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2012 Entrepreneur of the year is…Israeli and a woman

2012 Entrepreneur of the year is…Israeli and a woman

Dec 19, 2012 |

Pink-haired, Israeli MIT-grad Limor Fried was just named Entrepreneur Magazine’s Entrepreneur of 2012. Limor Fried — who’s colloquially known as Lady Ada — runs adafruit Industries, a $4.5 million company with 25 employees and produces some cool gadgets. Israeli entrepreneurs go global The lip-pierced engineer received her masters from MIT and the Media Lab. In many ways, she embodies the modern Israeli entrepreneur. She’s intellectually curious — a tinkerer at heart. She lives the lifestyle and products she sells. She’s every bit one of the crowd she sells to. According to the article: [bra_blockquote align=””]Last year New York City-based Adafruit did a booming $10 million trade in sales of DIY open-source electronic hardware kits, so-called because project designs are free and publicly accessible, and customers are encouraged to modify or “hack” the final product. In addition to MintyBoost ($19.50), the online catalog includes in-house designs like the iNecklace ($75), a pendant shaped like an Apple gadget’s “on” button, complete with a pulsing LED light; and third-party products that have earned the “Adafruit seal of approval,” like the MaKey MaKey ($49.95),...

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8 Israeli tech trends for 8 crazy nights: Payments (8/8)

8 Israeli tech trends for 8 crazy nights: Payments (8/8)

Dec 17, 2012 |

We’re celebrating Hanukah in Israel right now and given all the fun and festivities going on, we thought it would be a good time to look back over the past few months and highlight some of the tech trends we’re seeing in startup land in the Startup Nation. As a caveat, these trends are based upon our deal flow – what we’re seeing on the ground. So, Happy Hanukah and enjoy. >>Read about all the top Israel technology trends this holiday season<< :::::::::::::Payments::::::::::::: The problem: Payments are moving away from traditional point-of-purchase and onto mobile devices, into the cloud, and within software. The technology and transactional ecosystem have to migrate from hardware to software (or at least a mix of the two). Solutions: Israeli companies aren’t focused on taking on core merchant payments the way a Square is but are more focused on niche parts of the market. Digimo: While lots of new payment players are basing their solutions on new hardware  — like terminals or NFC — Digimo uses existing payment infrastructure and enables mobile payments with an interesting twist...

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8 Israeli tech trends for 8 crazy nights: Social video (7/8)

8 Israeli tech trends for 8 crazy nights: Social video (7/8)

Dec 16, 2012 |

We’re celebrating Hanukah in Israel right now and given all the fun and festivities going on, we thought it would be a good time to look back over the past few months and highlight some of the tech trends we’re seeing in startup land in the Startup Nation. As a caveat, these trends are based upon our deal flow – what we’re seeing on the ground. So, Happy Hanukah and enjoy. The Problem: The internet has made us into creators, and has let the world express themselves in ways that people could never even dream about years ago. While it is easy to share pictures and text, it is significantly harder to create, publish, and share video content through social media and the internet as a whole. The Solutions:  Vtago– Vtago has revolutionized the way people share videos with their friends by allowing the user to tag friends by using faces extracted from the video itself and connecting them with the user’s friends. In addition, each friend will get a personalized video showing only the parts of the video...

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8 Israeli tech trends for 8 crazy nights: Small business automation (6/8)

8 Israeli tech trends for 8 crazy nights: Small business automation (6/8)

Dec 15, 2012 |

We’re celebrating Hanukah in Israel right now and given all the fun and festivities going on, we thought it would be a good time to look back over the past few months and highlight some of the tech trends we’re seeing in startup land in the Startup Nation. As a caveat, these trends are based upon our deal flow – what we’re seeing on the ground. So, Happy Hanukah and enjoy. >>Read about all the top Israel technology trends this holiday season<< :::::::Small Business Automation:::::::: The problem: Small businesses have small marketing budgets, so they can’t afford full-service agency marketing support. They typically also lack the time and kn0w-how to run professional marketing campaigns. The solutions: Appforma: Like Wildfire Interactive (acquired by Google) before it, Appforma provides easy-to-use tools for small business to begin tapping Facebook for new leads using giveaways, contests, and coupons. The Israeli startup has already inked a partnership with leading small business website company, Wix. Gigya: Gigya is a pretty ubiquitous technology provider when it comes to social logins — the ability for websites to allow users to...

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8 Israeli tech trends for 8 crazy nights: NFC (5/8)

8 Israeli tech trends for 8 crazy nights: NFC (5/8)

Dec 13, 2012 |

We’re celebrating Hanukah in Israel right now and given all the fun and festivities going on, we thought it would be a good time to look back over the past few months and highlight some of the tech trends we’re seeing in startup land in the Startup Nation. As a caveat, these trends are based upon our deal flow – what we’re seeing on the ground. So, Happy Hanukah and enjoy. >>Read about all the top Israel technology trends this holiday season<< ::::::::NFC::::::::: The problem: Delivering content to the mobile device has always been somewhat cumbersome. There hasn’t been a quick, easy, low-power, and relatively inexpensive way for mobile phones to share data communications. Bluetooth seemed to solve some of that but requiring two devices to pair up limits its usage. It’s still been really hard to get content onto the phone. The solution: There is a technology standard called Near Field Communication (NFC) that quickly allows for two-way communication between endpoints by bringing them in close contact to one another. NFC is becoming standard in handsets now and...

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