out one feature that I LOVED - their amazing packaging:

Take a good look at the bottles on the right (not sure what I'm talking about?.. scroll down to see the graphical explanation). I can't give enough kudos to the product designer that made the design decisions on the TerraCycle bottles. Simply brilliant!

Israel's exports, part 4 (special war edition)

I thought that the mess in Israel/Lebanon would give me a short break from this series. But the Israeli Startup Factory keeps firing on all cylinders in war as in peace:

• Mercury Interactive just announced being exported to HP for a whopping $4.5B
• Ex-Libris exported to Francisco Partners for $62M

Previous export journals here, here and here.

Israel's exports, part 3

While business is far from usual these days in Israel, it's still business as usual on the company export business. This month's crop of companies exported:

• ProActivity exported to EMC for $30M
• XMPie exported to Xerox for ~$40-50M
• XOsoft exported to CA for an estimated ~$100M
• Colbar LifeScience Ltd. exported to Johnson & Johnson for $159M

These follow April's exports, and May's exports.