On the 27th of November Brooks-Keret, Israel’s leading financial services company will be hosting a very interesting event. Entrepreneurs will get to showcase their ideas to potential investors in a speed-dating like event. A wonderful chance to meet angels and VC’s in a business-ready environment.This event, sponsored by Bank Leumi and CPA office Steinmetz, Aminah and assoc. will take place at the Shfaim convention center. Prior to the event, the companies will showcase their ideas to an experts panel, of which I will be part, prepping them for the actual meetings with potential investors.

If you wish to participate in the event, contact Doron Habshush at doron@dhconsulting.info and he can provide you with more info.

The founders of Joongel which presented at the TC50 DemoPit are announcing a $100K investment from Israeli uber-Angel Dr. Yossi Vardi. Vardi pledged the investment on the spot at TC50 and the parties have since worked on finalizing the terms and paperwork.Interestingly, the investment will go into a new company called “Modular Patterns, Ltd.” (no site yet) and is intended for the development of a new product as opposed to furthering the Joongel service/product the company showcased at TC50. The founders are keeping tight-lipped about the nature of the new product and were only willing to share that it “relates to web service collaboration”.

While the founders have explained to me that the new product will take priority, they will continue maintaining the business around Joongel. Here’s how I previously described it:

Joongel considers itself a platform for the creation of web-based toolbars. These are toolbar “strips” in the header area of a web page that require neither download nor installation. Site publishers can use Joongel to offer a search engine aggregator or a vertical search engine for travel, video, cooking, etc. The motivation for publishers is mainly through monetization via affiliation and ad rev-share.

Users can take advantage of Joongel directly through Joongel.com, using browser search plugins, or through eight websites dedicated to various verticals such as travel, shopping and entertainment.

Since TC50 Joongel claims to have experienced a steady growth of users which are adding their plugins, particularly images search, music search, social media search and Creative Commons & free stock photos search (which was suggested to the founders by our very own Erick Schonfeld). The company is in talks about opening local versions of Joongel in France, UK and China.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

If Content is king then Data is its prince. And generally speaking, the more unique and difficult it is to gather, the greater is its value. A recent example of this is RepairPal which applies a narrow and deep approach to collecting data on automobile parts and repair prices in the US. The data collection is anything but trivial and requires significant manual labor, but the outcome could be a significant and valuable dataset. Israeli IMScouting is taking a similar approach but applying it to data related to football players. (Note: In the context of this post Football = Soccer).

Users can slice and dice the data in any number of ways to compare players side-by-side and filter search results by position, nationality, salary, and more. Advanced search is pretty impressive. For example, a search for an Argentinean player with a max age of 25, on his last year of contract, playing a forward position with a strong left foot, produced two results: Carlos Tevez, currently playing for Manchester United, and Juan Caffa, currently playing for Real Zaragoza (on loan from Real Betis). Tevez’s estimated market value by the way is around 30M GBP (~$49M USD) with an estimated weekly salary of 100K GBP (~173K USD). Quite a steal!

IMScouting collects in-depth data on 48 leagues in more than 40 countries with a total coverage of over 40,000 professional footballers. The data is collected using a network of 40 “correspondents”—football experts situated locally in European, African and Latin American countries that IMScouting employs to report data back to the mothership. Propriety crawlers are also used, but to a lesser degree. In-house experts—journalists, ex-players and other football experts—review the data to ensure reliability before it’s made public. Data goes pretty deep:

• Player info: Name, age, height, weight, nationality, languages, picture, main and secondary positions, estimated market value and salary, and agent with relevant contact details.
• Current and past player injuries: Including the duration of the injury and the medical definition.
• Video highlights: Edited video clips from the field.
• Player performance in recent years: Appearances, goals, yellow/red cards.
• International games: Participation and statistics.
• Transfers/loans info: Accurate and updated, including paid fees.

IMScouting also provides general information such as results, fixtures and stats on more than 500 leagues around the world. These include full match reports for some countries in Eastern Europe and Africa that are not typically covered by the mainstream press. There is also an assortment of content in the form of daily football-related business news, a weekly “Player to Watch” and special reports.

The obvious question that comes to mind is “could it really be true that such data is not readily available for world’s most popular sport?” The company’s CEO Dvir Ben-Aroya provided what I believe to be strong validation that this is indeed the case. His answer was “Pini Zahavi”.

This name may mean nothing to most of our readers, but there certainly should be members of our UK audience that do recognize it. Zahavi is considered to be a football super-agent with a particularly strong presence in the wheeling and dealing of UK football. His Wikipedia page states:

 He helped facilitate the takeover of two English Premier League clubs by fellow associates, Chelsea Football Club by Russian businessman Roman Abramovich, and Portsmouth Football Club by French businessman Alexandre Gaydamak.

He also brokered high profile transfers such as Rio Ferdinand’s move to Manchester United for £30M, Juan Sebastián Verón’s move to Manchester United for £28M and most recently Giovani Dos Santos’ move from FC Barcelona to Tottenham Hotspur for £4.7M.

Zahavi sits on IMScouting’s Board, which is a huge coup for the company.  His presence suggests that he thinks this data is worth something. Plus, Zahavi can most likely open any door the company requires opened.

The company believes that 65% of professional football players are traded each season, with 700+ teams looking for talent in Europe alone. They also believe that there are over 150,000 active football scouts and agents worldwide. To this add the huge amount of football fans seeking reliable, high-quality information about their favorite clubs and players. IMScouting believes this all amounts to a huge opportunity.

Initially, the company is basing its business model on a subscription service. Agents, scouts, and other football professionals are offered the service for €1,200 for an annual membership and €400 for a quarterly membership. The company is already testing the waters with advertising and will move into data syndication as well. The next phase of IMScouting will see it becoming more of a destination site for football fans so expect the usual assortment of social networking goodies.

IMScouting picked up $1.3M in Round A financing earlier this year from Giza Ventures, AfterDox and private investors. The company is about to commence its fundraising of Round B.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

Hi Everybody,

I’m ramping my consulting services back up. Bear in mind that I have only a couple of open spots for new projects so if you’re interested in learning how I can assist you please contact me soon. I can always be reached at: roi.carthy@gmail.com

Here are the areas I can assist with:

• Investment & Profitability Strategies : Working tightly with company management in order to chart a course that best positions the company for a follow-up investment and profitability. This includes “wartime” strategy as it relates to the product/service and to the company et large.
• Beta & General Availability Launch Programs: I assist in creating the strategy and accompanying tactics. Typically this includes product alignment, marketing readiness and Blogosphere exposure. The purpose is to create and execute a well thought-out launch plan. I cannot be hired for the purpose of a TechCrunch review. In fact, due to the obvious conflict of interest, companies that hire me are at a disadvantage in this respect.
• Community Marketing: Assistance in understanding what dialog requires initiation and how to go about conversing it. This is done through product honesty and thoughtful dialogs. The purpose is to locate and empower users to become evangelists.

Instead of dwelling on whether an economic apocalypse is about to loom upon us, some startups are plugging away at improving their products. Israeli Kampyle is a case-in-point. Today the company is extending its feedback analytics platform from websites to client software—with a specific focus on the installation process, a major pain point for client applications.Most software client application installations have high abandonment rates. There’s no shortage of reasons for users to abort the installation process, these include: slow/heavy downloads, too many steps, security concerns, lack of information, and too many ads. Speaking to customers, Kampyle learned that the aborts leave companies with many assumptions, but few conclusions. Sure, many companies trigger uninstall feedback forms when the user abruptly ends the installation, but it seems—at least from what Kampyle has learned—companies find it difficult to translate the collected information to actionable items.

Kampyle for Software is designed to do just that. It leverages Kampyle’s feedback analytics platform to aggregate and manage feedbacks generated by two forms it produces—one for the Installation, the other for uninstall. Instead of manually going through each feedback form, as many companies do today, Kampyle groups the feedback alltogether and presents the aggregate information in easy-to-read charts.  The forms are completely customizable of course, and so are the landing pages that are designated to open upon installation termination. No special programming knowledge is required to integrate the calls into installer creation tools such as InstallShield.

Kampyle for Software is free for Open Source applications. Commercial applications will be priced by scale, with a minimum of $99/mo. The first month is free so there’s no reason not to give it a shot.

From its debut 5 months ago, Kampyle has amassed 3000 customers. It may not be the next Google, but at least it’s plugging away.

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.

As the concept of the “social graph” began to gain focus and attention, a buzz around the notion of multi-player social games began to grow as well. How cool would it be to play a game of pong between two users of a social network, right? And yet most multi-player games are limited to Chess, Checkers, and Poker. It’s not that there’s a shortage of companies developing casual games—in fact, money is being poured into the space in truck loads. Yet the multi-player games we were teased about have failed to materialize so far. Don’t despair though because salvation is upon us and it comes in the form of Come2Play’s multi-player API.In my initial review of Come2Play I dubbed them the “Ning of social gaming networks“. Today they are upping the ante by putting out an open source multi-player API aimed at allowing Flash game developers to create real multi-player games.

The logic behind Come2Play’s move is to free game developers from matters revolving around the infrastructure necessary to drive multi-player games. The company believes it can catalyze a multi-player casual game revolution by removing this barrier and doing all the heavy lifting itself, specifically: hosting the infrastructure, providing emulations, and delivering distribution and reporting.

Released under the GNU Lesser General Public License, the API currently supports two players and will be gradually ratcheted-up to include a theoretically unlimited number of players. Developers will be able to create multiplayer games using ActionScript 2/3 which they should feel more comfortable with than server side scripting languages such as .NET, Java, and PHP. Social features that can be leveraged through the API include: Game rooms for up to 60 players, chat, leader board, ranking system, tokens, reward system and an ad-space-sharing mechanism.

Come2Play’s API could be perceived as a “honey trap” for several reasons. First, game developers can focus on developing games, rather than developing and maintaining infrastructure. Second, they get to keep all in-game ad revenue. Third, the developers get instant game distribution through Come2Play’s publisher network. Plus, all games can be automatically ported to Facebook and OpenSocial apps.

And now comes the trap (it is not as bad as it sounds). First, games built upon the API must be hosted on Come2Play’s infrastructure. Second, the games will be published in Come2Play’s game galleries and channels by default. Third, Come2Play reserves the right to display ads in the game wrappers and in the pre-game loading screen. The company splits this revenue 50/50 with publishers. CEO Alon Barzilay indicates that the company is open to flexible options in regards to the last two points. However, this will have to be done on a business development level.

So no more excuses… Can someone please develop multi-player pong for me…?

This post was originally posted on TechCrunch.com where I cover the Israeli startup scene.