In March of this year, Google chairman and outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt celebrated his tenth year at the giant search engine company, and made way for Larry Page, one of the two founders of the largest Internet company in the world.
One of the goals of installing one of the founders in the company's hot seat is to take Google back to the way it ran early on, in the start-up days. While Google is being rejuvenated, Schmidt is regaining his appetite for entrepreneurship.
Over the past year, the venture capital fund he set up - Innovation Endeavors - has been energetically searching for the hottest new technology start-ups. Although Schmidt is an expert in search from his years at Google, the scouting is being done by managing partner Dror Berman, who runs the fund.
There are no clear connections between the eight start-ups that Schmidt and Berman have invested in. But it is interesting that half of them have one thing in common: Israel.
Maybe this is a result of Berman's connections with Israel, and maybe it is just the talent that exists here, but the conclusion is obvious: Schmidt believes in Israeli brainpower and in the technologies, some of which could have become leading Google products in another incarnation.
Gogobot
"It's strange to travel around the world with a book."
Whoever has traveled overseas knows the frustration of long and intense Internet searches to find the right hotel, the tastiest restaurant and a few enjoyable outings. Gogobot's idea fills this need.
The company was founded by Israeli Ori Zaltzman and his American partner Travis Katz, who is the CEO. "An itinerary written up in Lonely Planet may not work for everyone. It's strange that you read a book to travel the world in the Internet age," said Zaltzman.
Gogobot allows the Internet user to share the trips, restaurants and hotels he found throughout the world with his friends. According to Zaltzman, other trip advising websites, like TripAdvisor, are full of recommendations from people whose goal is to promote their own business or to harm the competition, whereas Gogobot relies on recommendations based on the user's friends. "Gogobot organizes the recommendations according to the taste of the user's friends and people they have something in common with," he said.
The website also offers a virtual passport, where everyone can tag the locations they've visited around the world. Just two months after the site was launched, Gogobot won the Crunchies competition award for Best Design in the TechCrunch Annual Crunchies Awards.
The start-up relies on two business models: a fee for referring users to price comparison sites, and advertisements on the side of the page. Gogobot has raised $4 million and among its investors are MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe, Oren Zeev, and Battery Ventures. Half of the ten employees are Israeli, and Zaltzman says, "Israel is among the countries with the highest number of Internet users that log on to our site."
EyeView
"We will build a billion dollar company."
EyeView has become one of Eric Schmidt's favorite start-ups. After raising $500 thousand in the first round, the Israeli start-up raised $1 million last month. In total, the company has raised $6 million from Innovation Endeavors, venture capital funds Gemini Israel Funds, and LightSpeed Venture Partners, as well as from 888 Holdings' former CEO Gigi Levy.
EyeView was founded in 2007 by CEO Oren Harnevo, CTO Tal Riesenfeld, and VP marketing and business development Gal Barnea, which makes it one of the most veteran start-ups in Schmidt's portfolio. The company's technology enables advertisers to create targeted video ads in real time, so that each surfer will be exposed to a different version of the same video ad, based on geographic and demographic criteria, as well as each user's surfing history.
"Dynamic advertising has been around for many years in banners and search engine ads," said Harnevo. "We are the first to incorporate it into video, and there is already a very favorable response from the industry." Among EyeView's clients are AOL, Facebook, Youtube, Johnson & Johnson and MacDonalds.
"A company that incorporated our technology in its campaign received 300% more hits on its ad," said Harnevo.
EyeView is based on pay-per-hit model, in which the company is responsible for creating a user-friendly interface and also for showing the ads on the various sites. "Our goal is to provide a more personal, relevant, local and brand effective video experience. We are aiming to build a billion dollar company," said Harnevo.
Quixey
Schmidt invested in a new Google.
If you go to to the Quixey website, you might think that Eric Schmidt invested $400,000 in Google's competition, since Quixey is basically a search engine.
Quixey was founded eighteen months ago, and is developing a search engine that allows users to find a huge variety of applications. Until now, you had to go to Apple Store or Google's Android to look for an app. Quixey is trying to organize all of the different types of applications, including for Firefox, for Macintosh, and Internet Explorer. Quixey also has plans for applications for Chrome and Facebook later on.
"The idea is to understand what the user is looking for and not just to give him a standardized answer," say Quixey's CEO Tomer Kagan, a co-founder alongside CTO Liron Shapira.
"The search on Quixey works in a completely different way," says Kagan. He says that Quixey's search engine automatically gathers information on every application from blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter, and analyzes it so that the search becomes the most far-reaching possible.
"Applications today don't just do one thing, and it is difficult to describe their function in just a paragraph or two. How would you explain, for example, what a Photoshop application can do, since it has dozens of functions?" Like Schmidt's Google, Quixey has a business model based on sender-based text ads and paid search results.
Kagan says that his search engine currently has access to 1.5 million applications, and that his goal is to reach 2 to 2.5 million applications by the end of the year.
Any.do
The cell phone can go to the grocery store for us.
The goal of Any.do is to make your cell phone your personal assistant. "Our vision is that it will be possible to speak into your phone and it will fulfill day-to-day functions," explains Any.Do CEO Omer Perchik (26) who is one of the three co-founders. "The phone will be able to set appointments, pay electric bills, and do the grocery shopping."
Along with Perchik, CTO Itai Cahana and VP R&D Yoni Lindenfeld are also co-founders of Any.do. So far, Any.do has raised $1 million from Schmidt's investment fund, as well as from Genesis Partners, Blumberg Capital and Palantir Technologies CEO Joe Lonsdale. Currently, Any.do works via an Android app, whose function is to run a daily organizer for day-to-day activities. "One of our goals was to understand what people do on a daily basis, and which tasks they record for themselves," explains Perchik.
Any.do is currently running a closed beta version available to its employees only, and is keeping information regarding the final application under heavy secrecy. "The smart thing about our tool is not voice recognition, but understanding what the user wants to do," says Perchik.
Perchik will not reveal what Any.do's business model is, but he says that it is based on pay-per-hit technology and that advertisers will pay to serve their clients.
Two key figures in the technology world have already been bewitched by Any.do's charm: Facebook head of mobile products Erick Tseng and Twitter search and location-based services manager Elad Gil. "We worked very hard to reach them. Today we talk on the phone on a weekly basis," says Perchik.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on June 15, 2011
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