Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Web 2.0 kicking @ Israel

I've attended the Gemini Internet event a few days ago. Bob Rosenschein of Answers.com, a true veteran of the software industry, gave a great presentation full of ever-so-relevant quotes that demonstrate his way of thinking. My favorite:

"What information consumes is rather obvious - it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."
(Herbert Simon)

... as demonstrated with each and every wave of aggregation-filtering-discovery technologies...

Daniel Cohen of Gemini followed with an energetic presentation, highlighting the challenges of Israel-based Web 2.0 companies, and reaffirming the commitment of the Israeli VCs in general (and of course, Gemini in particular) to Israeli Internet companies. The track record isn't there yet, but judging from energy radiated by the participants, things might look quite different in a few months.

From among the participants, I was intrigued by Nir Ben-Dor's CoMagz.com, a different take on online content publishing. CoMagz.com attempts to integrate the dynamic nature of blog publishing with the collaborative, polished experience of a magazine. Done right, this could provide an interesting alternative to blogs vs. content sites.

ilcu.com's founders, Iddo & Michale, were surprised by the rapid adoption of their service, a slick implementation of social-event-sharing.

Together with FoxeyTunes, Speedbit, Spearcast, Hotbar, Maxthon, Incredimail, eSnips, Dotomi and many others (Yadda!), it was an impressive demonstration of things to come from off-the-valley.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Following quite well the web2.0 news i have the feeling Israel is not on track at all compared to US, europe or china and remains still a very R&D oriented country. I see here a lot of me2 and no true real user experience innovation. Hope this will change soon.