Roomer Wins 2012 TechAviv NY Top Zell Student Startup

At last night’s TechAviv NY meetup at NYU we hosted the talented students of IDC Herzliya’s Zell Entrepreneurship Program for our annual Top Zell Startup competition. The founders, execs and investors of TechAviv NY voted live via SMS after watching pitches by four Zell startups and hearing comments from TechAviv NY judges Avner Ronen (Boxee), Yaron Galai (Outbrain), Amit Avner (Taykey), Tal Chalozin (Innovid) and Aaron Cohen, Professor of Internet Entrepreneurship at NYU.

Competing Startups:

1. HocSpot – Share files and links with the people around you
2. Spoteam – Discover and watch the best video on the web
3. Roomer (stealth) – Buy and sell hotel room reservations (WINNER)
4. BiggerGame (stealth) – Turn sports events into a live social experience

The stealthy Roomer, a couple weeks out from launching their alpha site, took the top prize by one of the biggest margins in our history. Founders Gon Ben David, Gal Nevo, Ben Froumine won over both the judges and the crowd with their peer to peer marketplace for hotel room reservations. Did you know that 72,000 hotel room reservations get cancelled every day? That’s a lot of money lost by travelers and Roomer aims to help them get at least part of it back by offering their rooms to other travelers in search of a bargain. It’s StubHub meets AirBnB, for hotel rooms. Huge potential here. Congrats to the team and best of luck at TechAviv CA, where you’ll have to prove your chops all over again June 13th.

UPDATE: Roomer Wins at TechAviv CA too!

The Zell Entrepreneurship program, under the leadership of executive director Liat Aaronson has produced some of Israel’s most promising Internet companies including Wibiya, Funkkit, Overwolf, Gifts Project, Bizzabo and Wibbitz. It has a track record of exits that any VC would envy. Check out these impressive stats:

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